Abstract
This paper examines the infrastructural conditions for cultivating the municipal imagination in social design. It contributes to discussions on imagination as a collective, civic capacity engaging with the material and political conditions of public life. Positioned between communities and institutions, the imagination actor emerges as a figure navigating ambiguity, translating between informal creativity and formal governance. While imagination is increasingly invoked in response to overlapping social, ecological, and democratic crises, its practice within civic contexts remains structurally precarious. Informal, relational, and affective modes of imagination work, essential to sustaining collective process, often lack institutional recognition or support. This paper argues that imagination is not a symbolic add-on to civic systems, but a constitutive force for democratic renewal. To cultivate it requires confronting the politics of legibility, value, and support: recognising the infrastructural labour of imagination as both contested and essential. Without this, the civic imagination risks being evoked rhetorically while simultaneously being denied the necessary material conditions that can support imagination infrastructures.\
About the Authors:
Louis Alderson-Bythell is an artist and design researcher pursuing a PHD in Transdiciplinary Art and Design. They have an extensive practice, creating ecologically situated works, often in collaboration with community groups, scientific researchers and other artists. A graduate in Regenerative Economics at the Schumacher College as well as holding an MA in Design from the Royal College of Art (RCA). They are a visiting lecturer at the RCA and former research associate under the AiD Lab, a collaborative AI design research centre between the RCA and HKPU. Their research is concerned with the role of making and creative practice in the context of post-growth cultures.
Daniela Santillan is a designer and researcher from Lima, Peru, whose work bridges graphic design and transdisciplinary practice. With a Master’s in Transdisciplinary Design, she merges visual communication with social and service design to critically explore the social dynamics of urban environments. Her research examines how everyday practices, cultural expressions, and spatial behaviors shape, and are shaped by, public space. Now pursuing a PhD in Arts, Design, and Transdisciplinarity, Daniela investigates how emerging technologies in public domains can foster participatory design, collective ownership, and social good. Through her approach, she challenges conventional urban narratives and develops experimental methodologies to reimagine public spaces.
Contact: l.aldersonbythell@ied.edu
