Speaker
Description
The climate and ecological crises have generated diverse narratives about the planet’s future. Dramatic mitigation and adaptation actions are essential to ensure liveable futures for both humans and the more-than-human world. Scientific assessments, particularly the IPCC reports, provide critical insights into the consequences of action and inaction. The AR6 advances this by combining the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from AR5 with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to outline possible future worlds. However, these narratives remain anchored in macro-level economic and demographic assumptions, offering limited insights into how cities might evolve under each scenario. Moreover, while mitigation and adaptation “options” are presented, they largely reflect the current state-of the-art (e.g., green roofs, urban compactness) rather than engaging in forward-looking exploration of novel spatial strategies and concepts. As a result, there is a lack of visionary inquiry into what an SSP1-driven urban world might look like. This presentation explores the following research questions: (1) What are the implications of anticipating SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6—the most optimistic scenarios—for urban planning today? (2) How might cities under these scenarios take shape? (3) What shifts in planning approaches are needed now to enable such desirable futures? The presentation argues that while SSP1 scenarios provide a valuable framework for imagining sustainable urban futures, a reframing of current thinking is required to advance imaginative, anticipatory, and transformative urban strategies—both those rooted in present-day mindsets and those anticipated from the future—to address the compounded challenges we face today.
References
Bell, W. (2003). Foundations of Future Studies: Volume 1: History, Purposes, and Knowledge. Routledge.
Costanza, R. (2000). Visions of alternative (unpredictable) futures and their use in policy analysis. Conservation Ecology, 4(1), 5.
de Geus, M. (1999). Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society. International Books.
Ernstson, H., & Sorlin, S. (2019). Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (Eds.). The MIT Press
| Keywords | desirable futures, urban planning, IPCC, AR6 |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
