Drain covers and door steps: decision making and the co-creation of future cities

Abstract

Improved travel infrastructure and social, economic and political uncertainty will make cities of the future ever more cosmopolitan in character. City dwellers will have varied cultural backgrounds and contradictory ideas of how to live, work and inhabit urban environments. Civil engineers will need to understand the future aspirations and desires of urbanites, while challenging unrealistic expectations that undermine the viability of new engineering initiatives. This paper showcases a decision theatre research methodology to reveal how urban inhabitants engage with the built environment and access infrastructure. Adopting a research-through-engagement approach, the authors provide new insights into how urban environments are experienced and understood at both local and systemic scales by city stakeholders. Interrogating this empirical data, the authors illustrate how inhabitants with localised urban experiences may make demands on the built environment that appear illogical to civil engineers applying more systemic framings. The paper suggests that civil engineering solutions to population growth and climate change will require urban dwellers to change how they imagine, act and live within cities. It also advocates that civil engineers need to reframe their views of urban life, by investing in collaborative and co-creative decision-making partnerships with the inhabitants of these future cities.