| #e.18386 | Thursday 6:00PM to 8:00PM
November 17,
2011 | CM | 1.50 |
An Urban Future: Futures-thinking, planning, and the future of planning citiesAPA California Chapter, Northern SectionPalo Alto, CA Over the next decade, cities will continue to grow larger and more rapidly. At the same time, new technologies will unlock massive streams of data about cities and their residents. Municipal governments will engage in smart city strategies, and citizens will find ways to create, share, and repurpose information about their communities. As these forces collide, they will turn every city into a unique civic laboratory — a place where technology is adapted in novel ways to meet local needs. This intersection between urbanization and digitization will be just one force shaping cities in an uncertain future of climate change, resource vulnerabilities, demographic shifts, and bottom-up changes in production and consumption.
At Institute for the Future, we strive to understand these forces, their impacts on different sectors, institutions, and populations, and the key dilemmas that the next 10 years will bring. Ten years is a long time for unforeseen developments to reshape how we live our lives, and yet many professionals, especially planners, are asked to prepare for that horizon, often much longer. Futures thinking arose as a tool to plan for long-term change, and Institute for the Future has been practicing it for over 40 years. Since our origins in RAND, we have worked with institutions, organizations, and communities to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We look at disruptive changes, the interplay between technology and human behavior, the broad shifts many of us know are coming but aren’t sure exactly how, and many other variables. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action.
In this workshop, Institute for the Future will present futures-thinking methodologies and their foresight work on cities and explore how planning and futures-thinking could complement each other. It will be an interactive evening that challenges attendees to think through implications for their cities and connections with their practice.
Instructors: Marina Gorbis During Gorbis’ tenure with IFTF and previously with SRI International, she has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy, bringing a future perspective to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Gorbis is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has worked all over the world and feels equally at home in Silicon Valley, Europe, India, or Kazakhstan. Before becoming IFTF's Executive Director in 2006, Gorbis created the Global Innovation Forum, a project comparing innovation strategies in different regions, and she founded Global Ethnographic Network (GEN), a multi-year ethnographic research program aimed at understanding daily lives of people in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley. She also led IFTF's Technology Horizons Program, focusing on interaction between technology and social organizations. She has been a guest blogger on BoingBoing.net and writes for IFTF and major media outlets. She is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues. She holds a Master's Degree from the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Matt Chwierut Matt serves as a research affiliate, supporting IFTF's research efforts in a variety of ways. He thinks foresight and forecasting can help guide strategic approaches to social problems, and his passions mirror his IFTF research efforts on education, sustainability, social enterprise, and global development. In addition to his work on the Future of California, Matt has recently contributed to several other projects including a map of catalysts affecting the lives of the global poor. He holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from Stanford University, and is currently in the MCP program at UC Berkeley, researching cities, strategic planning, and development. Deepa Mehta Deepa brings an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to her work at the Institute. Trained as an urban planner, Deepa has worked with NGOs, planning firms, and cultural institutions, bringing multi-dimensional lens to futures research. At the Institute, Deepa primarily works on commercial innovation and leadership in the future. Deepa is curious about how the past (culture and heritage) plays a role in the future (development planning) and the tensions and opportunities that lie therein. Specifically, she is interested in uncovering how socially and culturally embedded knowledge networks inform innovation. Deepa also serves on the steering committee of Shipyard Community Arts, a San Francisco-based organization. Deepa holds an MSc in Urban Planning from Columbia University and a BA in Political Science from Rutgers University. (11 Ratings)
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