Urban Futures: Anticipating a world of cities

The speed, scale, and scope of urbanisation in the past decades are unprecedented in world history, and the trend is expected to continue for some decades to come. At the same time, a mix of factors indicates that cities can be considered not just as a concentration of people, but as a highly complex concentration of interrelated systems loaded with both opportunities and challenges. While city planners have long utilised their toolbox of methods for analysing various socio-economic trends and land-use patterns, the traditional methods of projecting and forecasting are proving inadequate, given increasing uncertainties, risks and complexities that cities face now. The use of foresight and future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) methods can help planners and policy-makers to understand this complexity, anticipate impending changes, and begin engaging more robustly with future scenarios – normatively, but importantly also adaptively. Therefore, this special issue on urban futures aims to better understand how anticipatory intelligence and governance can be more systematically applied to help cities engage with their looming and complex realities. We first look at the wide set of anticipatory methods that have been applied up to date to various urban issues and settings, ranging from urban development and transportation to natural disasters and urban security. We then look at how this special issue came about and how it aims to contribute to the debate on urban futures. We then introduce the set of papers that form part of this special issue, offering different perspectives to the theme, and finally propose an agenda for future research on the topic.

KARURI-SEBINA Geci;  HAEGEMAN Karel;  RATANAWARAHA Apiwat; 

2016-09-16

EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD.

JRC102841

1463-6689,   

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/FS-07-2016-0037,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC102841,   

10.1108/FS-07-2016-0037,