Abstract
Providing for the future needs of society requires civil engineers to envision the far future, embrace the concepts of sustainability, resilience, smartness, liveability and adaptability, and work collaboratively with all urban professionals and policy-makers. Given that most people live, and societies operate, in cities, visions for future cities often inform the civil engineer's ‘brief’. The UK Foresight Future of Cities project and Liveable Cities research consortium combined to create a novel aspirational futures methodology to help define this brief. This paper describes the methodology, which entails co-creation of three extreme aspirational futures, and its application to Bristol and Birmingham, thereby demonstrating the influence of different historical and current contexts. It explores how an engineering intervention – green infrastructure corridors to facilitate urban mobility – if conceived and designed with the intention of delivering multiple benefits, can meet many economic, social and environmental aspirations of a city and it citizens. Discussed in relation to current research and a Policy Commission on Future Urban Living, the results demonstrate the potential to transform engineering value propositions by using robustly-constructed, far-future scenarios to enable all urban professionals to make better, joined-up decisions in harmony with all urban systems, the outcomes being uniquely well-informed alternative business models.
Highlights
The conceptualisation, planning, preparation and realisation of any ‘future city’ is a complex but necessary requirement in a world where cities transition, transform, shrink, expand and evolve
This paper describes the application of the method to reveal a potential engineering intervention and, by applying novel insights from recently completed research, to support an analysis of: how this intervention might be proposed as a transformative solution to the problem of urban mobility; how it might be shaped to deliver multiple benefits (as a foundation for alternative business models (BMs) to facilitate its implementation); and the implications for changes to the systems of governance to enable the BMs to work successfully
The Foresight Future of Cities project challenged cities to create their own visions for their own cities (GOfS, 2017b; Van der Heijden, 2005), and the University of Birmingham Policy Commission on Future Urban Living (Rogers et al, 2014) de facto established a set of general city aspirations, but without a process such as that described the very many challenges and priorities that would emerge from the morass of complex interrelated issues that necessarily exist in ‘cities made up of people’ would lead to confusion, bias and a total lack of transparency in decision making
Summary
The conceptualisation, planning, preparation and realisation of any ‘future city’ is a complex but necessary requirement in a world where cities transition, transform, shrink, expand and evolve. It is widely used by the UK Government, for example, to assist in planning over a large range of time frames The ideas that it reveals can be helpful in shaping future scenarios, yet its description as the first step in an evidence-gathering process GOfS (2017a, 2017b) implies that it is unlikely to prove definitive. (ii) ‘Drivers matrix’ (Ogilvy, 1995; Schwartz, 1991; Van der Heijden, 2005) This involves the selection of two drivers of change in relation to the topic under consideration – usually one representing high impact and one high uncertainty – plotting these orthogonally to create four quadrants and exploring alternative futures in relation to their position on these axes (and quadrants). A novel methodological approach involving clustering a city’s aspirations and using each cluster to inform three extreme future visions for that city (see Hunt and Rogers, 2016b, for its initial manifestation) is presented, and tested by application to case studies in Birmingham and Bristol, to reveal unique insights from ‘what
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