The past two decades, imagination has become the watchword of urban planning and futures thinking. Crisis post-mortems diagnose failures of imagination, a growing ecosystem of programmes and funds promises to supply it, and the profession's flagship lectures call for its radical renewal. This report asks a question the discourse has not asked of itself: why this word, and not its nearest neighbour, creativity?
The distinction, I argue, comes down to accountability. Creativity, in its standard scientific definition, requires originality and effectiveness, judged by others; it can fail. Imagination carries no success condition; it cannot fail. Creativity's fall was partly warranted, as the creative-city era discredited it as a development strategy, while imagination's rise was partly a homecoming to a vocabulary planning had long been offered. But whatever the motive, the effect is that planning now adopts the ambitious rhetoric of creation while operating under the consequence-free parameters of imagination.
The report examines what this shift obscures. It argues that imagination is no natural equalizer but a faculty fed by knowledge, training, and resources, all unequally distributed; that visioning workshops reliably produce morale and consensus, but rarely concrete outcomes. The report closes with a call for an interdisciplinary reset. Cognitive science has spent decades studying how humans think about the future, and planning has yet to engage with them.
This report is part of a project that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No. 101068688. © 2026 Seal on the Beach.
