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"What, for example, are the possible futures of urban
transportation? Traffic is a problem involving space. How might the
city of tomorrow cope with the movement of men and objects through
space? To speculate about this question, an imaginetic center might
enlist artists, sculptors, dancers, furniture designers, parking lot
attendants, and a variety of other people who, in one way or another,
manipulate space imaginatively. Such people, assembled under the
right circumstances, would inevitably come up with ideas of which the
technocratic city planners, the highway engineers and transit
authorities have never dreamed.
Musicians, people who live near airports, jackhammer men and
subway conductors might well imagine new ways to organize, mask or
suppress noise. Groups of young people might be invited to ransack
their minds for previously unexamined approaches to urban sanitation,
crowding, ethnic conflict, care of the aged, or a thousand other
present and future problems.
In any such effort, the overwhelming majority of ideas put
forward will, of course, be absurd, funny or technically impossible.
Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to
toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to
harsh critical judgement. The application of the imagination to the
future thus requires an environment in which it is safe to err, in
which novel juxtapositions of ideas can be freely expressed before
being critically sifted. We need sanctuaries for social imagination.
While all sorts of creative people ought to participate in
conjecture about possible futures, they should have immediate access
- in person or via telecommunications - to technical specialists,
from acoustical engineers to zoologists, who could indicate when a
suggestion is technically impossible(bearing in mind that even
impossibility is often temporary)."
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