‘Paradise Regained’? Dreaming of Community Wealth Building as a ‘Somewhere’ Utopia

Abstract

This chapter is an investigation of the value of dream-thinking as a process for imagining the impossible. The ‘impossible’ is one aspect of Utopia, or ‘no-place’. A connection is made between dream-thinking and the potential for ‘ecological thinking’ as a process that is expansive, relational and associational instead of linear and causal. Taking a psychosocial approach and the wide inter-disciplinary perspective that such an approach offers, the chapter suggests that the complex inter-relationality that is part of dream and ecological thinking is an opportunity for imagining futures that go beyond standard linear thought processes. In this context, dream-thinking can be linked to the innovative and creative potential for a different kind of social economy. Such a utopian, dream society is compared to contemporary developments in Community Wealth Building (CWB) and its principal exponent, the Preston Model. A further component of the dream utopia behind CWB is the adherence of CWB projects to cooperative values and principles, where cooperation can be viewed as a benign alternative to competition and individualism. In the spirit of innovation and utopian thinking, the chapter concludes by encouraging the reader to live with the uncertainty of progress, an uncertainty without endings and targets, where process is one of continuous renovation as innovation.