This civilisation is dying, but people carrying the seeds of a new way of life will survive it. How can we navigate the vast possibilities that lie beyond the coming end of business as usual? A first step is accepting that our renewed imagination and action is required.
Our imaginations are often stuck on a simplistic fork in the road: utopia or dystopia. There are countless possibilities, and imagination is how we can envision and navigate them. Logic is useful, but too limited here. The imagination is what nature gave us for sensing how complexity unfolds. Lets use it!
As part of this week, artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, Lucy Neal from the Town Anywhere team will facilitate a new version of the internationally recognised Town Anywhere community visioning process with a “Throughtopian” lens, enabling us to time travel together to 2035 to ‘rehearse the future’ . We will then come back to 2025 to learn from the experience as we spend time exploring potential approaches to involving broad and wide groups of people in imagination led alternative future scenarios. For videos and information about Town Anywhere see here.
We’ll ask uncomfortable questions: the belief that transition must eradicate global injustice and inequality is high among progressives, but to many this sounds like an invitation to utopian failure: ending in oppressive state interventions. By Thrutopia we mean creating an “imperfect” future through bold and inspired pragmatism. There, full-scale collapse may be averted, but injustice, markets, and inequality will probably continue to exist, even if much reduced. How do we use ideas from across the political spectrum to achieve this? Our enquiry will be based on convening discussions about alternative futures while keeping an open mind, which includes grappling with politically diverse perspectives.