Imagining the Impossible: The Shifting Role of Utopian Thought in Civic Planning, Science Fiction, and Futures Studies
@article{Raven2015ImaginingTI, title={Imagining the Impossible: The Shifting Role of Utopian Thought in Civic Planning, Science Fiction, and Futures Studies}, author={Paul Graham Raven}, journal={Journal of Futures Studies}, year={2015}, volume={20}, pages={113-122} }
Histories of futurism and/or futures studies tend to see the discipline as having its roots in the “operations research” paradigm of the mid-20th Century, which in turn emerged from what eventually became the RAND Corporation (for an exemplar see e.g. Bell, 1996). To construct futurism in such a manner is to ignore many other disciplines whose focus has also been on the development, description and analysis of imagined futures. The RAND-rooted history restricts “proper” futurism to a…
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