"The People Are Thanked For Their Imagination."
Imagination Infrastructure, Custody, and the Politics of Return
A phrase leaves home
At Lagori Collective, we use the phrase imagination infrastructure too. Working from South Asia, we reached for it because it named something we kept encountering. Imagination has conditions, and those conditions are never only internal to the act of imagining. We use the phrase from within the field that has formed around it, close to its ambitions and indebted to what it has made possible. What we add, we add from a South Asian vantage point.
Stay with the phrase imagination infrastructure, and a question of custody starts to press. What imagination makes does not remain in the room that made it.
The clearest account of how the phrase travelled is the one Ruth Potts and Keri Facer set down in their 2025 report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF Report). We relay it here partly because it matters for the argument, and partly because it is a good story, of the kind where a phrase leaves home young and returns not quite itself. By their telling, it begins with Arjun Appadurai, who used it in the early 1990s, narrowly, to refer to cultural and media organisations. The phrase sat at the edge of a larger argument he was making: that imagination had become an organised social practice, something a society did together and daily, shaped by media, migration and the possible lives people could now picture for themselves. In that argument, imagination was already underway. A scholar’s task was to describe it.
In the genealogy Potts and Facer trace, the phrase all but disappears for close to thirty years. It surfaces again in 2019, at the Science Policy Research Unit in Sussex, where Martin Mahony and Silke Beck reached for it to sharpen something Andy Stirling had been describing: the stickiness of imaginaries, the way a dominant picture of the future hardens into common sense and crowds out alternatives. Around the same time, Cassie Robinson began the work that, in Potts and Facer’s account, became central to the phrase’s current life. Her concern was close to home. She had spent years in rooms where civil society was being reduced to the delivery of services and the handling of data. She had watched the sector lose its grip on any larger sense of who it might become. Imagination, in that setting, looked like something worn down by institutions with little room left to ask what they were for.
Robinson carried the phrase into the National Lottery Community Fund, where the Emerging Futures programme seeded fifty-two grants across the United Kingdom, and where, in 2021, Olivia Oldham wrote an early, field-setting piece that asked plainly what the two words meant set side by side. Oldham traced infrastructure back to its first life as a railway term, the culverts and bridges laid beneath a line, and argued that an infrastructure of the imagination should behave less like a scaffold than a playground, something continually remade rather than built once and left standing. By 2025, when the JRF report appeared, the phrase had become a field, with a community of practice well over nine hundred strong, a toolkit and an annual gathering. What had been an aside in an anthropologist’s argument had become an organising idea among funders, researchers and practitioners across British civil society and well beyond it.
Watch what happened to the phrase as it travelled. What changed on the way was the grammar. Appadurai’s wider argument treated imagination as an organised social practice already moving through media, aspiration and migration, something people were doing whether or not anyone arrived to support it. The field that grew around the phrase does not think imagination is absent. Its sharpest voices insist the opposite. Because it grew through questions of funding, public purpose and civic capacity in a Britain of closed libraries, thinned civic life and exhausted public institutions, it often reaches for a grammar of provision: what must be resourced and maintained. A concept takes the shape of the place it lands in.
Read from where we sit, the work did not look like a scaffold going up on cleared ground. It looked like something already standing, already moving, built into forms of its own, not all of them innocent, and not always visible to the programmes that arrived to convene it. The question the phrase started with comes back into view. From here, it begins to ask something else.
The second season
Potts and Facer’s report sets out what a critical imagination needs to arise: slow time, encounter that unsettles, a plurality of ways of knowing held against the pull of a single method, archives deep enough to outlast the people who fill them. The account holds. That these conditions deserve the patient investment a society gives its schools is the field’s achievement.
The field has been more attentive to time than it gets credit for. It refuses to treat imagination infrastructure as a thing built once and finished, and it asks how imaginaries might be held across years, and whether repeated encounters get enabled or quietly let go. The field has already made room for return. It sits there among other conditions, held alongside emergence and endurance and the move from imagining into action. We want to put more weight on it. Return is where the conditions either compound into capacity or stay an event. That makes it the test of whether emergence and endurance amounted to anything.
So the definitions do not divide cleanly. In much of the field, imagination infrastructure names the long-term investment that grows a society’s capacity to imagine differently, the conditions under which a critical imagination arises and lasts. We hold the same elements and pull one of them forward.
Imagination infrastructure is the arrangement of time, custody, obligation and practice through which a future stays within reach of the people it came from, until the returning compounds into a capacity they hold.
Ours begins where the field’s leaves off, after emergence, at the moment the imagining exists, when the only question left is whether there is a way back to it.
In the region we work from, that coming back is rarely a matter of programme design. It is carried through obligations that recur with the season, holding a future in place long after the process that named it has gone. This changes what has to be costed.
Wearing it in
Return is easy to underrate. A future imagined once, however vivid in the room, behaves like weather. It passes through and changes little. What turns an imagined future into something people can act on is the coming back to it: a second session some weeks on, where an idea raised before is picked up again and found to have moved, because people carried it home and argued with it in between; a decision some seasons later, about a tank or a tenancy, reasoned through the long logic a group had built months earlier. An imagined future that is never returned to more often than not does not last. It thins out and is gone, with no single moment anyone could name as the loss.
The coming back is also where the idea changes, and the change is the point of it. A future carried between seasons returns altered: tested against a sceptical relative, fitted to the actual fall of a field channel, stripped of the parts that only sounded good while the room was still agreeing. This is the work a musician’s riyāz does to a raga, a discipline we have written about elsewhere in these notes, repetition that wears something in rather than holding it in place. A future is worn in the same way, returned to until the people who hold it no longer have to reason their way back each time. It becomes theirs at the speed of habit.
Here an archive needs care, because not every kind of keeping is a way back. An archive matters because it can hold what would otherwise vanish, and in societies where non-dominant imaginaries are routinely erased. Yet an archive can become evidence, a record of a future once spoken and no longer revised, kept so perfectly and changed by nobody. It can also become a route of return, a place where people re-enter the future they made and find it altered by use. Preservation alone does not make a way back.
That coming back is revision, carried far enough to learn whether the future holds. It does not require the same hands that first imagined it. Futures are taught, inherited and handed on. What it requires is that the people a future came from remain in the chain of revision, close enough to keep changing it rather than being shown it later as a finished thing. Everything the field provides, the time, the encounter, the protected plurality, produces an imagined future. Whether that future becomes something people can reason from, decide from, and return to without needing the original room is a separate matter, and it has a structure, one that can be built or left to chance. Once return is the test, the problem comes into focus. Much of the way imagination work is organised prevents return by routing it somewhere else.
The report travels
If return is the test, then imagination work has to be read differently. It is good at producing imagination. The harder question is where the capacity that imagination produces ends up. This is a different question from the one the field has most often been organised to ask. The conditions frame asks whether a critical imagination arose: were the conditions there, did people imagine, was the encounter real. It is a question about the front of the process. It does not easily show who, at the end of it, retains the capacity the imagining produced. That is what we want to follow, because the capacity often settles away from the room.
A piece of imagination work often moves like this. A programme convenes a group around a future that matters to them and this could be anything from where a new borewell goes, and whose fields it reaches to a ward committee deciding where the streetlight goes to an anganwadi’s hours. The conditions are good, sometimes better than anything the group could have assembled alone, and a future takes shape. Then the programme does what programmes are built to do. It documents. The vocabulary the group built, the disagreements that sharpened it, the future they began to hold in common, are written up, abstracted, made portable. The report travels to the institution. The institution learns from it. It refines a method, informs a strategy, strengthens the next funding case and finally enters the donor’s memory as something now understood. Every step here can be sincere. A lot of our own work has moved this way too. The report can be accurate and still move capacity elsewhere.
And yet, by the end, the future that was imagined is compounding beyond the reach of the people who made it. It has become institutional capacity. It raises the standing of whoever can cite it. The group that produced it is left, at most, with the memory of a good week and whatever intervention the programme returns to deliver. The capacity changed holder. The conditions frame reads the process as a success, because the conditions were met: imagination did arise and the process worked on its own terms. Two things sit outside that reading. The thing imagination produces has a holder. And the route of return runs by default away from the room, and would have to be built to run back.
The report is true, and its truth is what makes the shift hard to see. Because it is true, it becomes the place where return is organised. The future, once documented, can be returned to, but the returning now happens at the institution: in its archives, its methods, its strategy cycles, its learning. The people who imagined it can be invited back, thanked, consulted, but they re-enter a future that is now held elsewhere, on someone else’s terms and timetable.
At the launch, someone from the institution says, “We learned so much from this process.” Someone else says, “We could not have done it without the community.” The slide thanks the participants by name. In the next proposal, the work becomes evidence.
Each step in that sequence is a handover of custody, and each one is honest. Theft implies malice; this is the ordinary, designed shape of the work. It routes return as reliably as a culvert routes water. It is allocation in its most visible form.
This is where cost stops being a delicate question. A process that funds the gathering and leaves the return unpaid has already decided where the capacity will accumulate, whatever its intentions, because the season in which an imagined future is carried home, argued with and made usable is the season that goes unfunded. The first articulation can be costed. The compounding often cannot. So the money follows the part that produces a deliverable, and the deliverable is the report, and the report is the institution’s. The structure of the funding and the structure of the capture are one.
The harder case begins when the return stays close. Everything so far assumes the route of return runs outward, away from the people who imagined, into institutions that hold it elsewhere. But that is only one direction. Return also stays close, held by structures of obligation and memory that already organise life here. When return remains near home, it turns inward: who, among the people it stayed with, is allowed back into it, and as what. That is the question that stays, and it asks us to look at the region’s own structures of return as closely as the programmes that arrive to convene them.
Seated in an order
A future that stays close is easy to mistake for a future that is safe. It has not been carried off into someone else’s archive. It is held by the people it came from, in forms they know, on time they keep. But a future that is held is also a future that is placed, and the structures that hold it best are the ones that place people most precisely.
These are among the structures the region runs on: obligation that makes a thing recur whether or not anyone feels like organising it, memory that carries a judgement across generations, the season that brings an assembly back, the inheritance that settles whose work it is to keep something going. They hold futures with a reliability no programme matches, because they do not run on funding or enthusiasm. They run on debt, the kind we have elsewhere called rīn, the sense of arriving into something already owing it your part. And debt, to work, has to fall on someone. The festival returns because particular people are bound to return it. The assembly reconvenes with the season and gives each member a place. The practice survives because a line of people is obliged to carry it, which is also to say that a line is entitled to carry it and another is not. We are seated in such an order ourselves, and what we are able to see from here is also part of what it handed us. To guarantee that a future comes back is to decide, in the same motion, who it comes back to, and as what.
The region appears here as a lens and a place where something true of all return-infrastructure is easier to see. It is also where older technologies of return can be studied with their dangers intact. This essay does the same. It carries riyāz and rīn outward, and naming that does not place us outside the order we describe. Any infrastructure allocates. A road decides who reaches what, and a calendar decides whose time is marked and whose passes unrecorded. The field has not had to face this question with the same force because it has often been building first for emergence, for the conditions under which imagination first appears, and emergence can look open to everyone at once. Return cannot. The moment the field builds the thing it is now moving toward, the recurring gathering, the standing resource, the archive people can re-enter, it will be building something that holds a future for some people more fully than others. There is no arrangement that holds a future for everyone equally and for no one in particular.
It shows plainest in the simplest case. The gathering returns each season, and not everyone returns to the same place in it. At the centre, some shape the future and set its terms. Others return to carry what the day requires without ever deciding what the day is for. The duty of keeping the thing alive may pass down a line without the standing to change it. And some do not return at all, because the structure that reliably brings others back was not built to seat them. The continuity holds, and its cost is borne unevenly, and the structure does not register that unevenness as a failure, because keeping the future and placing the people are a single operation.
So return forces a harder question than whether a future survives. It survives, often, and survives well. The question is whether the people placed at the edges of its return stay in the chain of revision, able to alter the terms on which they come back, or whether they inherit terms fixed elsewhere and long ago and are asked only to maintain them. An infrastructure can hold a future with great fidelity and hold many of its people in fixed positions while it does. Fidelity and openness are different things. A route of return can be perfectly reliable and still closed.
The field is moving toward more durable forms now, tired of the workshop that vanishes and the imagination invited once and never resourced again. Every step it takes toward making return reliable is a step into allocation. At one scale, the report holds the future elsewhere. At another, the assembly seats people in an order. In both, return is organised as allocation. It cannot be avoided by being newer, or better funded, or more sincerely meant, for the same reason sincerity did not stop the report from carrying capacity away: the routing was in the structure, not the intent. To build a dependable way back is to decide who walks it with authority and who walks it carrying things. That is the form return-infrastructure takes, here and everywhere, once it is real enough to last.
Which leaves the problem where it sits, and we will not pretend to have solved it. We have learned, in this region and in the field, a great deal about how to make imagination appear, and something about how to make it stay. We do not yet know how to build obligation that returns without excluding, how to secure the way back without fixing, in the same act, who returns as its author and who returns only to keep it. The test is whether people can return not only to maintain a future, but to alter the terms on which they return. That is the question our work in the region offers to the field. It is the problem imagination infrastructure must now inherit, and it is not yet anyone’s to resolve.
A note on what follows
This note is also the beginning of our exploration. Over the coming months, we will be developing and sharing instruments for tracing where futures go after they have been imagined. It is unlikely that it will solve the “problem,” however the hope is that it will make the movement of custody harder to miss.
This reflection grows out of Lagori Collective’s South Asian Futures framework, an inquiry into how futures are rehearsed, inherited, contested and sustained from within the region’s layered ecologies, obligations and plural temporal rhythms. The framework centres partial attempts, situated knowledge, and the quiet labour of staying with the not-yet.
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If these notes resonate, we invite you to carry them forward with care in how they are critiqued, reimagined or cited. We see this as one way to amplify thinking from the region, and to remind futures practice that no thought stands alone.
Suggested Citation: Kothari, D. (2026). “The People Are Thanked For Their Imagination,” - Imagination Infrastructure, Custody, and the Politics of Return. Notes from In Between, Lagori Collective .
Dhaval Kothari is a design researcher, strategist, and co-founder of Lagori Collective. Lagori is an experimental research and design studio working to expand the conditions under which multiple futures remain possible. Notes from In Between is where we work through how futures are imagined, shaped, and rehearsed from within South Asia.
Notes From In Between is a record of our in-progress thinking, provocations, open questions, and ongoing experiments at Lagori’s South Asian Futures Lab. It’s where we make our process public, not to present answers, but to invite conversation. Check out our previous notes.
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Some of what this note carries
This note has been shaped by people, texts, conversations and practices that helped us think more carefully about imagination, return, obligation and custody.
 | A guest post by
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Beyond riyāz and rīn, can you say more about what you’ve discovered about return-infrastructure?