Project

Rethinking Sustainable Scenarios for Inner City Development with Foresight Methods

Many city centers suffer from vacancies, the uncertain fate of department stores, the closure of traditional shops, and declining visitor numbers, among other things. The beginnings of these developments often date back several years, but the pandemic has intensified the dynamics of these changes. There is broad agreement that city centers should be designed to be more diverse and multifunctional. This includes, among other things, new residential offerings, art, culture and leisure facilities, co-working spaces, meeting places, and urban manufacturing. At the same time, there are demands for improving the quality of public spaces and recreational areas. However, there are challenges such as limited resources, limited influence of municipalities, fatigue from constant change, and the temptation to return to a "post-corona normality." However, in order to create a sustainable city center, it is essential to consider topics such as urbanization, growth pressure, double inner development, traffic transformation, climate change, and rainwater infiltration specifically for this urban space. City centers will have to change, and these changes should ideally be accompanied and supported by a dialogue with stakeholders and citizens.

But how can sources of inspiration for alternative paths of inner city development be explored in this context? In the research project, Difu and Fraunhofer ISI are developing and testing a workshop process that can support municipalities on this path. Methods of Strategic Foresight are used, which aim to anticipate possible future challenges and opportunities and to create new options for action through the use of alternative scenarios and visions. Central to this is the identification of signals - observations that trigger irritation and can be interpreted as indications of possible changes - for possible changes and the evaluation of their relevance from the specific perspective of the actors in the context of inner city development. Special attention is paid to reducing perception filters and biases in future thinking (de-biasing). This is important because routines in organizations, as well as in thinking structures and experiences of decision-makers, shape the evaluation of observations. Typical mechanisms favor a misjudgment of observations: the search for confirmation of one's own assumptions and the overestimation of predictability. An ideal foresight process therefore relies on questioning assumptions about the future time and again and acknowledging complexity and uncertainty in the face of alternative possible futures.