Abstract
Urban Futures is a timely book because of the pervasive disruptions and uncertainty that surround our everyday life and cities worldwide. The global pandemic, climate change, increasing socio-spatial inequality locally and globally, and rapid population growth, among others, threaten our cities and obfuscate our future. The future is unpredictable. According to Sardar (2010, p. 178), the word ‘future’, “used alone, in the singular and without context, seems to suggest that it is all about looking ahead. […] Moreover, the word … contains [a] certain inevitability: ‘going or expected to happen or be or become’. Not surprisingly, it is mostly associated with a definite expected outcome.” Bell (1969) argued that “[t]he future does not exist, but a limitless number of possible futures can be created” (p. 2). Rowland and Spaniol (2015) examined “the possibility that rather than being alternatives to one another, plural futures and the singular future might co-exist in practice, and, thus, constitute a multiplicity” (p. 556). To avoid, the controversy of ‘futurology’, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones also emphasise various scenarios or multiple futures instead of predicting a singular future.
Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones contend that urban visions should be considered a vital component of any plans to direct inevitable urban transformations into a desirable urban future. According to Gunder (2008. p. 189), “Core to planning is the provision, or at least the appearance of provision, of future certainty in a complex, unstable, dynamic and inherently uncertain world.” Silva (2002) argued that “dealing with uncertainty is a duty of planning. Basically, all planning approaches in one way or another manage uncertainty about the future” (p.336). Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones deploy ‘transformative theory’ as the theoretical foundation of this book. They ratiocinate that the necessity of developing city foresight and city visions is vital in urban design, planning, and policymaking to direct urban transitions. By reviewing urban projects and plans, the book offers a toolkit for city governments, civil society, communities, and universities to shape city visions and explore ways of achieving them. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones explain how the toolkit can be used in planning based on several cases.
The book includes 11 chapters that cover both theoretical and practical dimensions of urban futures. Chapter 1 primarily investigates the city as a complex, multilayered, and dynamic mechanism. By extensively reviewing the literature, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones elaborate on how our understanding of cities and their functions have evolved over the last decades. The new understandings have resulted in new narratives, discourses, and theories such as ‘urban transition’ in urban design, planning, and policymaking. They argue that these new narratives can assist planners and policy-makers to traverse hegemonic ‘technocracy’ in generating city visions, particularly smart city initiatives.
Chapter 2 focuses on the city and its various definitions. This chapter is an invaluable reference for academics as well as practitioners. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones review includes the definitions of social, political, economic, physical, and spatial cities that highlight the city as a paradoxical phenomenon. The city is the engine of economic growth, the place for the accumulation of human and financial capital, and the main hub of education and innovation that are perceived as ‘urban advantages’. However, the city increasingly faces historic and emerging challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation, socio-spatial inequality, and health problems as ‘urban disadvantages’. The city has created, or at least has significantly contributed to, the production of these challenges. The authors provide an in-depth understanding of the integrated urban challenges by investigating them at different global, continental, and national levels. They argue that urban planning should be empowered by new technologies and new ways of thinking about the future. These new tools will assist planners to help think longer term and strategically, democratise planning processes, and prepare more adequate integrated solutions to solve urban challenges.
Chapter 3 covers the various definitions of urban imagination. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones review the etymology of ‘future’ and ‘vision’ from ancient Greek mythology to contemporary times. For thousands of years, humans have utilised different approaches to comprehending the future such as using prophecies, divinations, oracles, and astrology, debating philosophically, producing creative visions, and scientifically analysing trends and patterns within data (Gidley, 2017). Drawing on Foucault (1973), we learn that our knowledge about the future, like any other knowledge, is unique and embedded in particular social, political, and historical contexts. This means our perceptions of the future vary. Visionary thinking has permeated the world’s literature, art and, more latterly, film for many centuries. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones show a profound understanding of the interconnections between real cities, visionary thinking, and imagined urban futures. Visions are crucial to imagining ideal future cities and utopian thinking. Utopia was initially coined to describe imaginary paradisiacal places. Since then, literature and new concepts such as dystopia and ecotopia have been generated (Claeys, 2010). Studying the origins of ‘future studies’, ‘future insights’, and ‘anticipatory studies’ shows that different definitions of ‘time’ create different ways of perceiving the future around the world. However, the Western linear perception of time has become hegemonic under colonialism. The four waves of scientific-based future studies have largely failed to predict the future and Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones discern an emerging human cantered and multiple futures as the fifth wave of future studies that embeds in intellectual traditions including religious, utopic, historicism, science-fiction, and systemic thinking.
Chapter 4 investigates the evolution of spatial planning under neoliberalism. Peck and Tickell (2002) argued that “neoliberalism has provided a kind of operating framework or ‘ideological software’ for competitive globalization, inspiring and imposing far-reaching programs of state restructuring and rescaling across a wide range of national and local contexts” (p. 380). Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones study how we have governed and subsequently planned our cities under neoliberalism since the 1980s. They distinguish that neoliberalism has different impacts on planning systems based on different styles of government and legal planning processes around the world. Hayek argued that planning should facilitate adaptation and help markets work effectively to address urban issues (Miller, 2010). However, city visions have largely been trivialised under neoliberalism with long-term city visions perceived as unachievable and unrealistic because they cannot reflect the dynamic of markets and urban complexity. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones, in contrast, argue that prevalent global challenges such as climate change, socio-spatial inequality, and the COVID-19 pandemic show the necessity of city visioning to generate future-based urban planning for our cities.
Chapter 5 elaborates on smart and sustainable cities as pervasive narratives in the urban future. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones extensively review the various conceptualisations of cities in the modern era such as ‘technocity’, ‘ecocity’, and ‘green city’, which shape our discourses, knowledge, and norms in planning. The authors elaborate on how Patrick Geddes’ Bio-polis and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden-city have influenced our perception of the city. “These moments pre-existed as floating signifiers, as proto-ideological elements with no particular … connotation’ attributable to their yet-to-emerge master signifier: sustainability” (Stavrakakis 1997, p. 266). Since the 1960s, ‘sustainable city’ has become the centre of planning discourses in the drive to protect nature. This master signifier has “to remain empty to serve as the underlying organizing principle of a series of other signifier-related narratives and discourses” (Žižek, 2000, p. 52). Sustainable cities are evident around the world. However, Gunder (2019) observed that under neoliberalism, sustainable economic growth has been prioritised among the other dimensions of the sustainable city vision. Despite this, the smart city has become an emerging master signifier over the past decade (Mohammadzadeh, 2022). Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are perceived as the core of smart cities because they offer new solutions to urban issues such as traffic congestion, pollution, and climate change (Bouzguenda et al., 2019). The new emerging technologies are significantly transforming the mechanism of power in cities. Since the 2010s, the ‘smart and sustainable city’ has been developed as a holistic approach to planning (Bibri & Krogstie, 2017). Yet, “little evidence exists on how sustainability outcomes are incorporated or achieved within the smart city initiatives” (Yigitcanlar et al., 2019, p. 348). Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones conclude that there is a vital need for smart cities to include long-term city vision in their planning in order to achieve sustainable goals.
Chapter 6 investigates theoretical approaches to urban futures. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones elaborate on the necessity of urban changes in the face of prevalent global issues and urban challenges such as climate change, migration, population growth, and pandemics. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones first examine cities’ pathways for change. They recognise two main strands of thinking towards systemic change within cities: socio-ecological systems (SESs) and socio-technical transitions (STTs). By reviewing the theoretical concepts of ‘adaptive’, ‘transitioning’, and ‘transformation’, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones elaborate on some of the crucial barriers in governance and political mechanisms in dealing with urban issues and progressing towards sustainable cities. These governance and political mechanism barriers include temporal (‘not during my term of office’), spatial (‘not in my area’) and institutional (‘not in my organisation’). Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones use transition theory to investigate urban transition and transformation. STT frameworks provide a multi-level perspective (MLP) including of the sociotechnical landscape, regime, and niches. Urban transition and transformation are staged in four main phases that provide an understanding of how sociotechnical transition can be managed in cities. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones apply transition theory by generating pathways and city visions and showing how transition theory can be used in practice by investigating three cases from the UK, EU, and Australia. They examine the role of a variety of actors and stakeholders, including municipalities, local authorities, and universities, which contribute to shaping and implementing transition management (TM) and city visions in different urban contexts.
Chapter 7 defines what ‘city foresight’ and ‘city vision’ mean in planning. A practical guide is presented on how city visions can be developed through participatory-based foresight methods to transform cities into sustainable smart futures. The three facets of futures studies – forecasting, foresight, and anticipation – are reviewed. Forecasting techniques are quantitative, while foresight approaches are qualitative. Anticipation was coined as ‘foresight 2.0’ or design-based foresight by Tuomi (2013). Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones study how city foresight is deployed in several cases. They propound that the process of generating a city vision is an opportunity to build a consensus among different actors and stakeholders from different fields and with different interests and expectations. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones define a city vision as “a long-term shared and desirable view of the city, developed through the use of participatory-based visioning and related foresight methods”. They provide an insight into the process of community-based city foresight and developing a city vision by reviewing two case studies: Reading 2050, and Newcastle City Futures 2065. Other cases from the global south are briefly reviewed.
Chapter 8 studies some key outputs from the evolution of city visions in planning. A review of several examples from around the world show that city visions have always been the kernel of master plans. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that the traditional masterplan is top-down, whereby public consultation often occurs after plan development. In contrast, city foresight, as a more flexible approach, includes a combination of co-design, co-production, and co-implementation that involves the public and other stakeholders in the process of developing the city vision. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones explain how new emerging concepts, co-production, and co-creation, can be used as tools to involve people in the process of developing the ‘foresight-based’ city vision. By referring to Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that a foresight-based city vision is involves high-level participation, equivalent to partnership and delegated power. Traditional master planning can be ranked down the ladder. The next section focuses on the two case studies – Reading 2050 and Newcastle City Futures 2065 – to highlight the process of participatory foresight-based city visions, including both the details and their different aspects in practice. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that the engagement of all relevant actors and stakeholders is crucial to developing a ‘good’ city vision. The chapter provides a good understanding of the progress of city vision in planning based on the collaboration and participation of various actors and stakeholders.
Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones investigate contemporary cities as places of innovation and experimentation. Historically, cities have been the main hubs of creativity, innovation, and new ideas, and the place of the accumulation of human and financial capital. Richard Florida (2019) argued that creativity requires diversity and inclusion from moral and economic growth perspectives. By reviewing a variety of literature on creativity and its connections to cities, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that urban diversity increases creativity and facilitates the co-production of projects, subsequently resulting in economic growth. Emerging concepts such as ‘innovation districts’, ‘living labs’, ‘urban rooms’, and ‘science shops’ and their usage in several cases are reviewed to show how these concepts inform planning and facilitate collaborative innovations to develop a city’s vision. Universities can act as leading institutions based on ‘place-based university partnerships’ and then ‘place-based leadership’ (PBL) in shaping city foresight and visions by facilitating the connections between different sectors (Cowie et al., 2016). Different aspects of PBL are elaborated on based on the literature review. This chapter investigates Newcastle City Futures (NCF) that aims to expand partnerships between universities, local government, businesses, and society, based on the needs and opportunities of each city. It promotes co-production and creates spaces for innovation for long-term changes. By investigating NCF, Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that conflicts between various stakeholder groups can create a new capacity for creativity, innovation, and experimentation in the city.
Chapter 10 investigates the changing shape of cities, their complexity and transformational changes, and the usefulness of city visioning for planning towards the inevitable transformations and complexities involved. Neoliberalism as the hegemonic ideology has transformed city governments into urban entrepreneurs (McGuirk and MacLaren, 2001), which challenges long-term planning and the necessity of city visioning. The city is an alive, multi-layered, and complex system. Planning approaches should change to reflect the internal and external forces that transform cities. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones consider that urban digital transformations provide new planning opportunities by collecting and analysing big data from cities. However, urban digital transformations may weaken the case for long-term strategic planning, including city visioning. Urban data are often collected and owned by private companies in pursuit of their own purposes, resulting in a lack of data integrity. However, integrated urban data management is often perceived as anti-democratic in liberal democracies. Developing and implementing city visions to manage urban transitions is challenging. However, urban data can be used as evidence to tackle urban issues. Planners should utilise their knowledge to generate a collaborative platform for an inclusive city vision and a strategic plan of action. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones review several case studies to show how a city vision can be developed in an uncertain urban age.
The last chapter concludes the book and the authors’ argument that planners should work with the four main stakeholder groups – the public, universities, local government, and the private sector – to create participatory-based long-term city visions. The first section reviews city foresight and recommends the application of transition theory to develop city visions based on practice. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones argue that city foresight-based visioning should be a crucial component of urban futures thinking. Addressing urban issues such as resilient economic development, sustainability, and climate change requires new ways of planning and policy making, such as city vision partnerships that consider the future beyond simply short-term plans. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones also investigate the impacts of Covid-19 on cities around the world. They argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has generated new opportunities for planners, urban designers, and policymakers to reinvent and reimagine future cities as places of living, working, and playing. The transformation of cities, particularly their built environment, is a long-term process that should be managed and planned for the long term based on city visions.
I highly recommend Urban Futures to academics, researchers, professionals, and students who work in planning, policy-making, and urban design. The book successfully covers the theoretical and practical dimensions of city foresight visioning. Urban automation will potentially change planning into a new top-down technocracy mechanism. Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones thoughtfully recommend a participatory-based city visioning tool that is crucial to protect our democratic values in planning for the future.