VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This paper discusses education for imagination as a crucial cognitive/metacognitive capacity in ensuring liveable cities. In a posthuman context where multiple, complex issues necessitate new, interdisciplinary understandings, imagination and agency are required for conceptualising and implementing positive, environmental change. Change is more likely to be sustained if it emerges from and is meaningful within communities. Supporting learners to develop imagination and understand it metacognitively can result in personal agency which better-equips them as participants within and instigators of liveable cities. Imagination is often regarded as a magical force, implying that it is unlearnable. Based on Burns’ models of cognitive/metacognitive imagination and on Atkinson’s notion of ‘the force of art’ as enabling possibilities for new worlds, the authors investigated how to support young people’s imagination and agency in relation to their local environment. ‘Imagination Agents’, funded by the Royal Society of Arts, trialled an after-school ‘art-club’, resulting in an artistic, environmental intervention in an economically deprived area of Glasgow. The project focused on local, environmental degradation as a conduit to enable the development of imagination, metacognition and agency. Pedagogy supported external, environmental and internal, cognitive transformation, connecting participants with the social and material environment in a ‘posthuman’ relationship. This paper uses three, ‘spatial’ lenses: cognitive, physical and organisational to discuss the value of pedagogies applied towards supporting positive, environmental change by developing imagination and agency at ‘ground-level’. We conclude with discussion of the extent to which emergent findings are generalisable in relation to supporting liveable cities.