London in 2050

Background

The Futures Forum had covered many aspects of Cities during their 6 month seminar series. As a way of helping the participants to order the large amount of data in their minds, the Forum asked SAMI to organise a short Workshop to construct some scenarios for the future of cities.

The Process

To focus the discussions we decided to concentrate on London, as an archetype city, and a timescale of 2050. The Forum members provided a comprehensive list of forces from their studies over the preceding months.

These were captured on more than a hundred "yellow stickies". The stickies were then placed, after discussion, on a scenario matrix, which sorts the forces at work into those which are certain or forecastable. The next task, again by group discussion, was to group these into major headings.

The grouping of the yellow stickies followed a pattern which is often seen, though always with some differences:

• Demographic and technology-related factors were thought to be forecastable

• Some environmental factors were also thought to be forecastable (in this case, global warming, especially relevant to London because of flooding)

• The factors related to human choices - the political and economic decisions made by individuals which over the years - were fundamentally uncertain, with questions on the nature of these decisions and their collective outcome.

The factors relating to human choices were very complex - looking at the potential outcomes, would the transport system, the sewers, the health services, education, crime prevention, crack and crumble or would they withstand the loads and be rebuilt and refreshed? We collected these factors into one major question about the outcomes - would London be a desirable place to live in 2050?

Another complex set of uncertainties related to the economic basis of London - as back offices and call centres have already moved offshore, would the increasing globalisation of Financial Services, so long London's mainstay, mean that Head offices were in New York, Tokyo? Would other sources of employment take over - tourism? Education? Arts? Government? We collected these under the heading "is London economically strong?"

There were a number of other questions which were about whether London would be a magnet for young people, for movers and shakers, for opinion leaders on a global scale, would a London publication source for a newspaper make it more or less compelling: these we grouped under "Brand".

Three scenarios

Once we had the main headings we could generate the scenarios. Each would include the "forecastable" factors and alternative answers to the questions:

• Is London a desirable place to live in?

• Is London economically strong?

• Does it have a world-wide cachet or brand?

Three scenarios were chosen to develop further, with different combinations of the uncertain factors.

• London manages to find a way to rebuild its crumbling infrastructure and create a "liveable" city while being an economic magnet and a city that people recognised as a "world" city.

• London manages to find a way to rebuild its crumbling infrastructure and create a "liveable" city, but it is not growing economically and it is not ranked as a world city.

• London is a world city - because it remains the capital of the UK and has for instance excellent sporting and arts amenities - but depends on its role as centre of government economically and is not a comfortable place to live.

Each of these was explored in terms of early indicators, heroes and villains, a timeline and decision points - what does London need to get right to achieve a combination of economic growth an d liveability?

Conclusions

The critical infrastructure items emerged as health provision and transport, on the economic front a viable environment for start-ups, and in terms of the brand, the Olympics was thought to be central.

The participants provided feedback after the workshop: two comments were

• "We have been discussing these issues for six months and have made more progress in clarifying them in the last day with SAMI's help than the whole of the six months"

• "I have worked in strategy for 20 years and I never realised how simple yet powerful scenarios are".