Imaginario (A. Huffschmid)

We not only have the physical experience of the city, we not only walk or feel in our bodies the meaning of walking around for a long time, of travelling by bus, of standing up, of being out in the rain waiting for a cab; but we also imagine, while travelling, we construct suppositions about what we see, about the people crossing our way, the zones of the city that we do not know but have to pass through in order to get another destination; in a word, about what is happening to us in relation to the others in the city (Garcia Canclini 1999:89)

"Imagination in urban contexts, as a socially shared level, articulates social desires, feelings, fantasies and explanations related to city life. The outcome of collective imagination was conceptualised by Armando Silva, García Canclini and others as urban imaginario. It is the imaginario, as a key dimension of the sociocultural and semiotic constitution of the city, where social meaning and memory, senses of community and belonging, inclusions and exclusions are produced and negotiated. The imaginario approach relativizes and complements - without replacing - the weight of material features (socio-economic condition, built environment, urban planning) by incorporating immaterial dimensions such as semiotics, subjectivity and aesthetics in order to recreate the symbolic territoriality and cultural power relations in and of the city. [...]

(bifurcaciones.cl)

Exploring imaginarios means focusing on how the city is perceived, conceived and lived by the citizen, as the inhabitant and user of urban space; and incorporates into the analysis his or her subjective "spatial experience". This spatial subjectivity does not emerge directly from the physical or visual experience of space, but is created by sense-making narratives: a sequence of imagining, experimenting and telling space. These narrations can be analyzed on the level of artistic practices (music, literature, visual arts) as well as [...] on the level of social or urban practices, inscribed in the routines and disruptions of urban life. 

[...] imagination or subjectivity here are not to be reduced to the level of individual cognition or psychology, but to the amplified as "socially shared" imagination, on the grounds of a socially shared culture seen as a "flexible and invisible cage in which one's own conditioned freedom might be exercised" (Carlo Ginzburg 2000). Stating the social dimension of imaginarios is to acknowledge the intrinsic interrelation of the social and symbolic organization of urban life, the interconnectedness between material and immaterial dimensions, the impact of architecture and physical texture on perception and imagination. Within the "flexible and invisible cage" of culture, urban subjectivity is produced by and at the same time produces social experience in the city, including the exercise of cultural power such as community-building, identity politics or boundaries of exclusion. Imaginarios are to be seen as products of specific historical and cultural processes as well as the producers of the urban, such as for instance the proliferation of urban fear, the use of public transport or environmental behaviour, the perception of informal commerce or urban "otherness", disputes over cultural heritage and memory practices in general."

Huffschmid, Anne (2012) From the City to "lo Urbano": Exploring Cultural Production of Public Space in Latin America. Iberoamericana, Año 12, No. 42. pp. 123-124.