Pathways and scenarios

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This is about envisioning future scenarios/action plans of certain themes/topics at different scales (worldwide/regional/city). The basic idea is to help city planners/makers envision different types of future scenarios for their own city. The scenarios/action plans here do not necessarily lead to more sustainable or just cities “per se” as the themes/topics are rather diverse and range from climate action plans over mobility scenarios to economic development concepts. They are supposed to be a guideline/inspiration on how it may be possible to develop long-term plans or possible scenarios for your own city and what advantages of that might be. Those plans ideally should then lead to more sustainable and just cities.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions. All citations are from project websites/reports if not otherwise marked.

General introduction to approach

In general the history of scenario building can be described in three generations. The first generation extrapolated trends using econometric and quantitative methods in order to predict the future as accurately as possible. The second generation recognised the difficulty of predicting certain events and shifted the focus from "Will something happen" to "What will we do if something happens". The third generation wants to shift the focus to "What do we actually want the future to look like" by reflecting the structural and societal change required to pursure sustainability.[1]

Shapes, sizes and applications

Examples of pathways and scenario building, include:

Policy scenarios innovation that foster social cohesion:[2] This is about developing trajectories for growth, innovation and competitiveness in the context of fostering social cohesion in Central and Eastern Europe.

Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative) for low-carbon and resilient cities: [3] The focus lays on developing visions and innovation pathways for thriving Australian cities that are low-carbon and resilient, adaptable in the context of change and robust under the physical and social challenges predicted with a changing climate.

Future mobility scenarios for older people: [4] The goal was the development of an action plan that wants to find innovative solutions for transport needs of older people in the near future (in the European Community) through giving advice for future research in the field. The action plan is based on a thorough review of existing knowledge, its coherent understanding and interpretation, future scenario assessment taking into account societal, technological and other developments, stakeholder consultation, and the identification of research needs.

Climate Justice Pathway: [5] The goal was the further development of the “contraction and convergence” framework which is a route that wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide in order to combat climate change. From the perspective of linking sustainability and justice, the “Climate justice pathway” is very promosing. It is about bringing the field of environment and development together. The premise is that this will ultimately lead to equity across and within all nations and generations, while remaining within the capacity of the planet.

Finger Prints/Scenario building methodology: [6] “Finger prints” is part of a project (SECOA) which wants to understand and deal with the complex and dynamic problems that coastal city environments face. “Finger prints” is a tool which explains the interrelationships between components of the conflicts in relation to time (the evolution of the process of conflict), and space (the hierarchy of the geographic dimension). The modelling has been carried out in continuity with the previous phase of data organization, taxonomy, and through the use of Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN).

Knowledge integration for climate mitigation: [7] Involving practitioners from different scientific disciplines to work with each other and with external stakeholders will lead to more succesful outcomes in this case for climate mitigation issues.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

Urban This differs very much from case to case; but in general envisioning pathways/development plans of whatever kind is applicable to urban contexts. It might even be easier than on a bigger scale as it potentially reduces complexity.

Sustainability Finding pathways to a "better" future are almost always targeting the realm of sustainability and play an important role doing so. “Climate justice pathway” definitely addresses sustainability issues, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases and wants to find ways to reduce them globally. “Envisioning & pathways (co-creative)” aimed to envision low-carbon resilient cities with multiple stakeholders.


Justice “Climate Justice pathway” and “Transport for elderly people” are inherently linked to justice aspects. “Transport for elderly people” pays respect to “interactional equity or justice as recognition” whereas “Climate Justice” is an own type of justice that links countries that emit lots of greenhouse gases with countries that suffer the most from those emissions.

If this is of interest to you; you may also find this page interesting: [8]


Linking sustainability and justice When it comes to pathways and scenarios the link between sustainability and justice varies a lot. “Climate justice pathway” clearly links both dimensions as argued in transformative potential.

Additionally, just “envisioning” itself is likely to generate more positive outcomes (e.g economical, justice, sustainability) than not “envisioning” - unless it is dominated by partial interests of powerful groups.

Narrative of change

If we understand modern scenario bulding as a process of thinking about "What do we want the future to look like" it helps with creating commonly shared goals and community identities.

The most modest assumption about this kind of scenario - building is that it will tell us more about the present than the future. Even if we follow this assumption envisioning a positive future helps to identify injustices in the present that need to be tackled.

Transformative potential

Concerning power relations just the “envisioning” (of future scenarios) itself has huge transformative potentials as it inherently means thinking about change and alternatives to the present.

A potential problem might lie in “who” actually envisions future scenarios. Starting from the observation that “official” future scenarios are typically developed from people with power (city planners/thinkers/politicians) a major challenge within the envisionment of future scenarios lies in typical “participation” problems: Do planners/politicians even want participation? If yes: How can they ensure that different parts of society can participate (e.g. language barriers; age barriers; gender barriers; or even just the knowledge that one can participate) - which might sometimes be very difficult and oftentimes only certain groups of people actually participate. This again might lead to the reproduction of power relations (people in power develop future scenarios which poentially does not pay respect to the needs of people without power.)

To give an example: A concept that wants to make the city more just (e.g. wants to find solutions for social housing) is not necessarily envisioned by people who experience unjust living conditions (e.g have no money for good housing) and it therefore might be hard to tackle those as the people in power maybe just not know about the potential problems as they are not experiencing them themselves. These thoughts hold true for all kinds of future scenarios (e.g low-carbon cities; mobility concepts) but especially to those scenarios/pathways which are inherently about justice.

If the envisioning is done with or by a diverse community paying respect to economic possibilities, age, gender, ethnicity etc. it greatly adds to procedural justice as well as justice as recognition and has huge transformative potential.

“Climate Justice pathway” This is very transformative as it wants to change multiple paradigms concerning “who” has to “pay” for damages to the environment. The goal is to change power relations concerning greenhouse gas emissions: Globally, the countries that are affected the most by greenhouse gas emissions (e.g rising sea level; hurricanes) are most of the times not the countries with the lowest emissions. On a national/more local level companies produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but they can not be accounted for the damages caused to the environment; the whole society has to pay that price through taxes or even their health (externalisation of costs). Furthermore communities with low income are more vulnerable to consequences of climate change than high-income communities as they mostly have less adaptive resources, while also having less political influence. This approach is at its core about justice and equality. The ultimate goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can be done through global/national/local action plans to reduce emissions (which can provide incentives to lower emissions) or through holding the emitents accountable for their actions (e.g legally - which has happened several times in the last years [9])

Illustration of approach

Visions and Pathways 2040 (VP2040) [which is the research project behind the envisioning & Pathways approach] is a four-year research and engagement project funded by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRC LCL). Three universities are involved: University of Melbourne, University of NSW and Swinburne plus many industry and government partners. The project aims to develop innovations, visions and policy pathways for transforming Australian cities with the goal of rapid decarbonisation and increased resilience in the face of climate change. Through its engagement program the project will gather stakeholder views of the dynamics of change and the possible future morphology of cities – their built infrastructure, systems of provision and lifestyles.


References

Category Pathways and Scenarios for Post-Carbon societies