From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

‘People know something’s wrong,’ Roberts said. ‘They don’t necessarily know how to articulate, though, what the problem is.’ Better Block helps, he argues, by working quickly and by having a deadline. He sees Better Block’s work as ‘a combination of an urban planning exercise meets a block party’.

What would it look like if rather than protesting about the things that are wrong, dysfunctional and broken, we set out to give ourselves what futurist Stuart Candy calls ‘visceral tastes’ of the future, experiences of a positive, delightful future, that transform our sense of what’s possible the way The Sultan’s Elephant did?

‘As we work to reverse these long-term socio-economic and socio-political trends to foster more connections to others, stronger communities, more pro-sociality and more kindness, in the short term it would make more sense to foster more experiences of awe, for ourselves and for others. It might, at least, serve as a shortcut to the kinds of psychol

‘A calm but massive refusal was being expressed.’

now Better Block is an international movement. Roberts calls this work ‘guerrilla bottom-up place-making’.

This sense that the imagination flourishes when freed of the burden of colonialism has been seen in many countries when they gain independence, and then experience a time where anything feels possible, and a new identity is debated and explored, what is sometimes called a ‘postcolonial imagination’.

Are there examples from recent or distant history, when the public imagination has felt really alive? Not just for an elite clique of poets and artists, like the Romantics, or powerful leaders who commission imaginative and artistic people in service of their regimes (think Venice), but when for large swathes of ordinary people it has felt like a m

‘It is one thing to say ‘Another World Is Possible.’ It’s another thing to experience it, however momentarily.’

What if we could mobilise hundreds of people to transform a place into a physical manifestation of their idea of a future? If people woke up to find their local train station or local museum transformed into a renewable energy power station, an orchard, an edible food garden, a pop-up for local entrepreneurs, a play space, a welcome centre for refu