The Civic Imagination Project

This workshop is about making imagination tangible, sharable and situated within lived spaces. Many of the real world issues that individuals and communities are struggling with can be understood and situated within the logics of space and place; issues of health, environment, education and so on can all be mapped onto local geographies, connecting them with local contexts and realities. Monuments from the Future is a simple, playful way of intervening within familiar spaces and places by constructing fanciful artifacts of the civic imagination from low cost materials and without need for prior experience or skill in model making or fabrication.

 

The workshop begins with a simple place-based observation. Participants then work in groups to come up with some kind of intervention; maybe helping to unlock some underutilized potential of the space they observed or to bring something to the place that is currently lacking. Using materials available to them, they

build artifacts that help re-imagine the space.

 

Ideally the artifact becomes a point of connection and conversation for people within the space. If it is not possible to leave the artifact installed in the place for more than the duration of the workshop, participants can still document its existence. The goal is to make visible, tangible connections between imagination and real spaces. To create a sense of agency and ability to shape the constructed environment.

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Download the Practicing Futures Handbook and specific workshop instructions here.