Raising marginalised voices to produce diverse, desired futures.
Future Visioning is the official start of the TCDSE framework. It is a people-centred participatory methodology aimed at amplifying marginalised voices and capturing diverse social aspirations towards more inclusive and equitable urban futures.
The Tomorrow’s Cities Future Visioning methodology is unique in its design and was created to kickstart a process of urban shaping for disaster risk reduction that is inclusive, meaningful for communities, and helpful for decision makers. Yet, it can also work as a stand-alone component that informs policy and create disaster risk reduction solutions that are ambitious and purposeful.
Future Visioning amplifies marginalised voices and captures the aspirations of different social groups. It shows that different desirable futures are possible.
The Future Visioning process
The process begins with the careful selection of community members and institutional actors who represent power imbalances, social vulnerability, and marginalisation from decision-making processes, all of which are relevant for a discussion about risk. Diverse perspectives on the past, present, and future, with an emphasis on gender (women’s groups), intergenerational justice (elders and youth), and socio-spatial inequalities (tenants and migrants), are also considered.
The core objective of this TCDSE component is to amplify marginalised voices for more inclusive and equitable urban futures.
Methods & Activities
In most cities, Future Visioning is facilitated through a two-day workshop, in which participants engage in storytelling, co-mapping, and co-design activities.
Future Visioning workshop in Nablus, Palestine
During these workshops, stakeholder’s visions are captured using various methods from the arts and humanities, such as visual representations, a ‘wheel’ that views aspirations as urban assets and a vision statement that encapsulates the essence of the vision. Although there are some shared elements across groups, the specific details of the visions often differ, as they reflect the various priorities and viewpoints of the stakeholders involved in the process.
Future Visioning in Istanbul, using the wheel of assets to outline priorities
Participants subsequently translate these visions into tangible spatial plans, co-producing maps with main desired land-uses, whilst also identifying crucial policies necessary to enhance the efficacy of their proposals against hazards.
By projecting their visions around thirty years into the future, every group creates a vision, which is a synthesis of what they would like to see come true in that time frame, from the perspective of someone in a position similar to theirs. This allows participants to think beyond personal constraints, fostering a collective and imaginative mindset. The resulting Urban Scenarios portray distinct perspectives projected into the future, highlighting socio-spatial diversity without competing visions.
If we can imagine a better future, we can build it together. Concrete options from Future Visioning can directly feed policy.
Drawing a land use plan
Outputs & Outcomes
At the end of Future Visioning, cities gain:
A collective understanding of diverse, and different, desired futures for the city.
A sense of a ‘desired travel trajectory’ for the city and neighbourhood, including statements on past, present and future.
An insight into elements to preserve for the future, what to protect against hazards, and what to change.
Future Visioning in Istanbul, hand-drawn land-use sketches
They also produce:
Individual & collective storylines that mention desires and hazard events.
Visioning statements.
A categorised list of desired assets, including critical themes such as housing, macro infrastructure and facilities, environmental aspects, etc.
Analysis of commonalities and conflicts among desired assets.
Sketched land use plans projected 30 to 50 years into the future.
Three policy priorities with context-specific design considerations
At the end of Future Visioning, cities and communities gain a sense of ownership over the future especially persistently marginalised groups. New relationships are formed as groups come to understand each other’s preferences, fostering productive dialogues and negotiations. This process brings clarity on the commonalities and differences among diverse group visions, and it draws upon knowledge stemming from the most hazard-vulnerable communities.
Visioning Statements from several groups of Future Visioning workshop participants in Kibera, Nairobi
Urban Scenarios, technical translation of visions into spatial plans and policies
The systemic nature of risk is increasingly acknowledged within scholarship, policy and practice relating to disaster management. However, a number of conceptual and methodological challenges arise in advancing empirical inquiry in this regard. These challenges relate to how the boundaries of the system are determined both spatially and temporally, how expertise from across disciplines is integrated to allow for consideration of institutional and broad socio-economic drivers of risk in addition to physical drivers, and, crucially, how causality operates within system complexity. The potential of forensic investigations of disasters that typically deploy in-depth case studies to overcome these obstacles is evaluated on the basis of causal mapping with experts from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in Istanbul, Kathmandu, Nairobi and Quito. It is found that such investigations can serve to interrogate the fundamental value of any given system and its spatial and temporal bounds, generate collective mental models of the system from which risk emerges, and drive reflection on its root causes. However, it is critical that forensic investigation approaches carefully consider participant selection and facilitation in order to effectively operationalize the systemic risk concept in complementarity with other approaches.
01/06/2023
Normative future visioning for city resilience and development
This paper argues for normative visioning as an underdeveloped component of adaptation planning.
Multi-stakeholder and normative approaches to future visioning offer generative moments when
creativity can meet the power to act required for critical, including transformative, adaptation.
Including normative methods with community and city actors in adaptation planning allows for
alternative narratives of development to arise as a basis for deeper conversation and potential action
on the root causes of vulnerability and risk. A specific visioning approach is tested for four megacities
– Istanbul, Kathmandu, Nairobi and Quito. Relations between current and future states of
development and resilience are found to be both aligned (congruent or contingent) and in opposition
(countervailing or constrained) shaping strategy for policy setting. These data are combined with
additional work from London, Kolkata, New York and Lagos to pilot a City Resilience Challenge Index
(CRCI), indicating to policy-makers whether and how cities are currently moving away from, rather
than towards, envisioned trajectories of vulnerability reduction and adaptation. In the future, the CRCI
might provide a global tool to track the progress of cities towards climate resilient development and,
by doing so, to increase ambition and galvanize action.
Future Visioning workshop in Nablus, Palestine
Future Visioning in Istanbul, using the wheel of assets to outline priorities
Drawing a land use plan
Future Visioning in Istanbul, hand-drawn land-use sketches
Visioning Statements from several groups of Future Visioning workshop participants in Kibera, Nairobi
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