Scenarios for Europe's cities

Abstract

This issue of Futures highlights the theme of human settlements. In 1983, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe held a seminar in Budapest on research on long-term perspectives for human settlements development in the ECE region. Government researchers from a number of European countries—France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland—produced scenarios of possible future developments down to the end of the century. Here, Futures presents specially commissioned articles, based on three of them. This introductory paper is a commentary by an outsider who, nearly a decade ago, was involved in a similar exercise.