Envisioning urban futures: from narratives to composites.

Abstract

Design (and design research) have a rich history of developing ways of making possible futures visible and tangible through prototypes, models, scenarios, or visualisations. Less common are platforms that gather multiple perspectives in the same space about possible futures. Thinking about diverse, rather than alternative, futures is particularly relevant in the context of cities. This paper suggests an alternative way of developing future visions for cities, moving away from coherent narratives to more pluralistic composites. Using the Liveable Cities project as a mechanism for exploration, it reflects on how participatory design methods and information visualisation techniques can engage participants in developing visions of urban futures. The paper will describe the details of the approach. It will present a summary of the findings as well as a discussion on the methods, which will include challenges and shortcomings.

The Landscape of Envisioning and Speculative Design Methods for Sustainable Mobility Futures

“…On the contrary, [140] state that participatory foresight (3/2017) is an analytical tool enabling the developing of alternative futures in science, technology, and socio-economic systems by connecting visions of different stakeholders' groups, which can contribute to different decision-making processes in various levels. [141] in the participatory scenarios (14/1996) employed a series of future visioning workshops and visualizations focused on visual techniques for designing radical future concepts and sustainable urban living. Despite researcher's non-deniable progress towards embracing alternative and fiction approaches, these participatory scenarios are yet acting and predicting for long distant futures (e.g., 2040 to 2050) [142,143].…”

“…For example, [161] investigate the consequences of self-driving vehicles utilizing three long-term scenarios. [141] moved away from the current trajectories of future development to develop alternative urban futures with co-creating scenarios and future visions workshops. Furthermore, experimentation (2/2016) utilizes via prompts in the form of virtual experiments, the design visioning, and the design research [153].…”

Envisioning urban futures as conversations to inform design and research

“…However, while much has been written on ways of visualising the multiplicity of urban experiences, and visual methods for exploring and tackling complex issues of urban planning 4 have been developed (see for examples gameforcities.com or Chora.org), how to develop pluralistic visions of longer term, speculative futures is a much less explored topic. To be exact, while some examples can be found in contemporary and historical design practice (Pollastri et al, 2017), there are no established methodologies or tools that are directly transferable or applicable.…”

“…• Move through layers of granularity of the information: from a general overview, to a very detailed one, in which it is possible to read the exact words of the participants. In this paper, the authors will not present the content of the visions that emerged from the Future Visioning Workshops, and that are visualised in the Atlas, a summary description of which is provided in a recently published article (Pollastri et al, 2017). What this paper will discuss in the next section is the role that visioning processes and artefacts designed as conversations can play in engineering and urban design research and practice.…”

“…For example, while the cartographic approach adopted in the Atlas of Future Imaginary Cities highlights patterns of information and key themes and topics, the individual urban visions produced by the various sectors remain elusive, and are represented in a way that deliberately leaves room for subjective interpretation (Pollastri et al, 2017).…”