Building imagination infrastructure - one piece of cake at a time

My local Friends Meeting House has a big central hall, filled with light, and a garden that blooms with wildflowers in summer. At least once a month, they host a community get-together. There are homemade cakes and pots of tea, random activities like yoga or music, and plenty of conversation. Events like this play a crucial role in helping build “imagination infrastructure” – they not only make people feel welcome, they actually give them space to start envisioning a more positive future.

The Meeting House in Hammersmith, run by the local Quaker community, hosts two regular events like this.  One for local Ukrainian refugees and one for asylum seekers who have arrived in the borough.  Last spring, I answered a call for volunteers. I helped out at three events – two “Open House’ afternoons for Ukrainian refugees and one “Welcome” for asylum seekers. In between making sandwiches and pouring tea, I made notes, took photos and had long chats with visitors. Between events, I carried out a series of semi-structured interviews with with a handful of regular volunteers.

The Open House and the Welcome events are examples of what social theorists call arrival infrastructure – the informal networks, spaces and people that help migrants find their way in a new country. Through offering genuine hospitality as well as practical support, these events also nurture something rarer: our collective vision of a more inclusive future.

Our broken asylum system

Across the UK, refugees and asylum seekers face a complex web of systems: from visa applications and health checks to housing bureaucracy and immigration enforcement. Navigating these is rarely straightforward. In 2012, the UK government introduced what it called a “hostile environment” policy – designed to make life difficult for those without secure immigration status. This policy required landlords, employers, and even doctors to check papers and report people to the authorities. While intended to deter irregular migration, critics say it fostered fear and discrimination, turning everyday encounters into acts of surveillance.

It feels like barely a day goes by without refugees and asylum seekers being in the news. And the stories have reached a crescendo over this last summer, with protests around the Bell Hotel in Epping (where asylum seekers are housed), the Reform Party campaigning on reversing small boat arrivals (with understandable migrant distress) and St.George’s and Union Jack flags appearing across the country, causing rows and division.

Against this backdrop, spaces like Open House and Welcome take on a certain significance. These events are run entirely by volunteers with support from the local council. They offer food, friendship and a sense of belonging. As scholars Bruno Meeus, Bas van Heur, and Karel Arnaut have described, these infrastructures make up the “urban fabric” that migrants encounter upon arrival – the networks, spaces, and relationships that help them begin again. They are not designed from above but infrastructured from below, through the everyday actions of citizens. The sociologist AbduoMaliq Simone refers to this grassroots creative construction as “people as infrastructure”.

The power of welcome

Alongside this physical network of spaces and co-operative processes sits something more intangible – an imagination infrastructure. I first heard about this concept a few years ago via Cassie Robinson and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The idea is both simple and radical. It refers to the social and emotional systems that enable communities to dream together, to imagine different futures, and to co-create solutions that traditional institutions cannot.

Social innovator Hilary Cottam argues that modern welfare systems were built for a different era – one that valued control, compliance, and efficiency over empathy, creativity, and trust. These rigid systems, she suggests, have lost the ability to respond to the complex challenges of our time. Imagination infrastructures, by contrast, invite people to reimagine what care and community could look like. They turn imagination into a shared civic skill – a collective act of renewal.

At the Hammersmith Meeting House, imagination begins in the simplest of ways. It begins with the act of opening a door. The volunteers’ welcome – warm and without judgment – allows people to picture a future where they belong. In that moment, imagination becomes a form of infrastructure: a social structure that holds and nurtures possibility.

Cottam writes that imagination infrastructures are “systems that allow people to breathe.” In a policy landscape that can sometimes seem dominated by suspicion and control, Open House offers refugees air, light, and dignity. It is a space where people can imagine themselves not just as survivors of displacement, but as participants in a shared, inclusive community.

Imagination as resistance

The imaginative dimension also has a political edge. In an era of “hostile environment” policies and inflammatory media narratives, simply imagining a more compassionate system can itself be a form of quiet resistance. The Open House and Welcome events refuse to accept that refugees and asylum seekers should be defined by paperwork and trauma. They replace bureaucracy and suspicion with empathy and trust.

These simple events with tea and cake challenge the notion that the only way to “help” migrants is through formal services or state-led programmes. Instead, they shows how communities can design their own infrastructures – social, emotional, and creative – to work alongside, or even in spite of, official systems.

The digital connections that sustain this work – from WhatsApp groups to shared online invitations – extend that hospitality into new spaces. But there are limits and risks. Community events supporting refugees and asylum seekers are not universally welcome – council workers are told “not to shout about” their involvement.

At the Open House and Welcome events, guests are not defined by their status but welcomed as neighbours. Volunteers, in turn, begin to see themselves not just as helpers but as co-creators of a shared civic life. In this sense, the imagination infrastructuring expands beyond the individual: together, people are gently reshaping the public imagination, allowing an entire community to picture what true belonging might mean.

The Hammersmith Meeting House is not solving the asylum crisis. But it is quietly offering something radical: the space to imagine a future where a sense belonging and optimism can flourish. As one participant said, “At least they have four hours in this beautiful space.” Sometimes, a few hours of friendly conversation, fuelled by tea and cake, can be the foundation for a little bit of hope.

We can’t disregard the virtual

This research was partly inspired by an essay I wrote in the second term of my digital anthropology masters. Our brief was to challenge digital dualism – the idea that everything in the digital world is “virtual” while stuff in the physical world is separate and “real”. As we learnt on the masters’ course, there’s no such division – these two worlds are entangled, enmeshed and inter-related: essentially two different aspects of our same lived experience.

And, as far as the digital world has real world impact, we were also reminded that “virtualities” are not solely confined to the digital. Abstractions like “the market” and “the economy” are virtual, but they exist outside of the digital domain. Sociologist Michel Callon argued that although such economic constructs are virtual, they are important: we have to pay attention to them. The virtual is a form of possibility, it brings the potential for transformation: imagination infrastructures are like this.

A future that works for everyone

Looking at the Bre-X mining scandal of the 1990s, anthropologist Anna Tsing wrote a great paper about venture capitalism and the powerful illusions that can be created by “globalist financial conjuring”. Performance, drama and speculation are crucial to lure investment. Right now, with artificial intelligence (AI) accounting for more than 50% of global venture capital funding, and technology billionaires driving the narrative about our collective future, it feels more important than ever to explore ways of grassroots imagination infrastructuring as a counter-balance.

I’m interested in how these real-virtual and digital-physical binaries co-exist and work together. In how the digital can complement the real and vice versa. Much of the volunteer community supporting these Open House and Welcome events came from a mutual aid WhatsApp group founded during Covid. It’s small things like these that can build the foundation for meaningful imagination infrastructuring years later. That and a good slice of cake, of course.

Photo by K8 on Unsplash