Future Visioning for pro-poor disaster risk reduction in Tomorrow’s Cities: activities toolbox

Tomorrow’s Cities Urban Disaster Risk Hub is an interdisciplinary and global programme funded by the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund. It has the mission to reduce disaster risk for the urban poor in cities where stark inequalities and socio-spatial vulnerability add layers of complexity to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR).

The Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE or DSE) is the main framework guiding the work of cities across the hub. It has been developed with the intent to democratize knowledge and tools related to DRR – influencing decision-making, and building agency and capacity for urban residents and communities that experience disaster risk, particularly those who are disproportionally impacted by disasters and that are historically excluded from planning spaces.

Future Visioning is the first stage of the DSE, introducing participants to the framework and developing conversations that engage with the whole network.

Ethos and methodology

The toolbox presents and develops a set of activities around future visioning in order to generate disaster risk reduction-oriented conversations. This expansion is inspired by new methods from the arts and humanities, as well as decolonial and feminist approaches with the aim of navigating subjective experiences and tackling power imbalances in participatory planning spaces.

The Tomorrow’s Cities approach to visioning is a process which includes critical stakeholders, risk-oriented policies, and essential debates about aspirations for the good future city. The activity guidelines are complemented by illustrative examples, but they are also open suggestions: all cities have their own spatial, logistical, and political specificities to consider. However, it is important to note that there are important milestones in the activities designed to ensure consistency across the research hub.

Using the toolbox

The main intended audience for this document are the stakeholders from new cities joining the research hub in 2022, that is, those contexts in which no future visioning approaches have been implemented using this particular framework. However, the creators invite all urban actors or cities already engaged in visioning to use the toolbox for critical learning or monitoring and evaluating existing practices. Most activities and steps have preliminary “critical questions” that encapsulate the main intention and support a reflexive engagement with the process.