Technological Imagination to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries

Technological imagination has been, until now, a stronger driver of development and has permitted to scale economy and even to obtain increasing returns of investments. However, times are a changing. Humanity faces now societal and environmental changes that are pushing the planet Earth toward a danger zone, overpassing recommended limits for several critical processes, such as bio-geochemical fluxes of nitrogen and phosphorus, greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere, biodiversity loss and land use change. The role of technology applied to built environment design should be redefined to stay within the so-called safe operation space for humanity, considering the limited resources we have and the need of low-energy solutions for buildings and cities. This chapter introduces the key concepts for the understanding the new role that we must assign to technological imagination to face the challenge of the Anthropocene epoch and discusses how to achieve the seven transitions objectives for transforming our world in a sustainable way.