Toward the Relational City: Imaginaries, Expertise, Experiments - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 188

specialized knowledge are tasked with facilitating rather than dominating
political debates thereby opening up processes of urban development to
alternative knowledges from informal local experts. Third, there is a need
to trial new interventions in human-nature relations through practices of
civic experimentation. Imaginaries, expertise, and experiments are aimed
at catalyzing civic politics through discussion, debate, agenda setting, and
action to realize new confi gurations of humans, nature, and technology
in the city.
A Call for Civic Imaginaries
We need different ideas because we need different relationships.
—Raymond Williams 2
One of the most daunting tasks of enacting civic politics is to replace the
modern dichotomies of urban/rural, natural/artifi cial, human/nonhuman,
and fact/value with a perspective that emphasizes the partial, hybrid, and
messy connections of the world. This perspective has been and continues
to be the main aim of relational theorists as described in chapter 2. One
approach to nurturing a relational perspective and envisioning differ-
ent futures is to forward the notion of ecological imaginaries . 3 The term
“imaginary” is similar to common words such as imagination, image, and
imagery, but is specifi cally focused on connecting vision with perception
and meaning making. 4 Thus, an ecological imaginary is an attempt to bring
into being new partnerships between humans and nonhumans, with each
serving to reinforce the integrity of the other. 5 Ecological imaginaries are
essential for all urban residents, experts and nonexperts alike, to form civic
identity through the recognition of human/nonhuman relations.
Environmental philosopher Richard Dagger notes the etymological link
between city and citizen, and argues that a civic imaginary allows the
citizen to be not just in a city but also an integral part of it. 6 The citizen is
one who is not merely a consumer, a producer, and a private individual,
but is also linked in multiple and varying ways to his or her human and
nonhuman surroundings. As such, ecological and civic imaginaries are
closely linked; in both cases, the emphasis is on recognizing and nurturing
constructive relations. A prescient example of a civic/ecological imaginary
is expressed by a Seattle City Hall insider, an individual who does not
self-identify as an environmentalist:
I remember going down to the Ballard Locks and watching the salmon coming
through the fi sh ladder. And I realized, I live in a watershed, I don't live in a city!