Sustainable imaginaries and the green roof on Chicago's City Hall

The concept of an imaginary has a long history of describing a society's collective understanding of how the world works. This article introduces the concept of the sustainable imaginary as a society's understanding and vision of how resources are being used and should be used to ensure socio-environmental reproduction. Incorporating John Allen's modalities of power makes it possible to see exactly how those resources are being used within and outside of city government. This article employs the sustainable imaginary via the example of the green roof on Chicago's City Hall. This structure exemplifies appropriate relationships within and with city government, the ways in which imaginaries are performed and reiterated, and how local environments interact with global discourses to produce specific discursive and material outcomes.