Civic
Imaginaries
Partnerships

In the context of widening inequality and declining trust in democracy, a renewed political attention to place has revealed the need for new methods to understand community aspirations and ideas.

What is a Civic Imaginary

Place-based policy often claims to build community capacity, enhance social capital and strengthen neighbourhood bonds, outcomes which are difficult to evidence by traditional approaches and metrics and need critical investigation. Policymakers need new ways to understand the lived impacts of place and the relational, felt experiences of policy interventions. This fellowship will foster new Civic Imaginary Partnerships, collaborative, interdisciplinary hubs that blend policy-facing research with grassroots creative practice. Civic imaginaries are the ways that people think, feel and dream about the futures of their places. Researching civic imaginaries creates a vocabulary and a geographically specific process to ‘work out’ and make tangible these relational and felt forces of place.