Imagining the urban

This is a response to rebuttals by David Wachsmuth and Stephanie Pincetl to our paper ‘Imagining the post-fossil city: why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds?’. Our response explains why their realist urban metabolic analysis suggests the ‘city’ is an arbitrary scale for analysis, whereas our constructivist approach focusing on the politics of meaning makes this appropriate. We basically share their concern over a strategy building on local initiatives only, but suggest it is paramount to understand better the politics – and polity – shaped by the required energy transition, and vice versa. Ultimately, we reiterate the crucial role for the imagination in any democratic energy transition. Moreover, we suggest it requires not just one type of imagination, but an ecosystem of imaginative logics.