imagination

Article: The Unmasters

Play and Imagination Against Debt

We spoke about debt and imagination to Steyn Bergs and Cassie Thornton during Moneylab #3 – Failing Better? in two separate conversations, addressing a set of the same questions from two different perspectives. The final format of this interview as a conversation has a comparative purpose and should not be read as an actual record of […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Art Living Project

For those who have never experienced homelessness first hand, it is hard to relate to those without a roof over their heads. Huge programs have been rolled out to take these people out of sight, either by criminalising or victimising them. With a rhetoric of individual responsibility prevailing, taking them out of mind is also […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Alberto Vanolo - Amateur Cities- All Cities are Beautiful

Smart City or The serial reproduction of an urban vision

A couple of months ago I bought a brand new video game console, Sony’s well known PS4. Despite being almost 40, I enjoy video games very much, and I also think that they are relevant cultural products to be carefully considered in the social sciences (I often use such an argument in order to justify […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Seizing the means of rendering

There is a history of the future written in renderings; images of fantasy assembled as marketing, escapism and policy toolkits. Images of ‘the’ future hold a powerful grasp over the things we orient towards as we innovate and disrupt our way to a receding hyper-real horizon.1 For example, the relationship between science fiction and technological […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Feature Image: Kevin Dooley, Paper Money, Extreme Macro, CC BY 2.0

The Four Faces of Financialization: Cities as a Site of Struggle

In spite of describing an important set of social and economic transformations, the word financialization has become used so frequently and in so many contradictory ways, that it risks becoming as fragile and confusing as other recent buzz-words like globalization, neoliberalism and gentrification. Yet the forces at work behind the term are real and have […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Superstudio - Continuous Monument

Continuous Monuments and Imaginable Alternatives

In 1969, Superstudio, a radical Italian design group, made a proposal for what they called the ‘Continuous Monument’. It was a homogenous block of architecture that would encircle the earth depicting the global and total dimension of design and architecture of that time. We currently live in the time of a similar monument that harvests […]