Futures studies’ backcasting method used for strategic sustainable city planning

Achieving a sustainable city requires long-term visions, integration and a system-oriented approach to addressing economic, environmental and social issues. This paper case studies a sustainable city planning project, Göteborg 2050, that uses the backcasting method. Visionary images of a long-term sustainable future can stimulate an accelerated movement towards sustainability. The paper describes a special kind of scenario methodology to build a future model for city development as a planning tool in facilitating a sustainable society. Backcasting in futures studies is widely discussed together with the comparison of three selected backcasting approaches, including Robinson's approach, The Natural Step Framework, and the Sustainable Technology Development approach. The purposes of this paper are to examine and discuss the use of the backcasting method within the Project Göteborg 2050, lessons learned and findings drawn from the experience. The case study shows that backcasting is an appropriate method in developing action plans for achieving urban sustainability. This work can be served as a model for sustainable city planning in Thailand as well as other countries.     

Testing the rhetoric: An approach to assess scenario planning's role as a catalyst for urban policy integration

Policy integration has become a high-priority objective for urban planning and management. At the same time, the transportation and urban planning fields have increasingly employed scenario planning approaches, not only to develop long-term strategy, but also—potentially—to strengthen organizational networks and encourage collaborative action. Yet these latter supposed outcomes of scenario planning remain under-theorized and largely untested. In this study, we propose a methodology, based on established theories of collaboration, to test the ability of a particular type of scenario planning to encourage collaboration between participants. We demonstrate the approach using a scenario planning process undertaken within the transportation and urban planning community in Portugal. The pre-/post-test experimental design uses a survey designed to assess participants’ propensity for future collaboration by measuring change in individuals’ perceptions and understandings. The results suggest that the process likely modestly increased participants’ propensity to collaborate, primarily by strengthening inter-agency networks. The effects on participants’ views and understanding remain inconclusive. We suggest that specific challenges in applying this specific scenario planning approach to public sector contexts may limit the method's potential in achieving inter-organizational collaboration. Nonetheless, only more widespread efforts to formally test the scenario planning rhetoric will reveal the true impacts on organization change.     

长三角城市群经济联系网络结构研究——基于社会网络视角的分析

作为中国经济活动最活跃的地区之一,长三角城市群网络化发展将是长三角城市区域今后发展的主要特征。本文基于社会网络分析方法,借鉴城市引力模型,以长三角城市群16个中心城市间的经济联系为例,对长三角城市群网络的基本形式、结构属性和网络微观特征进行实证分析。研究结果显示,长三角城市群经济关联网具备了中等网络规模,但内部各城市间联系不均衡性特征明显,多中心网络协同发展格局已初步形成。     

Gaming the FTSE 100 index

In the UK (unlike the US and many other countries), companies enter and exit the main stock market index (FTSE 100) according to a clear set of rules based on market capitalisation. This creates an opportunity to game the system to secure or retain FTSE membership by manipulating capitalisation. There is considerable evidence in extant studies that index membership is beneficial, both for shareholders and managers. Hence, companies may adopt financial strategies designed to acquire or retain membership. We investigate two types of gaming. We define strategic gaming as a situation in which companies, which may initially be a number of places away from the boundary, make abnormal share issues cumulatively over several quarters. We find strong supportive evidence for this. For tactical gaming, which would involve companies in the very closest proximity to the boundary, we do not. Our analysis shows that gaming is limited to companies outside the index trying to get in. Companies that are close to exit do not game to retain their index place. The high natural volatility of market capitalisation makes success of gaming uncertain. Our central estimate is that about 5% of entries to the index appear to be the result of gaming.     

银行公司治理中各行为主体间的正和博弈分析——以招商银行发行100亿元可转债引发的冲突及解决方案为例

在银行公司治理中,各利益相关者作为独立的行为主体都是理性的“经济人”,其行为是追求自身利益最大化。银行公司治理得以运行和完善,正是缘于各行为主体为寻求自利而进行的博弈。这种博弈的结果是正和博弈,即一荣俱荣。随着中国金融业改革的深入,银行的经营将更多地受到相关利益主体的约束,其经营行为必须走向市场化。从这个意义上看,完善银行公司治理的过程,就是包括管理层、董事会、股东及其他利益相关者权利义务得以逐步明确的过程,也是各行为主体间利益相互博弈的过程。银行公司治理既为利益相关者参与银行管理提供了渠道,也推进了银行公司治理结构本身的不断完善。     

我国车险市场道德风险的博弈分析

车险已成为我国产险的龙头险种,但由于信息不对称,车险市场道德风险已严重制约产险业的发展。各利益主体为自身效用最大化不断博弈的最终结果,使得车险市场整体运行效率大打折扣。本文运用博弈论的研究方法,通过构建博弈模型,对投保人、保险人、保险代理人以及汽车修理商四方行为主体的道德风险进行博弈分析,探寻其最优策略,并给出对策建议。     

Transdisciplinary forward-looking agenda setting for age-friendly,human centered cities

Cities need to adapt to ageing societies because the average age of habitants is increasing rapidly alongside the global trend of urbanisation. Apparent effects on both society and individual livelihoods will continue to increase in the coming decades. Great hopes are projected on technology to support solutions for the ageing society and urban planning. Smart city strategies and the field of ambient assisted living are two concepts sharing the assumption that technology will make our lives more independent, more efficient and safer with a higher quality of life. This paper presents a case study of a participatory foresight project that investigates how transdisciplinary agenda setting through the means of including citizens, experts and stakeholders can provide orientation for long-term planning on the future of ageing in the city. Results enforce the argument that urban governance needs to address additional tasks whilst adapting to challenges arising from ageing societies and urbanisation. Alongside mere technological innovation, human factors gain importance. Future-oriented urban development strategies need to incorporate this fact and should not predominantly be drafted on the paradigm of technological progress.     

Cross-impact gaming

A game that permits the exploration of future states of the Union is being designed at the Institute for the Future. This paper describes preliminary research in the design of a series of planning games that can be applied in various fields. Scenarios of the future result from manipulating estimates of possible events and trends and the cross impacts among these likely developments.     

企业人力资本投资博弈分析

目前大多数中小企业不愿进行人力资本投资,我们通过企业之间人力资本投资的博弈分析,认为企业应该选择人力资本投资,才能实现其上策均衡,而进行人力资本投资后,企业与员工之间还存在一种博弈,通过这种博弈分析,我们认为企业应采取措施留住接受了人力资本投资的员工.     

人民币汇率中美博弈:一个纳什均衡模型分析

后危机时代人民币汇率日益成为中美两国竞争、争夺与博弈的战略性领域之一。本文通过构建一个中美汇率交锋的完全信息且无限次重复博弈模型,认为人民币汇率中美博弈属于子博弈精炼纳什均衡,均衡汇率水平取决于中美双方各自耐心系数的大小。谁的耐心系数大,最终的均衡汇率就对谁有利。因此,面对美国抛出的人民币升值论调,中国除了积极参与国际货币体系改革、提高金融话语权以外,还应坚持"汇率调整以我为主"的原则。     

Measuring the effects of transdisciplinary research: the case of a social farming project

Social farming (SF) is an innovative concept belonging to a grey zone occupied by agriculture, social, education and health sectors. It involves various private and public actors who work together to co-create and share new collective knowledge. SF initiatives also involve many policies and tools that need to be reframed in order to facilitate the evaluation of these practices. Research in SF includes the active role of researchers in medium-term initiatives, involving a large number of stakeholders.Thus an evaluation of SF practices is crucial in developing and planning future actions. The complex nature of SF has led to the use of a transdisciplinary approach for the evaluation of its initiatives.This paper explains the transdisciplinary process used in a SF project, describes the nature of the collaborative relationships between researchers and others stakeholders, and examines the factors that inhibit and facilitate this collaboration. The paper highlights the important effects the transdisciplinary approach could have on the future of SF, in terms of network building, the co-production of knowledge, and the development of innovative practices.     

Creating the future: Goal-oriented Scenario Planning

Do current scenario planning techniques ignore an organizations ability to create its future? Social constructionists and organizational theorists have indicated that the future of an organization can be enacted by its constituents. Yet it is apparent that scenario planning techniques, used by organizations to plan for their future, tend to emphasize a future that the organization must react to instead of create. By emphasizing a future that the organizations must react to, it may ignore and completely miss the opportunity it has to create or enact the future it wants to have.Scenario planning, however, can evolve to support a creative foresight and approach to the future by recognizing the power behind enactment theory and applying a goal-oriented approach to the scenario planning process. Using goal-oriented scenario planning an organization can match the world it wants with the world it expects to see.     

Time-inconsistent risk preferences in a laboratory experiment

We conduct an experiment to explore the time-consistency of risk preferences in a multi-period betting game. Specifically, subjects planned their contingent betting decisions in advance then played the game dynamically later to determine whether their respective decisions matched. We find that subjects took more risk than planned in their initial bet and after losses. In addition, this increased risk was associated with an increase in breakeven mental accounting. Our findings indicate that immediacy of outcomes can lead to impulsive risk-taking behavior and highlight the importance of precommitment to long-term financial planning.     

Cities of the imagination: Science fiction, urban space, and community engagement in urban planning

Stories, dreams, histories and myths, Michel de Certeau argues, connect people to particular places and makes place concrete and inhabitable. These narratives generate an imaginary, poetic geography that haunts the abstract city of street maps and development plans, and makes it socially meaningful. This paper is concerned with one particular kind of story-telling - science fiction - and its relationship with the city, urban planning, and questions of community engagement. The paper argues that the ‘cities of the imagination’ generated by science fiction and other forms of narrative provide a powerful means of understanding, communicating and enriching the connections to place in urban communities. Moreover, science fiction is often characterised by its ability to explore the future of cities. This gives the genre a fascinating and potentially useful resonance with urban planning as a discourse and set of practices; and, in particular, strategies for engaging communities in the design process and, thus, designing for future social sustainability. These ideas will be tested through a reading of near-future urban spatiality in the cyberpunk stories of William Gibson. The theorisation of the relationship between urban space and narrative in the work of de Certeau and other theorists will be used to help frame this discussion.     

Managerial gaming of stock and option grants

In this paper, we examine managerial gaming of different types of equity grants, both at the initial award of the equity grants (front‐end gaming) and the unwinding of the equity holdings in the future (back‐end gaming). We find that the potential gains from stock price manipulation vary substantially across different types of equity grants. While traditional stock option grants are less vulnerable to front‐end gaming, they are more vulnerable to back‐end gaming than other types of equity grants (e.g., restricted stock grants). To prevent or discourage managerial gaming, firms should preset all terms of the equity grant in advance and link its future payoff to average stock prices (e.g., by granting Asian stock options).     

The community and public spaces: ecological thinking, mobility and social life in the open spaces of the city of the future

The roots of the present crisis of public urban spaces in the modern and contemporary city can be traced back not only to the history of the early vision of the planning movement to which the city planning discipline dedicates much attention, but also to the history of scientific thinking, the measuring eye that all of us—specialists, administrators, intellectuals and citizens alike—have used on it from the 17th century up to the present day. Recognition of these roots allows us to distinguish the fruitful from the sterile among the many directions offered by the various projects for the city of today and the city of the future. In the recent emphasis placed on the concept of community—in the interpretation offered here—lies the basis and motivations of some of the most interesting guidelines for an in-depth study and really innovative approach to the problems of city traffic and the closely associated problems of the reappropriation of a social dimension of public space for the city of the future.     

Evaluation of infrastructure planning approaches: An analogy with medicine

This paper discusses the evaluation of new infrastructure planning approaches. These new planning approaches have been put forward in response to the challenges of deep uncertainty about the future. These approaches emphasize the need for flexibility of the system in order to enable the plan to adapt to changing conditions. However, these adaptive approaches up till now have seen little real word applications. One important reason for this lack of application is that the efficacy of these approaches has not been established yet. In turn, this is largely due to the problem that there is no agreed upon method for proving the efficacy of a new planning approach. In this paper, we will draw an analogy to medical research and development in order to outline a methodology for establishing the efficacy of new planning approaches. We discuss how the well-established methodology for evaluation new medical treatments can be adapted to evaluating new planning approaches. We illustrate the resulting evaluation methodology by outlining an evaluation strategy for a specific new planning approach. It is concluded that the well-established methodology from medicine can successfully be used to inform the evaluation of infrastructure planning approaches.     

A framework for assessing the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks

Modern society depends on complex agro-ecological and trading systems to provide food for urban residents, yet there are few tools available to assess whether these systems are vulnerable to future disturbances. We propose a preliminary framework to assess the vulnerability of food systems to future shocks based on landscape ecology's ‘Panarchy Framework’. According to Panarchy, ecosystem vulnerability is determined by three generic characteristics: (1) the wealth available in the system, (2) how connected the system is, and (3) how much diversity exists in the system. In this framework, wealthy, non-diverse, tightly connected systems are highly vulnerable. The wealth of food systems can be measured using the approach pioneered by development economists to assess how poverty affects food security. Diversity can be measured using the tools investors use to measure the diversity of investment portfolios to assess financial risk. The connectivity of a system can be evaluated with the tools chemists use to assess the pathways chemicals use to flow through the environment. This approach can lead to better tools for creating policy designed to reduce vulnerability, and can help urban or regional planners identify where food systems are vulnerable to shocks and disturbances that may occur in the future.     

From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning

Reviewing landscape developments in the last decades evidently shows that in the future most pressing changes can be expected for the land surface. This indispensably calls for strategic approaches based on visions and transdisciplinary creativity. Hence, this paper critically reviews the Leitbild concept, an idea on spatial planning which has been widely discussed in the German-speaking planning literature but which has received scant attention elsewhere. Although the term has been translated as a ‘vision’, this paper shows that the concept is far richer in its content than these casual translations suggest. The paper shows that it defines a particular paradigm for landscape planning that embodies a transdisciplinary approach in which lay-people and experts develop both goals and strategies for realising their joint visions. A systematic overview of the key characteristics that make up the Leitbild approach is provided and set in relation to already available approaches for decision makers. Although there are similarities between the Leitbild approach and other planning and decision-support tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA) and Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA-sust), the paper shows that the particular combination of issues considered when developing a Leitbild makes it distinctive. Through an iterative process, the development of a Leitbild allows new approaches to spatial planning in which space and place can be considered as a social construct, and in which the values and understandings of local actors can be better represented.