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| One of many futurologists’ views of the infrastructure challenges ahead |
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The Urban Futures research programme has provided a means to address these challenges by focusing on the likely long-term performance of today’s urban design solutions. It aims to change the way that engineers deal with long design lives, and thus the way they think about the relevance and shape of their projects.
Urban Futures is a four year research project which started in May 2008, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The project consortium is led by Professor Chris Rogers at the University of Birmingham and includes researchers from Birmingham, Exeter, Lancaster, Birmingham City and Coventry Universities. Professor Rogers is also Chair of the ICE’s Innovation & Research Expert Panel, which has created a vision for the future research needed to advance the industry: “Engineering to Live within Planetary Boundaries: Civil Engineering Research Needs”. The initiatives are wholly complementary.
The Urban Futures Method provides a way to assess the resilience of today’s engineering solutions, many developed in the name of sustainability, by exploring their ability to continue to deliver their function in the face of future change. If the solution works across a range of alternative futures, the investment is likely to prove robust; if not, the solutions can be altered in an informed way, or they can be implemented in the knowledge that they might prove a risky investment. Either way, enhanced confidence in urban design should result.
By incorporating a scenarios analysis based upon four distinct, extreme-yet-plausible, future scenarios, the Method guides the user through the complexities of thinking about the impacts of changes in society, technology, economy, environment and policy. This is made possible because the characteristics of all four futures have been established in considerable detail, and thus it is possible to ‘enter’ each future to explore a solution’s performance.
The four futures build on the work of the Global Scenarios Group:
- New Sustainability Paradigm, in which individuals and communities share common values around sustainable living within the resource limitations of the planet;
- Policy Reform, in which strong governance and policy directives forces society to operate more sustainably even though values remain largely unchanged;
- Market Forces, in which the market is freely allowed to dictate policies and behaviours;
- Fortress World, in which a wealthy elite secure the resources they want inside fortresses and the impoverished majority live outside the fortresses subsisting on whatever resources remain.
The basis of the Method is that, for each sustainability solution, the intended benefits are defined and the conditions necessary for their continued delivery are determined. Each necessary condition is then assessed in the four futures.
Consider a relatively simple example of implementing rainwater harvesting (RWH) as a sustainable local water management strategy for a redevelopment project. This has an intended benefit of reducing the volume of potable water required by the site and, for this example, would mean that the existing supply capacity might be sufficient whereas without RWH additional supplies and associated infrastructure would be needed. There would, of course, be infrastructure costs associated with the use of rainwater for toilet flushing, for example, but in areas of water scarcity this could prove attractive. There might be other intended benefits (e.g. mitigating flooding); these would be assessed separately.
The table lists four necessary conditions that must be maintained in the future if RWH solution is to remain effective, and their assessment in the four futures. The outcomes are listed in the table, yet the reasoning can only be definitively established by consulting the detailed characteristics of the futures.
Each assessment reflects the far future (say 40 years hence) and is done in isolation, i.e. without consideration of how the current situation morphs into the future. Other influences, such as climate change, will alter the context in which a solution is judged (e.g. higher temperatures, more intense rainfall events, longer periods of drought); it is simply a matter of overlaying high, medium and low impact variants to elucidate what the changes might be.
In this case RWH will likely work well in three scenarios as long as the tanks are large; it will only likely work in the Market Forces scenario if pricing controls regulate water use.
The Urban Futures Method is the subject of a new BRE publication: Designing Resilient Cities: a Guide to Good Practice that will be launched in April 2012. It sets out the framework for implementing robust, future-proofed solutions at any regeneration scale.
If you are interested in attending the launch, or if you would like more information about the Urban Futures research project, please contact Joanne Leach, Project Manager, University of Birmingham (0121 414 3544 or 07785 792187; E-mail: j.leach@bham.ac.uk, or visit www.urban-futures.org).
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