An Imaginative Guide

AN IMAGINATIVE GUIDE ON HOW ONE COULD LIVE IN AN ECOLOGICAL PARADISE

This comprehensively researched and originally presented book consists of three parallel narratives and drawings is a carefully guided journey from place to place, from sense to sense, from forms of production to other forms of production, from one innovative idea to another. Drawing is used truly as a research tool: as an illustrative interpretation of existing/previous drawing, a city, an instrumental tool for describing a production process and as a way of thinking and proposing new ideas for living in the future. The author leads us slowly through the journey that starts in France and ends up in Sri Lanka interweaving three narratives - a fairy tale one, academic one and a propositional one. The narratives are carefully positioned in relation to each other both in context and in its graphical content of the page so the reader is forced to go slowly through this journey of fascinating ideas that consider interpretations of previous utopian visions of the city to lavender paper making, scented textile weaving and prawn farming, towards the world of vision once the climate may change the surface of the earth, and sea level rises. It is an optimistic, carefully researched, innovatively presented and highly original piece of work. The work is imaginatively informative and spans young and old audiences, inspires communities interested in ways of ecologically and socially sustainable living. It is the work that took time deliberately and turned speed into slowness and careful thinking with careful drawing and testing. This book is a true pleasure to read and look at.

Dr Ivana Wingham, University of Brighton, UK