Techniques of Futuring: Imagining Sustainable Cities of Tomorrow

It is widely acknowledged that overcoming the current planetary crisis warrants new ways of producing and integrating knowledge in in policy processes. The depth, width and urgency of issues likes climate change requires, it is argued, knowledge practices that not only explain change but that actively help to shape sustainable development. A key issue in this respect is the way in which specific epistemic practices like cost-benefit analysis and design thinking integrate analysis with building legitimacy and capacity and developing ideas for directions of change together with diverse societal actors. Building on recent writings on trans-disciplinary science, this paper calls for a better understanding of the actual acts of futuring. It introduces and develops the concept of ‘Techniques of Futuring’ defined as practices bringing together actors around one or more imagined futures and through which actors come to share particular orientations for action. The paper introduces a theoretical framework that is empirically explored and refined through a comparative case study of transdisciplinary engagements in the domains of environmental policy and spatial planning in the Netherlands since the 1960s