Institute For The Future

An Urban Future

On Thursday November 17, we hosted a group of urban and regional planners from the California Silicon Valley APA to discuss futures thinking, city planning, and our foresight map on Cities and information.  The goal was engage the planning community and see how on-the-ground practitioners would engage with our foresight research.

Rod kicked off the event with an overview of our work, and Deepa talked about how planners are “practical visionaries” who utilize plans, codes, and economic development strategies to shape cities.  Futures thinking, how IFTF practices it, provides an outside-in, strategic foresight perspective to help others make better decisions about the future.  

Cities have often served as platforms for our hopes or fears about the future (think the Burnham Plan of Chicago or Blade Runner) but we need visions of the future from both urban planning and futures thinking that are plausible given existing trends and flexible enough to adjust to changing technologies, demographics, and economics.

The evening focused on the natural connection between futures thinking and urban planning, and how thinking about forecasts and signals that bring interdependent issues to the fore can impact decision-making actions.  
Matt used the Rockfeller cities map, “A Planet of Civic Laboratories” to get people thinking about technology and planning challenges.

Some great ideas tumbled out, and here are some examples:

• Using 3D modeling to engage the community around issues like zoning, housing, and environmental impact assessments, which are typically thorough but contained in reams of report pages that people don’t want to read through.
• Connecting communities with the natural environment.  There was a great insight that so many visions of future cities, such as in Blade Runner, don’t include nature, but we’ve always been a species that thrives on proximity to natural ecosystems
• Using a massively multiplayer game to get people talking about city issues like energy systems.  The challenge with many city services is that they involve some technical thinking and jargon, and there’s a need to find a common language to involve both official experts and citizens of all types.

These are just a couple of ideas that came from students and planners, and we’ll be digesting them in the near future as we build literacy in cities.
As Deepa said in her presentation:  Planning is about co-designing, co-creating, and negotiating dynamic cities and strategic foresight can help us develop a vision of what that looks like.