When Strategy meets democracy: exploring the limits of the ‘possible’ and the value of the ‘impossible’

This chapter faces the diffuse perception of an increasing malaise in the ability to imagine radically different urban and regional developments which currently affects collaborative/relational strategic planning processes. Such inability is particularly visible in declining urban areas characterised by a profound socio-economic and environmental crisis. The first part of the chapter discusses the meaning of imagination within the relational strategic planning approach and adopts a Deleuzean cartography to visit the complexity of the everyday urban life. The second part concerns the city of Taranto, its stories and suffering, its beauty and irreversible cancer and its plans and desires. This city’s everyday life is described either as a complex cartography of engaging, fighting, cooperating, ignoring trajectories of evolution and change or as a set of lines of thinking and acting each of them characterised by its own movement and inhabited by actants, forces and relations. In the third part the chapter argues that strategic planning can offer a comfort zone delimitated by the space of possibilities within which socio-economic and environmental crises can be anesthetised and treated as a set of problems and solutions more or less known. The chapter concludes by arguing that the difficulties experienced in imagining radically different urban futures in the field of strategic planning figure in its conceptualisation of the imagination as the construction of executable possibilities, which ignores the imagination of the ‘impossible’.