Codesigning Fair Cities for the Next Generations

Abstract

From enlightenment and anticipation to action, strategic foresight can provide the insights to build a sustainable vision for a preferred future out of many possible futures. Thinking ahead and together with citizens can spectacularly open the spectrum of optimal futures but also help coevaluate the drivers, the barriers, and the conditions for change. Strategic planning for the implementation of a compelling transformative urban agenda has to address many spatiotemporal patterns in cities and must therefore focus not only on the three spatial dimensions but also the time dimension. Time is a scarce and most precious resource. Local time plans can enhance the capacities of cities as chronotopes and improve resource efficiency and quality of life.

The aim of better codesigned policies is to achieve better lives. Urban observatories and sustainability indicators can take the pulse of cities and their citizens and serve as compasses in the journey of sustainability. Impact indicators are powerful instruments and could serve as yardsticks and compasses for prospective policy making and also for assessing and reorienting policy implementation.

A strategic global CityPedia by and for world cities and citizens could bring together trends and opportunities, visions and plans, best, good, and appalling practices, and enrich distributed capacity to synthesize insights. Such a global effort could foster solidarity among world citizens and enhance noble emulation towards the civilization of sustainability.

10.1 Watercolour 10 Athens, “The Eye of Greece, Mother of Arts” (J. Milton)