Futurists and their schools: A response to Ziauddin Sardar's ‘the namesake’

Complexity science and theory development for the futures field

“…This article is the final part of a trilogy of papers in Futures and is preceded by 'Exploring the future with complexity science: the emerging models' [1] and 'Futurists and their schools: a response to Ziauddin Sardar's 'the namesake'' [2]. The 'futures field' can be divided into five major segments, or futurist schools that are subsumed under the terms 'futures research', 'futures studies' and 'foresight' as follows:…”

“…The following principles apply: (1) The civil system is an open system in which investment capital is the system growth parameter that drives it away from equilibrium, with the formation of spatial structure. (2) The historical circumstances of human settlements provide a path dependency in respect of natural resources, defence, energy, transport, or communications. (3) Emergent properties arise within a complex adaptive system from which a theory of the system can be formulated, and these are not deducible from the features of the transacting entities.…”

“…systems science orientation and for the purpose of new scenario development for climate change, environmentalists refer to futures research as 'Integrated Assessment Research' [2]. Since infrastructure and socio-technological systems involve hardware such as urban systems, it is useful to take households and establishments as the transacting entities and these may be located in space and time with postcodes.…”

Exploring the future with complexity science: The emerging models

“…This article is a sequel to the author's paper 'Futurists and their schools: A response to Ziauddin Sardar's 'the namesake'' [1] and focuses on the application of complexity science to the five main futurist schools. The schools may be differentiated in terms of their time horizon for futures research, in so far as the Environmental and Geosciences school has the longest at say 100-200 years, Infrastructure and Socio-technological Systems range from 50 to 100 years, Social, Political and Economic Science look forward up to perhaps 25-50 years, Human Life, Mind and Information Sciences have a similar time horizon, and the Business and Management Science school has a relatively shorter term at perhaps 10-20 years.…”

“…Complexity science applications are outlined for each of the schools, and these provide evolving theories for futures thinking. (1) Environmental and geosciences treat the Earth and its various components as typical out-of-equilibrium systems with dissipative processes. (2) Infrastructure and socio-technological systems emerge through the diffusion of investment capital, with the endogenous transformation of the urban system.…”