Exploratory scenario planning (XSP) can help communities prepare for uncertainties posed by climate change, pandemics, automation, and other unprecedented twenty-first-century challenges. This manual is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in using this emergent planning approach, which is effective at the local, regional, or organizational level. Through the XSP process, stakeholders envision and develop various potential futures (i.e., scenarios) and consider how to measure and prepare for each, rather than working toward a single shared vision for the future. Through instructive case studies, recommendations, sample workshop agendas, and more, this manual equips would-be practitioners with the background knowledge, procedural guidance, and practical strategies to implement this planning tool successfully. Readers will be prepared to facilitate--or even lead--an effective, impactful XSP process in their own settings.

This book provides clear information and guidance on how to do scenario planning to support strategy and public policy. The book describes the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA), an intellectually rigorous and practical methodolgy.

In the face of increasing complexity and uncertainty, planners, public officials, and community residents need new tools to anticipate and shape the future. Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools examines the current state of scenario planning and scenario planning tools that can help communities and regions prepare for that future through a variety of visioning, land use, transportation, and other planning efforts. A unique opportunity presents itself to use the best and latest technology to help citizens visualize the future of their cities and regions, so that they might chart a course for sustainable growth. Decisions about the future are often controversial due to competing economic interests, different cultural values, and divergent views about property rights and the role of government. Broader and more effective civic engagement is needed to ensure community support for decisions about development and other land-related policies, and public investments. The traditional predict-and-plan paradigm is inadequate to address all of these challenges. The authors identify a clear need to develop and implement planning tools and processes that foster anticipation and adaptation. Three concepts will be critical to the scenario planning and tool-building process: collaboration, capacity building, and creation of an open environment for engagement. Collaborative problem solving facilitates resolution of interrelated issues that cannot be resolved by one organization alone. Capacity building is needed to enable individuals and organizations to apply scenario planning methods and tools effectively to their specific planning concerns. An open environment for information sharing and education will help accelerate the use and improvement of scenario planning tools in multiple settings. The emergence of new and improved scenario planning tools over the last 10 years offers promise that the use of scenario planning can increase and that the goal of providing open access to the full potential of scenario planning tools is within reach. This report recommends seven immediate actions that could be implemented quickly to facilitate this goal. A group of tool developers, planners, and other users convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute, including the co-authors of this report, are already working to advance these efforts.

Planning Regional Futures is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is, and should be, in how cities and regions are planned. This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions, which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like, steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; ‘regional planning’ and its mixed record of achievement; and, the link between ‘region’ and ‘planning’ becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged. This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures, moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is, and should be, for in how we plan cities and regions. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Transformative scenario planning is a way that people can work together with others to transform themselves and their relationships with one another and their systems. In this simple and practical book, Kahane explains this methodology and how to use it.

This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups. Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making. This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.

Engaging the future successfully will require the active participation of planners, community leaders, and many individuals, as well as the contributions of students and scholars of planning. To shape any number of possible futures, we must imagine them in advance and understand how they might emerge. Forecasts, scenarios, plans, and projects are four ways of representing, manipulating, and assessing ideas about the future. The chapters in this richly illustrated volume offer a variety of tools and examples to help planners advocate for a new kind of planning--one that allows communities to face uncertain and malleable futures with continuous and deliberative planning activities.