Imbloc – a ‘place time’ of transition
I am back from three days in Armagh, at the invitation of the incredible ABC Culture team, keynoting at its inaugural New Cultural Geography of Smaller Places conference.
My talk, ABC and D of ABC25: leading from outside of the centre, took a walk through some of the less-obvious but foundational dispositions of placemaking, encompassing imagination scaffolding and place knowing, and was inspired by the day the conference took place, Imbolc.
From my talk:
Imbolc is our halfway point between the Yule winter solstice and the Ostara spring equinox and the celebration time of Brigid, the Celtic fire and fertility goddess.
It’s a powerful ‘place time’ as much as it is a spiritual one. We see the seeds of Spring beginning to stir in the earth. With Brigid we have the association of the bounty of milk, fire, the home and newborns. There are the rituals of singing out the winter and of the household deep clean and declutter to welcome in spring, and. It is the time of hope and new life, better weather and longer days. From the inward turn of winter, we are stirring again and emerging from the rest enforced on us from the cold. The transition is a time also of the passing of knowledge from the Crone to the Maiden.
I think there is a lot we can learn from Imbolc to bring into our placemaking practice. We are moving from winter, and one way of doing things, to spring, another way of doing things. As much too as Imbolc is a calendar event, it is a process, it is that transitional space where we can explore and experiment, test, question, create – of our values, narratives, goals, what we think success is…With both practice and with knowledge of place, what do we want to leave behind and what do we want to bring with us?
This questioning is put into sharp focus when we look around to see how so many of the structures and institutions we have created so far are not readied for our future or equipped to deal with our present, with the compound crises we are facing of climate and ecological emergency, social inequality and division, the pandemic and its long shadow.
As we stand at the eve of Imbolc, it is a time of facing challenges and of being tested – do we have what it takes, do we have the imagination, to make real and lasting change? Can we step out from the comfort zone of how we have always done things to unsettle the present to create that real and lasting change?
This for me accords with the solidarity aspect of the radical imagination – we are going to get nowhere with change if we work in silos, or to defend intellectual territory, or if we come into a project thinking we know all about it and how it will be done already. And, if we are to work radically, then we need to work with plural knowledges and upend normative power positions.
What comes next will emerge out of what is already all around us. It is an uncertain, knowing and unknowing process, we have to lean into ambiguity and mistakes, and the mess and loops of such a process. We have to dissolve power positions so that we are working as equals in place and work with care, kindness and trust. It’s a vulnerable process.
The place knowing of the centre and of the city can only get us so far. And I would argue, has taken us down some cul de sacs of thinking and doing in the placemaking sector.
Places of the edge, of the periphery, smaller places, rural places, I think can spearhead the imagination scaffold and the placemaking radical imagination – not only to redress the neglect and denigration of the not-urban, but as they can rise to the challenge of designing new ways in which we can live and work together that generate wellbeing, grow capabilities across communities and embed a reciprocally thriving relationship with nature and other species.
It’s a challenge of no small scale, it demands we don’t tinker at the edges, but experiment with new ways and means of doing things.
References
The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking / Roman Krznaric
Imagination Infrastructures - Cassie Robinson