Abstract
In the governance of urban sustainability transformations, participatory futures practices are increasingly popular. Yet there is a rising awareness that the success or failure of these practices depends on how they are staged and the context in which they are conducted. These contextual factors are often less than ideal, and futures practices take place at the crossroads of many pre-determined agendas and priorities. We distinguish four factors that shape the effects of participatory futures practices: 1) how the institutional landscape constrains or enables a project aimed at urban sustainability transformations; 2) the participatory culture surrounding the project; 3) the project design; and 4) the futures methods applied. We assess these factors in three cities within the European H2020 IRIS Smart Cities project. In each city, project members participated in sessions where they designed citizen engagement using a futures methodology: the novel Scope and Ladder models. Each city reflects a different combination of the four contextual factors. We find that space for exploration and re-imagining can be found and optimized under imperfect conditions. Drawing on the results of the three cases, we conclude with a set of recommendations for the funders, project members and futures organizers of urban sustainability transformation projects.
Highlights
Global environmental change is threatening urban systems and de mands urgent transformations toward sustainability (IPCC, 2018)
We aim to understand to what extent and how futures practices can guide the design of citizen engagement in large projects that aim for urban sustainability transformations
This paper took on the challenge crucial for many organizers of participatory futures practices: how to use ‘futuring’ to design citizen engagement and create space for alternative solutions in the middle of ongoing sustainability transformations? We noted that while a large section of the literature on futures studies and citizen engagement fo cuses on the conditions for success, in reality, many of these conditions are oftentimes imperfect
Summary
Global environmental change is threatening urban systems and de mands urgent transformations toward sustainability (IPCC, 2018). A sense of urgency can be used as an argument to push the space for citizen engagement out of urban transformation processes – and this can be exacerbated when a small group of powerful stakeholders seeks to pursue its own interests. Participatory futures practices can create space for open-endedness and plurality in relatively closed or pre-structured projects (Stirling, 2008). They offer a way to explore both future worlds and the trans formations to practices that would be possible or desirable in these worlds (Sanders & Stappers, 2014). For the purposes of this paper, we define ‘space’ as the possibility for the inclusive consideration of alter natives in a pluralistic manner The implementation of these alternatives should be seriously considered
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