Urban Futures: Planning for City Foresight and City Visions

by Timothy J. Dixon, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

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.

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2021

Reviews

[Richie Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished reading this book. My first book on urban futures approached from futures lens i.e., not the typical/traditional urban theory methods. Since it's published in 2021, I assume the field of urban futures from futures lens is still relatively new and the field welcomes more scholarship (unless of course I dig deeper into scholarship to find out that it goes back a longer time).

What's really useful for me is the lesson that there needs to be a systemic/structural change (transition theory) and also co-creating with peoples (participatory agency, quadruple helix, communities, etc.) futures of the city using city visioning and city foresight. A lot of wester case studies and therefore does not cover Asia/oriental studies.