From What If to What Next

Meet Tim Gill and Alice Ferguson of Playing Out, brilliant guests for a vital discussion. Today we're talking about kids, and play and about the places where we live. Kids have almost entirely vanished from our streets. Retreating indoors in the face of the car's domination of our city spaces, and a perception of the lack of safety, kids are all too often starved of play. 'No ball games here' signs. Horrible noises only audible to teenagers to chase them away from sitting near certain buildings, The privatisation of public space. Cities are increasingly being designed around the needs of adults and capital rather than kids. So what might we do about it? Some beautiful visions of the future from our Time Machine adventure this week. I hope you love it.

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We start this year with a fantastic episode and a really important question. What if we were to implement every solution that we already know exists in order to tackle the climate crisis with the sense of urgency that an emergency should inspire? After the damp squib of COP26, it's a vitally important question. Can we do it? Is there still time? And most importantly, what would it feel like to live in a time when that was actually happening, when all around us, all hands were applied to this most momentous of tasks? It's not a question we ask often enough.

And it is a big question. Joining me are Clover Hogan and Paul Hawken, both brilliant thinkers on this question. Paul's book. 'Regeneration', which we refer to throughout the podcast, can be bought at many independent booksellers (never Amazon). Do let me know what you think of this episode, of thoughts for future What If questions it raises for you, or anything else it inspires in you.

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Although not planned as some kind of 'Christmas Special', that's kind of what this episode is, so hopefully it will give you the opportunity to treat your imagination to something very special over the festive season. This episode will introduce you to Flora Collingwood-Norris and to Orsola de Castro, cofounder and Global Creative Director of Fashion Revolution.

Please consider buying Flora's book 'Visible Creative Mending for Knitwear' and Orsola's book 'Loved Clothes last: How the Joy of Rewearing and Repairing Your Clothes Can Be a Revolutionary Act' at your favourite independent bookshop (never Amazon, never Amazon...). I hope episode this inspires much stitching and loving repairing

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The IPCC report that came out in mid-2021 said "unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees, or even 2 degrees, will be beyond reach". "Immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions". Let's imagine we were able to actually do that in the time available to us.

It would mean the complete reimagining of food, travel, housing, the economy. A retooled education system. A new sense of shared and collective purpose. It would feel like living through a revolution of the imagination. But what would it actually feel like to live through a revolution of the imagination? It's a question that leads us to our question for today's episode – what if we are standing on the cusp of an Imagination Age? It was a question inspired by this article I read that one of our guests had written about the second guest.

Gabriel A. Silva, who wrote it, is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Neurosciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego. He holds a Jacobs Family Scholar in Engineering Endowed Chair, is the Founding Director of the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence, and Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. In addition to his academic work, he is a regular contributor to Medium and Forbes.

And Rita J. King, who it's about, believes in Applied Imagination for creative, pragmatic problem solving in the Imagination Age. King is EVP for Business Development at Science House, a strategic consultancy in Manhattan. She is a writer, researcher, speaker, designer and artist. As a Futurist at the National Academy of Sciences Science and Entertainment Exchange, she invents novel technologies, characters and stories for film and TV projects. She is a Resident Research Fellow at the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence at UC San Diego.

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Powerful psychology is used to convince us, often subliminally, that we want and need things we previously never knew even existed. This is especially dangerous at a time when we need to urgently cut consumption of high carbon-generating products and lifestyle choices. It is estimated that in the UK companies spend over £23bn a year on advertising. Research shows that the more advertising we are exposed to, the more unhappy we feel, the more materialistic, the less we engage in positive social activities and the less we care about the environment. Advertising, in other words, is incompatible with the decarbonisation we so urgently need. There is a very real, and dangerous, link between living in cities overrun with cars and the fact that we are surrounded by billboards and newspaper stuffed with seductive car ads. What if instead those spaces presented us with different messages, messages celebrating more inclusive cities with far less cars, cities with clean air, cities rich with biodiversity - messages that told different stories? Our What If question for today then is … "What if we reclaimed our public spaces from advertising?"

My two guests on this episode bring a huge amount to this conversations. Rosa ter Kuile is Campaigns and Communications manager at Rising Arts Agency. and is part of the Bristol Womxns Mural Collective. Robbie Gillett works part-time from Bristol on Possible's Badvertising campaign and at Adfree Cities. I hope this episode will help you to see the spaces around you differently, to reimagine what your corner of the world would look like without adverts, and how that might impact your imagination.

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I'm not going to say much about this episode, other than that it's incredible. We are exploring Afrofuturism, which has been variously described as "speculative fiction from the African diaspora", "a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens" and "an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation". It has so much to teach us about imagination and how to keep What If questions alive over time. You will also hear the story of the Zambian Space Programme (a new one on me) which is just amazing.

My guests are both amazing. Dr. Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst, which will be out next year. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism.

Dr. Dennis Chester is Professor of African American Literature at California State University East Bay (CSUEB) in Hayward CA. His interests include all manner of topics related to African American literature and culture with specialties in the Harlem Renaissance and in contemporary genre studies. Dr. Chester's recent activities include published articles on African American crime fiction and presentations on Afrofuturism and the characteristics of Black speculative fiction. A recent Fulbright fellow, Dr. Chester is also very interested in the diasporic aspects of contemporary Black writing and exploring the ways that Black literature and Black people move within and across national borders.

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The world's governments will be coming together for 2 weeks to, hopefully, reach some kind of binding agreement that might give the world at least a fighting chance of preventing runaway climate change. There's one problem though...

On a planet where over half the population is female, the leadership team put together by the UK government, who are hosting these talks, is almost exclusively male. Yes, you heard that right. And yet, climate change is an issue that impacts women more than men. It disproportionately impacts their livelihoods, the levels of violence they face, their educational opportunities and much more.

Yet we know that involving the diversity of a population in making big decisions that affect them can lead to far greater public support, not to mention better ideas. Research also shows that women understand climate change better than men, are more open to change and to big ideas, and bring a more compassionate approach to decisionmaking.

I'm joined to explore this by the fabulous Nameerah Hameed and by Bianca Pitt, both of, among other things, #SheChangesClimate. I hope you love our conversation as much as we did. Please let us know what you think. And do share the link with your friends and do sign She Changes Climate's Open Letter. And see you in two weeks, for a fascinating episode to mark our 40th episode.

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Everywhere, where you live included, has a patchwork of organisations of different sizes who are doing business and making things happen in a way that is not solely about the generation of profit, but about serving a larger social purpose. They might be called social enterprises, or socially-trading organisations, or all sorts of other things.

Today's episode asks what if they got together and designed how better they might join up and work in a more connected way? What if they offered peer to peer support between each other? What if the Mayor of the city got behind this new network, and saw it as an opportunity to invest and support the emergence of a new economy? What if that investment was then, as each enterprise found its feet and generated surpluses, reinvested back on a pay-it-forward basis to help other emerging enterprises? And what if this skilful support for a new economy spread and spread and became the default model for how to regenerate the economies of towns and cities across the land?

Sounds good doesn't it? Well stand by. You're about to hear a story of how this is actually happening, one you won't have read about in the papers or seen on TV, but it's very much a reality. I am joined by two amazing guests who have played an active role in making this happen.

Danielle Cohen joined Power to Change, the independent trust that supports community businesses in England, in 2018. She works in cities and regions to enable the community business sector to flourish as part of the local economy. Her work has included partnering on the development of Kindred, a social investment vehicle owned and led by the social economy in Liverpool City Region, backed by the city region's Combined Authority and Power to Change. Before joining Power to Change, Danielle worked in urban regeneration, community engagement and corporate responsibility, including as deputy CEO of a central London BID. She believes passionately in building a regenerative economy which nurtures people and planet.

Erika Rushton has 35 years of experience in supporting and investing in communities and creative enterprises to create, grow, occupy and reinvent their own economies. She has worked with homes, workplaces, towns, whole cities, industry sectors and communities of interest at a regional, national and international level.

She is the Director of Creative Economist whose current contracts include Islington Mill Arts Club to deliver The Other City – an Artist led £7 million redevelopment of heritage and modern buildings accommodating 150+ creative enterprises; Women In Space a network of 25+ creative women from across the UK who have taken over unwanted land and buildings, creating value and giving places new purpose; and Kindred, which you'll hear more about shortly. She mentors creative women leaders nationally and internationally; lectures internationally; and works voluntarily to address intersectional gender discrimination in the UK.

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The decline of insect populations around the world has been nothing short of terrifying. Last year I visited a school in an intensive wine-producing region in France, and suggested to the kids that they might build an insect hotel, only to be told by the head teacher "we don't have any insects here". It has stayed with me ever since. So in today's episode, we are exploring how it would feel to live through a time when insect population, and biodiversity in general, bounced back? If we did everything we possibly could to create the conditions for that? How incredible would that be?

My guests are Vicki Hird, who runs Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food, and is the author of the just-published 'Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More', and Matt Shardlow is CEO of Buglife, "the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates". Do join them and support their work.

Thanks as ever to Ben Addicott for sound production and theme music, and for our taste this week of what my Time Machine sounds like... Do let me know what you thought of this episode.

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Today we bring together Anthea Lawson, author of the fabulous new book 'The Entangled Activist' and Alastair McIntosh, author of 'Soul and Soil' and 'Riders on the Storm'. I usually try to constrain the conversations we have here to around 45 minutes, but this one was so fascinating that we just kept rolling, and just kept chatting, and so this one actually comes in at an hour and a quarter! But you'll love it I promise, and you'll wish we'd kept going. I'm not going to tell you anything else, just that you will love it, and I so look forward to your reflections and comments.

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