Imagining the Ideal City as a tool for political participation in schools

This paper discusses a participatory action-research art-based project with the intent to promote young people's political participation and civic imagination. The Ideal City project uses participatory action-research methodologies, as well as visual arts tools (photography, video, sculpture, installation), to foster imagination about ways of social and political organisation with the involvement of secondary school students, teachers, school staff and leaders, parents, grandparents and other members of the educational community. The use of arts-based participatory research presents a unique opportunity for relational and contextual engagement, enabling the development of critical thinking and of envisioning new and challenging possibilities for social and political action. These possibilities stem from the activation that artistic processes make of the imagination, allowing us to find new options without letting ourselves be trapped by a predictable end. There are growing concerns with contemporary democracies that face, at the same time, populist tendencies polarising political debates and signs of political disaffection with an apparent lack of interest in democratic participation. However, this contemporary crisis can also be viewed as resulting from the removal of citizens from public affairs, whether due to the omnipresence/omnipotence of the private sphere or invasion of the public sphere by market logic. The growing individualisation of social, political and civic rights and freedoms and the tendency to turn citizens into consumers or spectators who vote are significant barriers to the quality of democracy. In this context, citizenship education emerges with particular relevance, as education can counter the apparent lack of alternatives. The Ideal City requires that reimagining the future involves not only the critical appraisal of the past and the present but also the radical imagination of the world not as it is but as it could (should?) be. This call for a civic imagination is essential for the reinvention of democracy, fostering young people’s resistance against contemporary oppression and their capacity to collectively rethink the world besides its contemporary limits. This collective idealization cocreates new forms of conceiving political citizenship. In this paper, we will present the method and its implementation in two secondary schools during the school year 2024/25. We analyse and discuss the participants' involvement in the collaborative production of knowledge about democracy's past and present and the ways in which they imagine the future of their communities.