Futures最新文献

Recent discussions within urban planning support nature as a potent ally to facing climate change in cities. Among all, nature-based solutions (NbS) and their upscaling have been proposed to address climate change challenges in the urban environment. Different visions on how NbS uscapling is advanced in the urban context, by whom, and for what purpose have generated conflicting imaginaries by which the city of the future could look like. Yet, this plurality has generated confusion and controversies on the ‘right way’ to perform NbS upscaling. Stemming from urban sustainability transition and governance research, the paper proposes a working definition of upscaling NbS based on three analytical dimensions: discourses, practices, and relations. The combination of the three dimensions suggests a new understanding of the complex phenomenon of NbS upscaling that implies the effort of different actors to frame a winning picture of NbS to be normalised as an implementable solution in the pursuit of a selected nature-based future imaginary. The paper argues for an alternative perspective on human–nature relationship that puts at the centre nature and considers tradition and locality for NbS upscaling for a greener and more just future in cities.

The study delves into the potential application of Germany energy transition methodologies to Iraq, emphasizing the industrial sector role, the imperativeness of adaptability, and the crucial role of demand response management. Germany achievements in evolving towards a greener and more efficient energy framework offer vital lessons for nations, such as Iraq, aiming for similar objectives. However, the contrasting socio-economic and energy landscapes of both countries call for distinct approaches. The study delves into these variances, exploring how Germany energy transition strategies can be tailored to Iraq unique situation. The discussion underscores the integration of the industrial sector in the transition and the requisite for a malleable strategy. Additionally, the article sheds light on the significance of adept demand response management, a cornerstone of Germany energy shift. Included is a case study that illustrates the customization of German methodologies for Iraq, exploring possible advantages and challenges. The outcomes act as a guide for Iraqi journey towards sustainable energy, drawing inspiration from Germany successful trajectory. The insights and suggestions presented might also resonate with other countries eyeing or initiating their energy metamorphosis, advancing the collective vision of a sustainable tomorrow.

Various media and forms of cases or works have promoted the development and dissemination of "Design Futures", making empirical research focusing on practical cases not only valuable but also urgently needed. While heuristic case libraries enhance creativity and efficiency in traditional design, a resource library for Design Futures has not been established. To fill this gap, our preliminary work includes clarifying the perception of cases by different practitioners through semantic representation to establish a perceptual model. In this paper, we propose the typology of Design Futures practice cases. Using desktop research, expert selection, and empirical methods, we constructed a semantic perceptual space and further extracted it into four categories. Combining multivariate statistical techniques and related visualization methods, we examined the distinctions and relationships between semantic words, dimensions, cases, and their types. We have finally established the perceptual model for semantic representation of design futures practice cases, with 4 main perception dimensions (critical, wellbeing, conceptual, and technological) and 13 key semantics, and explored in depth the implications these semantics may contain individually. We further explored the potential of the model in developing a case library. In summary, our research findings provide a framework for representing, retrieving, and evaluating practice cases and support the development of a Design Futures Repository.

Actors experience considerable uncertainty when developing and realizing mobility innovations that can contribute in the transition to a sustainable transport system. Although the role of uncertainty and its handling is mentioned as important in the literature on transitions and innovations, there is a lack of understanding how uncertainty affects decision-making processes and actors themselves. This paper investigates the interplay of uncertainty competencies and governance settings in four innovation cases of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Our findings demonstrate it is difficult to sustain MaaS beyond a research trial, because actors experience too much uncertainty about governance questions of long-term responsibilities and role distribution. Although individual actors possess effective project management skills and willingness to innovate in a trial context, they are unable to bring MaaS to a next level because MaaS is not seen as a part of a larger design quest in which stakeholders experiment and play with uncertainty through different institutional configurations.

Oil companies, which are critical element of the energy system today, will evolve to navigate a challenging climate policy environment. In this context, the objective of this paper is to use structural analysis to identify the pivotal variables that will act as key drivers in navigating the challenges presented by this future scenario. This methodology enables the depiction of a system through a matrix that connects all its components, emphasizing the relationships among a comprehensive set of variables. Subsequently, critical variables can be identified Godet (1986). The paper explores the theoretical foundation of the method and elucidates its practical implications for the oil industry. The objective of the study is to seek answers to questions such as: What are the primary drivers of long-term development in the crude oil industry? Which of these factors are the most strategically positioned to drive significant changes? We suggest a starting point by choosing a comprehensive set of internal and external variables. In light of the methodology's software constraints, we are specifically selecting the six most critical variables. Our analysis reveals that, in the long term, six out of the 27 variables examined are likely to exert a significant impact on the oil industry. This reduction in the potential to explain the system with a parsimonious number of critical drivers constitutes the main contribution of the paper.

In face of the ecological and social emergencies, how the French contemporary mobilizations against injustices does address the issue of a fair and sustainable future? We will answer this question from a qualitative survey conducted in 2019–2020 of 130 association officials and activists on social and environmental justice, fight against racism, sexism, and /or speciesism. These mobilisations combine a radical denunciation of inequalities that goes back to their root causes with an attachment to fluidity concerning the “who”, the “what”, the “how” and the “when” of emancipation. We will examine in particular the way in which the emancipated common is part of a radical and fluid renewal of the relation to utopia by promoting both the diversity of tactics (advocacy, civil disobedience, border violence/non-violence) and the making (in) common. The activists interviewed address the link between local alternatives and the advent of a new global order in an elliptical, even enigmatic way, through metaphorical statements – “no big night, but shared gardens”, “the islets will make the archipelagos”.

Exploratory scenarios based on participatory approaches proved helpful in dealing with uncertainty and complexity in urban and transport systems. Such scenarios usually create coherent and manageable narratives that capture broad patterns and trends at global scales. However, significant difficulties exist in bridging exploratory scenario narratives with spatial and local realities, which is crucial for guiding policymaking in urban, regional, and mobility planning. This paper explores whether and how exploratory scenario narratives and participatory mapping processes can establish a reciprocal relationship, wherein narrative-based maps contribute to spatially shaping scenario narratives. It uses an experimental approach involving three participatory workshops with experts and local stakeholders specifically tailored to the mapping of land use and transportation-related scenario narratives for the year 2050 in the Henares Corridor (Madrid, Spain). The spatial transformations mapped during workshops have indicated that participatory mapping processes have an impact on scenario narratives in different ways, enabling the identification of three categories of mapping episodes with different meanings: (i) complementing narratives, (ii) expanding narratives, and (iii) modifying narratives. The paper closes by examining the implications of the obtained findings for policymaking, including a reflection on the research’s limitations and potential for application in real-world planning processes.

From charting out climate change mitigation pathways to estimating price risks associated with the social cost of carbon, as environmentally concerned citizens of the twenty-first century, we live in a culture of foresight. Because of a growing integration of an ever-wider sample space of possible climate futures into the present, historical experience has become seemingly irrelevant for effectively predicting where our climate transitions are headed, in effect restricting our sense of futurity to its performativity in the present. What has been surprisingly absent as a theoretical and methodological approach among sociologists, however, are treatments of the performativity of the future as the expression of a historical praxis for prognosis, with its own mode of disclosure. By interrogating the temporal structure of anticipation that characterizes computer-based simulations of emissions scenarios, the paper illustrates how this praxis discloses the future in accordance with the grammatical tense of the future perfect. It then argues that this relationship between past and future is the cultural product of a historically particular set of prognostic techniques and technologies, namely, model-based scenario analysis. Against this background, the paper seeks to contribute to the rehabilitation of the relevance of historical experience by historicizing the social ontological status of the future that theories of performativity take as their starting point.

Futures imagined in scenario processes reflect both stakeholder perspectives and broader societal imaginaries: collectively-held, institutionally-stabilized visions of the future. The presence of imaginaries has mostly remained implicit in studies of scenario planning, especially in development contexts. We argue that scenario planning will benefit from reflexivity regarding imaginaries. Here, reflexivity refers to an awareness regarding different perspectives, assumptions, values, and—oft-hidden—politics at play. We developed a framework of relevant imaginaries and assessed how and to what extent these are expressed in scenario narratives, through analyzing seven scenario sets focused on agriculture, food security and climate change in the Global South. Our results show that neoliberal and sustainable development imaginaries are dominant in these scenarios. Imaginaries from the Global South are scarcely represented—arguably because of that, we observe few regional perspectives on potential challenges in these scenario sets. We conclude that the scenario sets offer effective critique on neoliberal mechanisms and global development dynamics, but do not provide significant room for transformational alternatives from the Global South. We argue that opening up explorative scenario planning to more pluralistic conceptions of the future can greatly enhance its reflexivity, and a representative mix of imaginaries allows for scenario planning that leads to more transformational policies.

Future experts, decision-makers, stakeholders and future citizens – they all go to school, which could be a place to prepare students to facing post-normal problems in their future roles. While the literature on mathematics and science education shows increased interest in post-normal science to critically understand contemporary problems, mathematics is still generally taught as a neutral subject with either correct or wrong answers. In this paper, I lean on post-normal science literature and the slowly growing literature on ethics and mathematics education to develop a framework for identifying how mathematics education can prepare students for ethical aspects of post-normal problems. Three areas of ethics associated with post-normal problems are explored through concepts from ethics and mathematics education: ethical perspectives of the problem, ethical perspectives embedded in knowledge, and ethics in interpersonal care in discussions and care for students’ self-esteem in participatory processes. This framework is used to analyse and discuss three classroom projects to provide examples of what these areas may contain. The projects partly align with post-normal science, and are about clothing and sustainability, traffic safety, and argumentation related to open an offshore area to oil exploitation. The ethical areas are discussed in terms of ethical awareness and democratic practices.