CityReads | How Can We Plan for Urban Futures Beyond COVID-19?
390
Re-imagining the future of cities using urban foresight techniques.
Dixon, T. and Tewdwr-Jones, M. 2021. Urban Futures: Planning for City Foresight and City Visions. Bristol University Press/Policy Press, Bristol.
Source:
https://urbanaffairsassociation.org/2022/04/14/2022-best-book-urban-affairs/
https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2021/06/10/how-can-we-plan-for-urban-futures-beyond-covid-19/
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/urban-futures
The Urban Affairs Association just announced that Dr. Timothy J. Dixon (University of Reading) and Dr. Mark Tewdwr-Jones (University College London) were selected as the recipient of the 2022 Best Book in the Field of Urban Affairs for Urban Futures: Planning for City Foresight and City Visions.
Britton Harris, a distinguished American city planner, argued that planning involved three kinds of thinking: policy, design and analysis. Essentially, what are we trying to achieve or what problems are we trying to solve, how can we invent plans to achieve these goals or solve the problems, and can we root this in good analysis? Harris observed that a problem in planning was that you very rarely found the three kinds of thinking in the same room together. It is the 'design' element that is neglected relative to policy and problem-solving on the one hand and analysis on the other. The authors of this book position themselves perfectly to fill this gap, and indeed, do get all three kinds of thinking into the one room – in this case the book! 'Foresight' is rooted in the articulation of problems and objectives – policy; and 'visioning' is 'design' for the city of the future. Great care is taken here to root this in the science of cities – analysis.
Urban Futures asks leaders and cities to reimagine how we want to live, with an argument that is heavily situated in the present climate crises and recognizes the centrality of urban spaces. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.
Throughout history, and in times of continuing uncertainty, writers, artists, film-makers and others have attempted to make sense of the future. Some have argued that, by its very nature, the future is unknowable and unpredictable, whereas others have argued that by taking control of our destiny, and by 'inventing' the future, we can also play an important role in helping to create it.
Today, as we stand on the cusp of what many consider to be a future that will present us with our greatest set of perennial challenges, we need more than ever to make sense of what the future holds for humanity. However, living in uncertain times, in an Anthropocene and in an 'urban age', where climate change, environmental impacts, health impacts, political turmoil and socioeconomic upheaval create potentially traumatic perils for both humanity and the natural world, it is very difficult to even begin to see what the combined impacts of these forces might be, even in the short term, let alone the medium term (10–20 years) and long term (more than 20 years).
"Urban futures" is based on the notion that we need a practical and formal framework to imagine what our cities could and should be like to live, work and play in, in the long term (beyond 20 years); how they will operate; what infrastructure is needed; and how governance systems will be required to help shape them and ensure their resilience. To do this, we need to develop city visions that are based on participatory city foresight methods (or the science of thinking about the future of cities); and, as we also argue, we need to draw on 'transitions theory', which emphasises how important city visioning is to the process of managing and planning for a sustainable (and smart) future for cities. In this book we therefore draw on our UK-based research (particularly in Reading and Newcastle) but also highlight international examples of city foresight and city visions.
How Can We Plan for Urban Futures Beyond COVID-19?
As cities across the world plan their recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, it is more important than ever to think beyond the short and medium term to plan and reimagine how people want to live, work and play in our cities in 2040 and beyond.
Despite the circulation of many articles predicting the imminent demise and even the death of cities due to the current pandemic, a contrary view is that many cities have the right ingredients for successful resilience so they can bounce back from the pandemic with renewed vigour. Certainly, cities are expected to be the engine room for the global economy with 65 per cent of the world's GDP growth expected to come from 600 cities worldwide during the next five years, despite those cities making up only 20 per cent of the world's population.
Just as cities form the basis of many people's lives today, in all probability, they will also do in the future. Today, some 55 per cent of the world's population live in 'urban settlements' – as defined by the United Nations (UN) – and, by 2030, this will grow to 60 per cent, with one in every three people living in cities of at least half a million inhabitants, and, by 2050, that figure will be 70 per cent. Cities, after all, act as engine houses for wealth creation, employment and human progress, by combining the forces of agglomeration and industrialization. For example, 80 per cent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is generated in cities.
While the COVID-19 crisis has been very much an urban phenomenon with impacts on people's health, wellbeing and lives, there are compelling arguments for believing that economies of scale, face-to-face contact and the continued 'draw' of cities will help them prosper beyond the pandemic. At the same time, however, COVID-19 has accelerated trends which were already starting to have an effect pre-pandemic: in many cities the moves towards homeworking and online shopping, for example, will have an impact on the use and make-up of city center space as the 'death of distance' becomes a reinvigorated phenomenon, and in other cities existing income and racial inequalities will continue to widen.
This means some cities will need to rethink how their centers function, with multi-purpose uses combining a range of facilities such as retail, hospitality, residential, education and so on, and with more agile and flexible office space in the center and suburbs to cater for changing demands. Attracting people back to our town and cities, focusing on 'shoppertainment' and 'cultural draw' so that the inherent economic 'ecosystem' can be renewed and regenerated, will require fresh and innovative thinking on, for example, greening transport systems to improve air quality and tackle climate change, and avoid returning to pre-pandemic 'business-as-usual' models of growth. A recent Institute for Finance report suggested that if cities in 21 emerging markets prioritised climate-smart growth in their recovery plans, they could gain as much as $7 trillion in investments and could create 144 million new jobs by 2030.
So, while there is a basic premise that there is still a 'future' for our cities, it begs the question of what sort of long-term future that will be, and how we might plan and shape it. Thinking about the future of cities is not new. Visionary thinking has been part of human culture, religion and politics for many thousands of years. Visions are fundamental to thinking about the future and often related to preferred or desirable futures and to a shared sense of change and transformation. Early examples of what might be termed humanistic visionary thinking emerge in the writings of Plato (4th century BC) and Thomas More's city-based Utopia (16th century). This sense of 'futurism' is also seen in the writings of Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, two of the early visionary planners of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, who developed generic visions of what an ideal city should be.
Humankind's capacity to envision the future and to be able to imagine alternative futures is a relatively recent development, relating directly to the age of enlightenment. Thus, 'utopian' thinking, founded on the work of writers such as Plato and Thomas More, was transformed during this period into 'euchronia' (or a time of perfect social, technological and ecological harmony), which enabled different places in different times to be imagined. The city has often been at the heart of much of the utopian and euchronian literature, film and related art that has emerged since then. As Clarke suggested: 'For at least the past five centuries… the make-believe city has been the benchmark of all imaginary societies'. Moreover, the resultant 'urban imaginaries' that have been developed have been founded on both utopic ('good') and dystopic ('bad') futures. In turn, this body of work has helped shape and influence the nature of urban design and urban planning.
Building on this, the concept of 'urban futures' can be used to develop city visions which are co-created for particular cities. The term 'urban futures' means to imagine what cities and urban areas will be like in the long-term (beyond 20 years), how they will operate, what infrastructure and governance systems will underpin and co-ordinate them and how they are best shaped and influenced by their primary stakeholders (civil society, governments, businesses and investors, academia and others). At the heart of urban future thinking is the concept of 'city foresight'. This is the 'science of thinking about the future of cities' and includes a range of futures-based methods and tools to help build and develop a city vision: for example, 'backcasting' starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs and pathways that will connect the present with the specified future.
Urban futures thinking requires city stakeholders to work together to co-create a city vision in a highly participatory way. This means that the four main groups (civil society, local government, business and academia) need to work collaboratively to build and develop city visions. As part of 'urban futures' thinking, city visioning is the formal process of creating a 'city vision', or a shared and desirable trajectory for a particular city or urban area.
Visions provide us with the means to see the critical issues and challenges that lie ahead, to help fight complacency and to see how things might be different. "Visions provide actors with views of the future that can be shared: a clear sense of direction, a mobilization of energy, and a sense of being engaged in something important." This is important in the context of transformative change in cities and how we manage and plan for future change. However, visions need to be a shared view of the future and rely on participatory methods to underpin them.
A city vision is not a masterplan, and strictly speaking, it is not what we might call urban planning, although it can certainly link and support that activity. Rather, it should help decision makers and communities think clearly and logically about resolving their problems, and the primary structural matters that include issues to do with equity or growth. Consequently, it cannot and should not avoid looking at the most difficult questions of power, exclusion, wellbeing and the legitimacy to act.
This is not about creating an all-singing-all-dancing single blueprint or strategy, owned by the mayor of a city; the days when single visionaries created total plans for cities are probably long gone. Instead, we must recognize that every city is different, its make-up is different, its place-assets and distinctiveness are all different to other places. That's what attracts us to want to visit places in the first place. Seeking to shape the future by working with stakeholders provides a real opportunity to create a shared, democratized and inclusive view of how an individual city could be.
Contrary to what some politicians tell us, planning is not just about delivering development as quickly as possible. It concerns itself with the impact of urban change on people and places including the impact of flooding on land and advising not to build in certain locations, the effect of poor air quality on people's health, the lack of green space in cities that affect people's wellbeing and mental health.
But planning is also not static and needs to adapt to changing circumstances. COVID-19 has shown us explicitly that we all have a stake in what happens in and to places. To embrace urban futures, we need to think of urban planning as a series of components, or even as a toolkit, from which techniques are drawn and used, according to the needs of a specific place.
All these traits may seem a world away from what urban planning has become in some countries; for some, they may even seem fanciful, or even utopian. However, they are exactly what urban planning was always meant to address – harnessing open dialogue about possible long-term futures in ways that, in the present, may seem startling.
The switch in thinking towards a proactive and progressive form of urban planning, compared with what we currently have, is to dream the art of the possible, unfettered by institutional and professional sclerosis, overcoming narrow sectional interests, and relying on urban planning devices and methods – shaped for the 21st century – that embrace pluralism and urban livability goals. Dig deeper into the most successful and admired cities across the globe, and this art of the possible is already happening.
Related CityReads
52.CityReads│How Disaster Influences the Urban Redevelopment?68.CityReads│How Cities Shape Infectious Diseases？84.CityReads│Review of Guns, Germs, and Steel
85.CityReads│Is Guns Germs andSteel Telling Real History? An Anthropological critique123.CityReads│How to Escape the Progress Traps?
145.CityReads│Can Food Production Keep Pace with Population Growth?
149.CityReads│Against the Grain，Against the State202.CityReads│How Our Modern Urban Life Came to Being?221.CityReads│A House is Not Just a House: Bilbao on Social Housing271.CityReads|Eight Books on City and Infectious Diseases272.CityReads|Humanity’s Encounters with Infectious Diseases273.CityReads | Infections and Inequalities
275.CityReads | Resilience Management During Epidemic Outbreaks276.Epidemics: What We Need to Know
282.CityReads | Cities after Novel Coronavirus
283.CityReads | Environmental Origins of the Black Death
285.CityReads | 6 Books for Contextualizing Covid-19
286.How Pandemics Have Remade Societies, Wars, and Culture?287.A Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus
292.CityReads | Why Everyone Thinks Cities Can Save the Planet?299.CityReads | Human History is a Battle Against the Microbes
301.CityReads | Yi-Fu Tuan on the Coronavirus Pandemic
341.CityReads | A Year of Anthropause
344.How Five Grand Transitions Have Shaped the Modern World?
358.CityReads | Survival of the City
386.CityReads | The Future Is Vast388.Seeds, Germs, Silver, and Slaves: The New World Columbus Created389.How Have Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes, and Maize Changed China?
（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）
"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
posts our notes on city reads weekly.
Please follow us by searching "CityReads"