Pathways and scenarios

This cluster includes six different approaches:

• Policy scenarios innovation that foster social cohesion
• Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative) for low-carbon and resilient cities
• Future mobility scenarios for older people
• Climate Justice pathway
• Finger Prints/Scenario building methodology
• Knowledge integration for climate mitigation

All citations are from project websites/reports if not otherwise marked.

General introduction to approach

The cluster is about envisioning future scenarios/action plans of certain themes/topics at different scales (worldwide/regional/city). The basic idea of the cluster is to help city planners/makers envision different types of future scenarios for their own city. The scenarios/action plans in this cluster do not necessarily lead to more sustainable or just cities “per se” as the themes/topics of the cluster are rather diverse and range from climate action plans over mobility scenarios to economic development concepts. They are supposed to be a guideline/inspiration how it may be possible to develop long-term plans or possible scenarios for your own city and what advantages of that might be. Those plans ideally should then lead to more sustainable and just cities.

To shortly explain the diverse approaches inside of the cluster:

• Policy scenarios innovation that foster social cohesion:

The approach is about developing trajectories for growth, innovation and competitiveness in the context of fostering social cohesion in Central and Eastern Europe.

• Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative) for low-carbon and resilient cities:

The approach focuses on developing visions and innovation pathways for thriving Australian cities that are low-carbon and resilient, adaptable in the context of change and robust under the physical and social challenges predicted with a changing climate.

• Future mobility scenarios for older people:

The goal was the development of an action plan that wants to find innovative solutions for transport needs of older people in the near future (in the European Community) through giving advice for future research in the field. The action plan is based on a thorough review of existing knowledge, its coherent understanding and interpretation, future scenario assessment taking into account societal, technological and other developments, stakeholder consultation, and the identification of research needs.

• Climate Justice Pathway:

The goal was the further development of the “contraction and convergence” framework which is a route that wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide in order to combat climate change.

• Finger Prints/Scenario building methodology:

The “finger prints” approach is part of a project (SECOA)which wants to understand and deal with the complex and dynamic problems that coastal city environments face. “Finger prints” is a tool which explains the interrelationships between components of the conflicts in relation to time (the evolution of the process of conflict), and to space (the hierarchy of the geographic dimension). The modelling has been carried out in continuity with the previous phase of data organization, taxonomy, and through the use of Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN).

• Knowledge integration for climate mitigation:

The methodological idea is that the advantage of integrative research is that it deals with uncertainties, risks, system-flips, innovations and patterns of interaction between purposeful neighbours in a physical neighbourhood. It involves practitioners from many scientific disciplines who must work with each other and with external stakeholders.

Shapes, sizes and applications

Just in general concerning the maturity of developing future scenarios/pathways:

“The development of modern scenario and futures thinking has sometimes been described as passing through three generations (List, 2005; Sondeijker, 2009). The first generation concentrated on predicting the future as accurately as possible, typically by extrapolating trends using quantitative or econometric methods. The second generation accepted that making point predictions of the future is often a foolish endeavour and shifted the focus from “will something happen?” to the question “what will we do if something happens?”. Scenario planning, as pioneered by Shell in the 1970s (Wilkinson & Kupers 2013), is representative of this approach. The third generation focuses on longer time spans and preferred societal systems which are normative and explorative in nature and reflect the structural and societal changes required to pursue sustainability. This scenario process is intended to produce pictures of the future that we collectively may want. The question then becomes: “what do we actually want the future to look like?”.

As the "Climate Justice pathway" is a promising approach with regards to its transformative potential it will be explained in more detail here: The “Climate justice pathway” is about bringing the field of environment and development together. This ultimately shall lead to equity across and within all nations and generations, while remaining within the capacity of the planet. To cite the Cordis Page: “The project suggests an alternative approach, which is to motivate and advocate for convergence principles across the world in transactions and values. We recommend decision making processes guided by convergence which can help to generate emergent outcomes for sustainability and equity.”

• The Contraction & Convergence framework exists since the early 1990s and was central to the Kyoto protocol. The basic idea is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally (contraction) through every country in the world agreeing to a certain per capita level of emissions that is equal for all countries (Convergence). The project itself uses the word convergence with multiple meanings and at multiple scopes/scales as it wants to further develop the original meaning of convergence: In the new definition convergent can mean “convergent globalisation”, it can mean convergence at a community/social movement level or on a policy making level. On a content level it means bringing “limits” (e.g. planetary boundaries) and “equity” (e.g social justice) together while envisioning all kinds of actions (e.g policy recommendations). It also means not only converging greenhouse gas emissions but all kinds of commonly shared/produced resources. The ultimate goal is “to motivate and advocate for convergence principles across the world in transactions and values”

The focus lies more on the more general principle of “convergence” as the project claims that the existing “Contraction & Convergence” framework has not been successful in reaching its goals and the principles themselves are more transferable to other instances/scales:

• “Global governance has failed to work fully with the concept of convergence for this resource [greenhouse gas emission]– in the sense of basing international agreements on the principle of C&C” The Kyoto Protocol only weakly implemented the C&C framework and the framework most likely will only be relevant in the next treaty “on paper”
• The basic problem is that all states firstly have to agree on common goals and then secondly actually make national policies which align with the international treaties (that mostly do not punish Non-compliance). The second step happens not often enough as it often times directly concurs with the national economy.
• The “new” convergence framework wants to work on different levels: “Over the course of the project we have written recommendations for convergence, these were made to the EU and national and global governance – but also relevant for social movements.”

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

Connection to cities

This differs very much from approach to approach; but in general envisioning pathways/development plans of whatever kind is perfectly applicable to urban contexts (it is maybe even easier than on a regional/national/global level)

Connection to sustainability

With “Envisioning & pathways (co-creative)” and “knowledge integration for climate mitigation” it depends how one distinguishes the methodological part from the substance part: If a city generally envisions/finds pathways for the future (e.g an economic development plan/a mobility concept …) the “envisioning” itself has no connection to sustainability issues, it obviously depends what you “envision”. The instances within the funded projects, however, have aimed to to envision e.g. low-carbon resilient cities (in Australia). Therefore the instances aimed at sustainable outcomes.

For “knowledge integration for climate mitigation” it is the same issue. “Finger prints” is just a tool in general, it has no inherent sustainability/justice dimension.

Connection to justice

The “Climate Justice pathway” and “Transport for elderly people” are inherently linked to justice aspects. “Transport for elderly people” pays respect to “interactional equity or justice as recognition” whereas “Climate Justice” is an own type of justice that links countries that emit lots of greenhouse gases with countries that suffer the most from those emissions. “Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative)” has a participatory/procedural justice dimension.

The other approaches are themselves not inherently linked to justice aspects

Linking sustainability and justice

Again, the approaches differ too much from each other to give an answer for the whole cluster. “Climate justice pathway” clearly links both dimensions. For other approaches it also again is very relevant how you interpret/name them. Additionally, one could argue that just “envisioning” itself (which is basically thinking about the future and planning in advance) is likely to generate more positive outcomes (e.g economical, justice, sustainability) than not “envisioning” - unless it is dominated by partial interests of powerful groups.

Narrative of change

The cluster shows that envisioning different scenarios for the future in general will give cities more possibilities to react effectively and will make them more prepared/resilient for/to what could come.

Scenarios can help to:

• Identify and examine assumptions;
• Consider a wider range of perspectives;
• Prepare for the future by considering the implications of possible futures;
• Provoke debate and discussion;
• Communicate opportunities and risk in a more tangible way; and
• Examine the plausibility of different options and what’s required to achieve them.(p.27)

Transformative potential

When talking about Transformative potential we are concerning ourselves with following questions:

• To what extent does the cluster/approach alter, change or challenge existing power relations?
• (To what extent are) which power relations considered as problematic (unequal, oppressive, unjust, excluding etc.) by the cluster/approach, implicitly or explicitly?
• (How) are these power relations being framed, problematised, challenged, altered or replaced by the cluster/approach?
• And/or which existing power relations are (at the risk of) being reproduced/ strengthened by the cluster/approach, and how?

First those questions will be answered for the whole cluster; afterwards for each specific approach: Concerning power relations just the “envisioning” (of future scenarios) itself has huge transformative potentials as it inherently means thinking about change. The whole cluster therefore - in theory - has a huge transformative potential, BUT the cluster does not tackle any specific power relations “per se”, that again is dependent on the single approach.

When thinking about potentially strengthened power relations through "envisioning in general" a potential problem might lie in “who” actually envisions future scenarios:

Starting from the observation that “official” future scenarios are typically developed from people with power (city planners/thinkers/politicians) a major challenge within the envisionment of future scenarios lies in typical “participation” problems:

• Do planners/politicians even want participation (which is claimed most of the time but not always true) ? If yes:
• How can they ensure that different parts of society can participate (e.g. language barriers; age barriers; gender barriers; or even just the knowledge that one can participate) - which is very difficult and oftentimes in reality only certain groups of people actually participate.

Which then again may lead to the reproduction of power relations (people in power develop future scenarios which do not pay respect to the needs of people without power) E.G A concept that wants to make the city more just (e.g. wants to find solutions for social housing) is not necessarily envisioned by people who experience unjust living conditions (e.g have no money for good housing; do not speak the language - I am just imagining...) and it therefore might be hard to tackle those as the people in power maybe just not know about the potential problems as they are not experiencing them themselves.

These thoughts hold true for all kinds of future scenarios (e.g low-carbon cities; mobility concepts) but especially to those scenarios/pathways which are inherently about justice (e.g the mentioned social housing plan or the “Climate Justice Pathway” - and thus will not be mentioned there again).

To finalise the (implicit) reproduction of power relations between people in power who are envisioning pathways and people without power “who are envisioned upon” are connected to all types of justice: Pprocedural/participatory justice but also distributional justice AND justice as recognition as it may be difficult to even know what should be distributed/what is missing in different neighbourhoods and what can be recognised (from our guidline examples of “justice as recognition”: Relocation of public housing residents affected by climate-risks into new homes without accounting for existing social networks and relations).(p.11)

Envisioning & Pathways (co-creative) for low-carbon and resilient cities

• The goal of the project is to envision possibilities for the physical forms and urban lifestyles for Australian cities in the year 2040 and supports the goal to achieve an 80% decarbonisation by then. Its goal is not to envision fossil fuel free cities but low carbon cities.
• The main power relation that is being tackled is the dependencies of cities from fossil fuel energy systems. This is strongly connected to dependencies and relationships of cities/the nation/the world to companies that extract/sell/produce coal/fuel/greenhouse gases and also has huge consequences on many physical elements of the city such as “buildings and transport, as well as infrastructures including energy, water, food, information, goods, services and waste disposal.”
• The project claims that cities play a key role in global decarbonisation, it multiple times connects the problem (CO2 reduction) to a worldwide problem. It also claims that right now (2015) “we are more than halfway through the critical decade [...] the period in which our actions on climate change will determine whether we succeed globally to limit temperature rise to less than 2 degrees.”
• If the goal is to tackle power relations that may be harmful to the environment in general (e.g. dependency of companies) only to tackle the effects (greenhouse gas emissions) may strengthen the potentially underlying more problematic power relations.

Climate Justice pathway

• This is a very transformative approach as it wants to change multiple paradigms concerning “who” has to “pay” for damage dealt to the environment.
• The goal is to change power relations concerning greenhouse gas emissions: Globally, the countries that are affected the most by greenhouse gas emissions (e.g rising sea level; hurricanes) are most of the times not the countries that emit them. On a national/more local level companies produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but can not be accounted for the therefore dealt damage to the environment; the whole society has to pay that price through taxes or even their health (externalisation of costs). Furthermore communities with low income are more vulnerable to consequences of climate change than high-income communities as they mostly have less adaptive resources, while also having less political influence. This approach is at its core about justice and equality.
• The ultimate goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can be done through global/national/local action plans to reduce emissions (which can provide incentives to lower emissions) or through holding the emitents accountable for their actions (e.g legally - which has happened several times in the last years

Future mobility scenarios for older people

• The approach ultimately wants to find mobility solutions for elderly people based on different scenarios and profiles of possible future developments. The scenario development itself isn´t too transformative. Thinking about future mobility scenarios and the following policy recommendations in the context of mobility might offer transformative potential.
• The basic assumption is that there will be different mobility needs for elderly people in the future that will have to be tackled. Depending on the “scenario” for future developments and depending on the profile type of the elderly persons (e.g “Fit as a fiddle” ; “An Oldie but a Goldie”) those needs differ and therefore power relations that should be tackled would differ. E.g In the so called “Energy Doom scenario”; which is one of the projected scenarios one goal should be the “Development of low cost vehicles and technical solutions to guarantee safe driving” which would be relevant for the “Fit as a Fiddle” and “Happily Connected” profile. In the Techno Boom scenario a goal that would affect all profile types would be to develop “Car sharing services to include vehicle with special features to facilitate the transportation of physically impaired older people (all profiles).“ The ultimate goal is an inclusive mobility system for all the profiles; so different excluding factors are supposed to be tackled; but they vary very much depending on the scenario and the profile type.
• Again depending on the scenario and the profile there are different types of framings etc.
• If the focus lies too much on the profile types and the idea of satisfying their needs based on their lifelong experiences (e.g if a profile type was driving with cars all their lives and want to keep the cars) transformative potential might get lost and the mobility system may not be changed too much.#

knowledge integration for climate mitigation

• It is about knowledge integration from different stakeholders which is used to realise climate mitigation strategies.
• Different types of knowledge from different stakeholders challenges “monopolistic” knowledge that only a certain group of actors may have. The project was done by 17 partners in the research consortium and different people were included outside of the project (e.g citizens)
• The basic idea of bringing knowledge together is not extremely transformative per se; but is beneficial in finding all kinds of solutions e.g to create environmentally sound cities (as shown in the project)

Policy scenarios innovation that foster social cohesion

This one does not have transformative potential in the way we understand it; it does not tackle bigger power relations.

Fingerprints/ Scenario building methodology

This seems too far away from any real content to speak of transformative potential.

Contentwise the scenarios that concern themselves with the creation of low-carbon environmentally sound cities seem to be most transformative as they often automatically include justice aspects in their envisioning.