A new report presenting the Retrofit 2050 visions has been published, describing the three city visions developed as part of the Urban Foresight Panel workshops that took place over 2011 and 2012. Retrofit City Futures: Visions for Urban Sustainability sets out three contrasting long term visions for retrofit city-regional futures.
Part of the glue that holds the project together, the scenario foresight process is designed to explore visions of the city in 2050 and retrofit pathways to them over the time period 2020-2050. The first stage of this process was to work with the Urban Foresight Panel, a group of invited experts, to undertake participatory backcasting exercises to develop and explore visions of the future – each intended to reflect a different framing of the contested concept of ‘sustainability’. The second stage, currently underway, is to ground these visions in real-world contexts, working with panel of regional experts in our case-study areas of Cardiff/South East Wales and Greater Manchester.
The visions are not intended to be predictions of the future; rather, they are a tool which can be adapted and used by a wide variety of stakeholders and organisation to stimulate discussion and inform long-term policy and planning. The report can be found here.