In his new book on the power of imagination, Rob Hopkins suggests ten ways to imagine yourself out of a climate crisis

It’s finally here to buy - Rob Hopkins’ From “What Is” to “What If”: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. As the piece below will show, we’ve been trailing and anticipating this book for ages now. We deeply agree with Rob that imagination and creativity is essential for communities to respond actively to the major crises in our system, climate breakdown and automation.

But this Guardian article (or listicle) on ten great ideas from the book gives us an opportunity to show how much our approaches overlap - and enrich the original article with our own researches (on a bullet point after each ideas).

Make a village green out of the unlikeliest places

Tooting Transition Towns network transformed a turning circle on Tooting Broadway into a village green for the day - the Tooting Twirl. They also set up the Tour de Tooting in 2016, a display of home-decorated bicycles. They also run a community garden, a repair cafe and the annual Foodival - “where people contribute locally grown produce, which a group of chefs from Tooting’s restaurants turn into a variety of dishes, served up the following day at a public feast”.

  • This exemplifies the shift from “What is” to “What if” that Rob’s book promotes. Using futures and imagination to make communities’ dreaming concrete and actionable is so much a part of our own practice - see this search.

Your local streets transformed to a playground

Next, Rob celebrates the Bristol community interest company called Playing Out, which encourages neighbourhoods to set up street play zones. This now has support from Bristol council, which makes it easy and possible for residents to ask that their road can be traffic-free for short periods. Two parents in hi-vis jacket supervise, string and chalk are provided, and then free-wheeling play from kids takes over.

  • The Guardian piece expresses quite a lot of ignorance in being sniffy about Rob’s citing of neuroscience as a justification for allowing kids free, rough-and-tumble play - but he’s completely right. Its developmental advantages are huge.

Tune back into nature

Even if you’re a city dweller, try to take the opportunity to seek out and hear birdsong. Rob discovered the fanzine Caught by the River. They pointed him to Dawn Chorus Day, which started in Birmingham in the 80s, and is now on the first Sunday in May each year. You have to get up at 4am, and when Rob did so “it was magical. It was like going to the Royal Philharmonic.”

  • This is an example of biophilia - love of nature - and its reviving effects. The educationalist Peter Gray goes as far as identifying “nature-deficit disorder” in children. Indeed Gray’s been interviewed for Rob’s book.

Play!

Rob points to the facilitatory game Transition Town Anywhere, guided by Totnes’s Ruth Ben Tovim. This asks participants to construct a vision of their town from cardboard boxes, string and other scraps. What people build in these processes - “cardboard-and-string shops, banks, doctors’ surgeries and bike repair workshops” take on a reality for the makers, says Hopkins - they’re proud of what they imagine. In one exercise Hopkins says, a group devised the Yeast Collective, a combined bakery and brewery: “the brewery has been up and running for five years, and is shortly to move into a shared space with an amazing sourdough bakery.”

Prisoners helped by tools of conviviality

Hopkings speaks of LandWorks, from Devon, “running a market garden for offenders and potential offenders on a two-acre patch of land in a former quarry. The project’s ‘trainees’, as they are called, spend six-months developing skills in growing, landscaping, pottery, woodwork, construction and design, and cook and eat together. The project gives prisoners a sense of purpose and belonging. LandWorks claims its reoffending rate is just 4%, far lower than the UK national average of 29.3%. The charity’s approach could easily be copied just about anywhere”.

  • We’ve also explored radical and convivial forms of rehabilitation of prisoners several times in this blog - from reading exercises to commedia dell ‘Arte, from newspaper theatre to new kinds of prep for job interviews.

Makes cities into parks

“What if London was a national park?” A great question, which Rob notes Mayor Khan has answered positively, by declaring London the world’s first “National Park City” in July.

Guardian reports: “The vision came from Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geography teacher and devoted walker, who calculated that 49.5% of London was already green and blue space. Besides organising a free National Park City festival, it is now ‘the mayor’s ambition’ to reach at least 50% and to ‘increase tree canopy cover by 10%’ by 2050”.

  • We have a deep archive of “greening the city” posts here (which of course follows Rob’s Transition Towns lead). See tags and searches on cities, gardens, architecture, and streets.

Create your own museum

The Museum of Making will be launched next summer in Derby - and it’s come about, as Rob notes, from a community being granted the opportunity to revive an older project (the Derby Industrial Museum) on its existing site (originally an old silk mill in Derby, built by the Lombe brothers in the 1720s, one of the earliest factories in the world world. The developers were told, according to Hopkins:: “Here’s the keys and a very small budget. See what you can do.”

Locals were enlisted to physically prototype the entire museum - which helped them get funding. The project has generated other initiation like a mobile “Makory” touring the area, and an annual Maker Faire ind Darby. This overall approach has become a model in Darby for how to launch projects - and perhaps could also be a template of hospitals and schools.

Be like Liège

We have already profiled Rob’s story about how Liège in Belgium, over five years, has expanded its vision of food supplies being sourced from around the city, to a thriving transition economy. Quoted from the Guardian: “They had started 21 cooperatives and raised €5m. They had two farms and two vineyards and a brewery, and three shops in the centre of the city, and pedal-powered business collecting it all together, and a local currency they all use. Their waste gets taken off by somebody who grows mushrooms on it … 70% of all the food for the schools comes from an organic market garden”.

  • The promise of municipalism has shone brightly over the last few years of A/UK - see our posts here. We are interested in how cities are often chafing under the constraints of nation-states - but also can be somewhat city-centric in relation to the towns and parishes beyond their edges.

Let boredom be your friend

Meaning switch your smart phone off, get rid of its seductive apps, or get a simpler phone (Hopkins has an old Nokia). But there’s a more general point here, about how we are cluttering up our creative mental space with our digital attractions. Hopkins quotes  Sherry Turkle: “Boredom can be recognised as your imagination calling you.” Hopkins calls boredom “a moment when our brain might start composing a song or a poem, coming up with a really interesting idea for supper or a new approach to a problem”.

Create a Ministry of Imagination

We have also covered Rob’s fantastic notion on this blog - quoting Bologna’s Office of Civic Imagination which runs six city labs that help “understand how citizens and government can work together”.



ENVIRONMENTALISTS, INGENUITY, POLITICAL CULTURE, COMMUNITY, 4TH SECTORpat kaneimagination, rob hopkins, transition networkComment