This article is based on personal experience in the discipline of architecture that argues for imagination as a driver of new knowledge production, hopefully by describing my academic and practice journey. It is about the practical realization of outcomes rooted in a creative imagination; the tension between reality and fantasy, and synthesizing multiple concerns of a place, creating something meaningful for a place and to the inhabitants. The story of my academic journey is grounded in how I have creatively applied my knowledge of the discipline to explore current social phenomena in the place that has been home for three decades, South Africa. My professional journey driven by a practice that imaginatively, within the particularities of place, has attempted to make visible pathways from which to change beliefs and attitudes that bind me to authoritative knowledge. In the tension between academic and professional journeys, the former biased by what I have learnt and know, and the latter, a creative exploration of imagination, knowledge is not authoritative or alternate. It is a collection of dynamic experiences; collective understandings in different life-worlds. It is new.