Dead zones of imagination: Prefiguring and contesting hydrosocial imaginaries in Germany's post-lignite transformation

• Examines how future human-water relationships are envisioned in Europe’s largest lignite mining area during its transformation into a post-fossil tourist recreation zone. • Reveals that a dominant “hydrosocial imaginary” is constructed through planning visualizations depicting a controlled “ecology of repair” and an “ecotourism-extraction nexus.” • Shows how existing landscape installations prefigure emerging lakes as “spectacles of extractive attraction”, valorizing industrial ruins and imagining water as an economic and imaginative resource for regional prosperity. • Demonstrates that this powerful imaginary is contested by civil society actors who question the inevitability and timeline of lake conversions and challenge the underlying economic growth paradigm. This article explores how future human-water relationships are envisioned during the transformation of Europe’s largest lignite mining area, the Rhenish mining area, into a post-fossil tourist recreation zone. We examine how institutional, political, and economic actors construct a hydrosocial imaginary of this future in order to organize consensus around a growth-oriented transformation pathway, and how civil society actors adapt or challenge it. We argue that institutional actors create and disseminate the imaginary to gain cultural hegemony in terms of interpretive power regarding the region’s post-fossil transformation. Our initial findings show that this dominant imaginary is made conceivable and tangible through two primary means. First, planning visualizations present a controlled “ecology of repair”, depicting a positive transition to a tourism-oriented future. Second, existing landscape-architectural installations at the mine prefigure the emerging lakes and make them sensorially experienceable, translating the planned future into the present as “spectacles of extractive attraction” and thereby extending this depiction of a seamless and tourism-oriented renewal into lived experience. Together, these practices frame water primarily as an economic and imaginative resource for regional prosperity within an ecologically modernized, growth-oriented paradigm. Yet this hydrosocial imaginary is not uncontested. Civil society actors question projected timelines and challenge the underlying logic of economic growth. The negotiations reveal that while dominant actors strategically deploy the imaginary as a hegemonic instrument to organize and foster consensus, stabilize expectations and manage uncertainties, alternative futures of regional development remain at stake.