Urban Futures: Planning for City Foresight and City Visions

Description

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.

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 University College London.

"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