Radical Imagination and Vernacular Security: Creating Spaces for Alternative Security Futures

Abstract While critical scholarship has extensively analyzed the governance of migration as a security issue and has documented its detrimental effects, the securitization of migration has become a successful mobilizing tool for far-right actors. Deeply worried by this development, this study moves beyond critique to explore how ordinary people imagine alternative security futures. Based on ten participatory workshops with 125 residents of Hamburg in 2023, our research examines how participants conceptualize a “secure city for all.” Participants envisioned security through enabling and preventative spaces and infrastructures rather than exclusionary measures: accessible urban spaces, affordable housing, community solidarity, and alternative emergency responses. The findings both confirm existing vernacular security scholarship, showing the fundamental ambivalence of security imaginations, and extend it in two key ways. First, we identify accessibility (physical, linguistic, and informational) as a previously overlooked dimension of vernacular security that affects diverse populations transversally. Second, we demonstrate that imagination constitutes a distinct form of vernacular security knowledge, highlighting how non-elites actively theorize alternative security arrangements. By creating spaces for collective imagination, the study shows how participatory methods can serve as political interventions in an era of shrinking democratic spaces.