You are cordially invited to the Imaginarium – a vibrant festival of ideas, where you have the power to radically rethink how we live today and in the future. The only limit is your imagination! Lucy Callington finds out more…
Imagine an event on your doorstep where you can meet with friends, let your imagination run wild and play your part in shaping a sustainable future for your community?
Well, imagine no more, as the first ever event of its kind locally – the Imaginarium – comes to St Andrew’s Centre on Saturday 7 February.
What is an Imaginarium?
Hosted by local environmental groups, HI Sustainability and Cambridge Carbon Footprint, the Imaginarium will be a fun space where people of all ages can think about what they’d like the future of Histon and Impington to look like for themselves, their families and community.
On the day there will be a range of activities for attendees to enjoy and as Nicole Barton, from Cambridge Carbon Footprint, explains – a space for people to play their part in shaping the future. She says: “The Imaginarium will help the community imagine a greener, fairer and more connected future for our villages.
“The challenge now is to create a longing for something better, to give ourselves the time and space to imagine and visualise what a different, brighter future might look like”.
The team wants to hear ideas from all quarters of our community. There will be local residents, scientists, architects, farmers, neighbours, artists, engineers, naturalists, councillors and more ready to share their own experiences and to hear from the youngest to the oldest village residents.
Connecting generations
Attendees will have the chance to get involved in fun activities including entering the ‘HI Time Machine’ and drawing from the ‘Pool of Possibility’. Topics covered are likely to include how we might play, travel and live alongside nature; how our homes might look; what our diet might be like and where our food will come from; how we might live well with less stuff; and how we might have better health and greater connection across the generations.
Nicole shares that the event, supported by Histon Beer Festival funding, will also be filmed to keep a record of the conversations, and all materials created during the event will be collected into a display. She says: “The ideas that people come up with will be used to create a directory of ideas that can then be used to influence decisions made by councils and groups that work in and for our villages.”
Event artist Helena Perry, who is helping to curate the spaces, believes that the Imaginarium will help to harness the community’s collective energy. “We all want the same thing”, she shares “but don’t realise that we are not alone. It’s so easy to be paralysed by climate anxiety and to worry about the future we are handing over to our children. Or we bury our heads in the sand because day-to-day living can be so all consuming”.
Creative Helena is optimistic about what can be achieved when people have “an opportunity to come together and see if our hopes and dreams are aligned” and believes the Imaginarium will provide “concrete ways of moving forward towards our shared goals”.
Community collaboration
In the run-up to the event, village groups including the schools, Brownies, Guides and Woodcraft Folk, have been busy engaging with the idea of the Imaginarium, and a display of their ideas will be on show for visitors at the event on 7 February.
Sue Free from HI Sustainability enthuses: “It’s hard to build a different future if we can’t imagine how it will look and feel. We welcome small ideas and huge ones, sensible ones and fantastical ones! Join us to nourish the ambitions of our community, feel hopeful and tap into a sense of what’s possible.”
The Imaginarium takes place between 1pm and 4pm on Saturday 7 February, at the St Andrew’s Centre, Histon. Visit HI Sustainability for more details.
READ ALSO: Meet the planners shaping the area’s future | HI HUB
