Urban Futures: Planning for City Foresight and City Visions

by Timothy J. Dixon, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

Overview

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447330936
Publisher:	Policy Press
Publication date:	06/18/2021
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Timothy J. Dixon is Professor of Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment at the University of Reading. Mark Tewdwr-Jones is Professor of Cities and Regions at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UniversityCollege London.

Table of Contents

Urban futures: planning for city foresight and city visions Cities and integrated urban challenges Reimagining the city: views of the future from the past and present Planning and governing the future city Future narratives for the city: smart and sustainable? Theoretical approaches to urban futures Using city foresight methods to develop city visions Shaping the future: city vision case studies The innovative and experimental city Visioning and planning the city in an urban age: a reality check Conclusions: facing the urban future to 2050 and beyond

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book is scholarly, rich in ideas, and offers a toolkit for city and regional governments and communities to build visions and explore ways of achieving them. It will be part of the foundations of future city planning.” Sir Alan Wilson, The Alan Turing Institute

“This is an inspirational intervention in thinking about cities of tomorrow. Ethically committed, practical and scholarly in avoiding the hubris of too many soothsayers of urban futures.” Michael Keith, University of Oxford

“Too often planners, fearing to impose top-down solutions, fail to offer needed expertise. This important volume both envisions desirable futures and provides designs for reaching them without insisting on any one solution.” Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

I highly recommend this book to academics, researchers, professionals and students who work in planning, policy-making, and urban design. 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.” Planning Theory

“The book provides a framework to discuss visioning and strategizing for cities and urban regions, not only from an academic but also even more so from a planning practice point of view, developing an analysis, design and policy perspective.” European Planning Studies

From the Publisher