ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the emergent property of the imagination: how it is specific activity, reliant on certain conditions, and giving rise to products that they have a certain character. Both would take seriously a perspectivism that questions positivistic distinctions between the imagined and the real. The chapter explores the imaginative effects of projected but ultimately failed large-scale infrastructure projects planned by Chinese commercial consortia, more precisely the collapsed plans to a build a new Maputo City Centre on the Island of Inhaca, and the now defunct plans to construct a new 500 MW power-plant in eastern Ulaanbaatar's Shar Hat district. Imagination concerns a common cultural repertoire that is exposed to certain experimental and exploratory procedures in collaborative discursive exchanges. The imagination, Morten Nielsen and Morten Axel Pedersen conclude; can be conceived of as having emergent properties such that a model of the future that has ceased to exist can nevertheless have after-effects that are actualized in the present.
