Abstract
In the current “decade of action”, many cities, countries, and international organizations throughout the world have committed themselves to achieving ambitious sustainability goals. A wide base of support and action is needed to realize the transformative change that allows these targets to be met. This thesis aims to improve understanding
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of the ways in which shared images of the future can be generated or moved, and how steering this process can contribute to action towards urban sustainability transformations. The urgency of the environmental crisis has led to the emergence of new communities of actors that come together to act for more sustainable futures. The work in this thesis can support these communities organize themselves by outlining how to imagine new forms of governance, how they work, and how they can be achieved. From a review of the transformations, governance, and futures literature, I identify four challenges to the organization of futures practices for sustainability transformations: 1) including different perspectives and assumptions in futures, 2) the need for novel approaches and methodologies, 3) making space for participation, and 4) broadening the scope of evaluations. The following main research question guided the research: How can futures practices lead to action in urban sustainability transformations? To build a theoretical base for the thesis, chapter 2 elaborates on the different intellectual traditions and futures practices that each make epistemologically distinct claims about the future and its manifestations in the present. Through their different outlooks on analyzing, understanding, and influencing the future, these diverse approaches represent fundamentally different attitudes to what it means to meaningfully engage with the future. Because of this diversity of attitudes toward the future, and the different possible modes of engagement with the future, futures literacy is more complex than it appears at first sight. Being futures literate depends on reflexivity of these different engagements with the future, and on what these different approaches can offer future-oriented action. Such reflexivity entails being reflexive about how different approaches to the problem of the future arise, as well as about the underlying power structures. This chapter also investigates possibilities to cultivate this futures reflexivity.It concludes with a set of questions to guide future research in deepening reflexivity as a key element of futures literacy. To formulate and answer to the questions at the end of chapter 2, chapters 3-6 of the thesis report on three case studies, which in this thesis are all examples of futures practices set up and conducted in the context of larger transformation processes. The context of the transformation process determines the extent to which the community can easily adopt the resulting plans and what kind of support is available to them. Experimenting with futures practices in these three relatively small case studies can provide insights into the first developmental steps toward larger transformational change. I argue that the imaginative, the creative, and the experiential can open up transformative futures perspectives in governance processes.
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