About the Journal

About the book

We are living through an unprecedented crisis of the social imagination. Across the globe, the images people hold of the future have been colonised by dystopian media cycles, algorithmic anxiety, and the slow suffocation of ‘used futures’ — inherited scripts that no longer serve, yet persist for want of alternatives. The very capacity of communities, publics, and civilisations to imagine otherwise appears to be atrophying at the precise moment when it is most needed.

Into this breach steps participatory futures (PF): the most powerful methodological repertoire available for engaging the public in the co-creation of new social imaginaries. PF is not a workshop technique. It is a theory and practice of civilisational renewal — a creative twinning of public engagement and futures thinking that intervenes, at the deepest possible level, in how communities and societies see, sense, and inhabit their own futures.

This book is a response to that challenge. Participatory Futures: Past, Present, and Futures is the first major edited volume to chart the full arc of participatory futures — from its intellectual roots in the mid-twentieth century through to its emergent horizons in the decades to come. It is being written now because it needs to exist now.