Study note on academic ideas about future city

Study note on academic ideas about future city

Academic ideas are bolded

Peter Eisinger. “Detroit Futures: Can the City Be Reimagined?” City & Community 14:2 June 2015.

“Many Detroit business and political leaders, as well as many ordinary citizens, believe that the city can be restored to vitality. At least four visions of the future city animate their efforts: the city as a great international model for green planning and technology leadership, the city as an entertainment destination, the city as a metropolitan center, and the city as a pioneer destination on the urban frontier. As these visions have simultaneously played out, they have perhaps improved daily life in Detroit in the last decade, but each is finally a partial and inadequate vision. None speaks directly to the interests of the bulk of the city’s working class and poor population. Some of the visions lack sufficient scale relative to the city’s problems, and some cannot be realized for lack of resources. All of these visions finally represent failures of city-building”;

Shahed Khan, Atiq Uz Zaman. “Future cities: Conceptualizing the future based on a critical examination of existing notions of cities” Cities 72 (2018) 217–225.

“Assigning labels to cities that evoke desirable features has become increasingly popular in recent years with city administrators promoting various notions of the desired city. This article examines the various labels used to classify cities and identifies the key characteristics that each label tends to highlight. It is contended that as proponents of variously labelled cities pursue certain aspects of sustainability, their focus may be too narrow to cover the broad spectrum of sustainability. A literature review of various notions of desirable cities promoted under various labels suggests that cities of the future would need to be dynamic and intelligent in every aspect of social, economic and environmental sustainability. Therefore, it is important that all aspects of sustainability are considered in envisioning the desired future in which to conceptualize the cities of the future. It can be assumed from the past trends of urbanization that future cities will continue to uphold and build upon common goals and values of existing cities such as promoting pleasant urban form, community engagement, economic opportunities, and technological advancement and cultural diversity”;

“The key constituents of a city, which are people, infrastructure, institutions and services, haven't changed significantly from the time of the ancient city of Jericho developed nearly 9000 BCE near the Jordan River in the West Bank, to the twenty first century city of Masdar initiated in 2006 near Abu Dhabi (Mark, 2014; Reiche, 2010)”;

“The increasing awareness of adverse effects of infrastructure development

on the ecosystem that eventually affect citizens' welfare will necessitate cross-sectoral development approaches for future cities to assess and mitigate them. Enhanced technological capacity to promote further synergies between the natural and built environments will enable planners to seriously consider the interrelationship of urban form with its environmental factors, promoting closed-loop urban resource flows. Cities are most likely to pursue industrial production systems that are restorative by design and promote collaborative consumption practices”;

Ilaria Zambon, Pere Serra, Massimiliano Bencardino, Margherita Carlucci & Luca Salvati (2017) Prefiguring a future city: urban growth, spatial planning and the economic local context in Catalonia, European Planning Studies, 25:10, 1797-1817, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2017.1344193.

“Urban expansion has inevitably transformed urban and rural landscapes, altering the spatial configuration of cities and regions, with negative environmental and socio-economic consequences (Abelairas-Etxebarria & Astorkiza, 2012; Almeida, Condessa, Pinto, & Ferreira, 2013; Camagni, Gibelli, & Rigamonti, 2002; Petrov, Lavalle, & Kasanko, 2009)”;

“Trend Impact Analysis (TIA) and Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA) arewell known and largely used scenario planning methodologies (Bradfield, Wright, Burt, Cairns, & Van Der Heijden, 2005). These methodologies evolved out of the fact that traditional forecasting methods relied on the extrapolation of historic data without considering the effects of unprecedented future events. The concept of TIA and CIA involves four steps: (i) historical urban data are collected; (ii) an algorithm is used to select specific curve-fitting historical data and extrapolate this to generate ‘surprise-free’ future trends; (iii) a list of unprecedented future events which could cause deviations from the extrapolated trend is developed and (iv) expert judgements are then used to identify the probability of occurrence of these unprecedented events as a function of time and their expected impact, to produce adjusted extrapolations. Specific land-use approaches based on scenario-building have been developed in recent decades (Dammers, 2010; Gantar & Golobic, 2015; Stewart, 2008). Their application covers issues such as land-use planning, science and technology policy, organizational future-orientation and societal challenges (Dufva, Könnölä, & Koivisto, 2015; Shearer, 2005; Xiang & Clarke, 2003). They have several purposes: (i) to enrich the political debate, highlighting future territorial challenges; (ii) to engage with policy-makers in the identification of major priorities, providing integrated decision support frameworks; (iii) to anticipate patterns and processes of change and (iv) to foresee appropriate decisions, actions and policies (Silva & Clarke, 2002; Uotila, Melkas, & Harmaakorpi, 2005;Wiek, Binder, & Scholz, 2006). Moreover, these approaches assess the interaction between human and natural environments with the objective of identifying causes, mechanisms and consequences of land-use dynamics, such as urbanization (Chaudhuri & Clarke, 2014)”;