Viable futures in the everyday: Neighborhood living rooms as 'imagination infrastructure'

Based on ongoing ethnographic research in neighborhood living rooms in the Netherlands, this paper argues that these spaces can be understood as 'imagination infrastructure' giving residents the opportunity to participate in the creation of viable alternative futures. Firstly, they function to express and articulate the latent needs and desires of residents in their everyday lives. When citizens are given the space to 'act otherwise' in a space that is not governed by the predetermined norms of the private home, the institution or the market, the things they choose to do, and the way they choose to interact with each other, represent choices about what kind of world they want to live in, and what might be missing or inadequate in those other spheres of daily life. Secondly, and following on from this point, these spaces function as generators or incubators of new initiatives, and offer room to experiment with alternative possibilities. Drawing on the political theory of prefiguration, the argument is that such spaces offer an open-ended space of possibility in which participants can enact a more desired future, collectively, and have the opportunity to reflect on and iterate this future.