Rethinking tomorrow's cities: Emerging issues on city foresight

Rethinking tomorrow's cities now, builds our capacity to act with foresight and create resilient and liveable places. I use methods from the futures studies field, particularly macrohistory, to provoke our current patterns of city making. From macrohistory, the grand patterns of social change reveal some of the key systems dynamics influencing the rise and fall of cities in civilisation. The key urban system dynamics in the broadest sense provide a meta-framework of emerging issues shaping new urban challenges or opportunities for our towns and cities. The hope drawn from the past and present is to focus our urban interventions in the key areas to create future cities of wonder and purpose. The implications of the emerging issues (critical focus areas of city foresight) that arise from the macrohistorical analysis are discussed using the case study of the Maroochy 2025 community visioning project.2025 is a community driven project to develop shared visions and action plans for the Maroochy Shire¹ towards the year 2025, for the purpose of creating an empowering and community owned response to the challenges facing them locally and globally.