The course contains a large group assignment, and a small individual essay assignment (next to a test about the course articles and lectures).

• In the small essay assignment, you will analyze an existing urban or regional future vision, and analyze these while using literature from planning theory and planning methods.
• In the large group assignment, you will experiment with an element of vision-making with help of a gaming approach. A gaming approach offers us a possibility to 'simulate' multi-actor framing dynamics in a planning process in a lab situation. A gaming approach helps in 'zooming in' on participatory aspects and the multi-level, multi-actor dimensions of urban and regional planning processes; the group can propose an innovative multi-actor governance arrangement, and experiment with the new governance arrangement in a gaming setting.

In the group assignment, groups are invited to focus on one particular aspect of vision-making and strategic planning.  Students can focus on one particular controversial issue in an existing urban or regional vision,  or students can decide to ‘experiment’ with a certain intervention or planning instrument.  The instrument will be chosen in deliberation with the staff, depending on case-study chosen and existing backgrounds and skills available in the project group; an instrument can be a particular Planning Support Tool, or a new organizational form or rule that exists in one country, but not in another (‘institutional transplantation’, De Jong).

Particular themes simulated in the Urban Future Lab course in previous years:
- Cities adapting to climate change, for example appointing search areas and allocating budgets over urban areas for measures (such as green roofs, water storage basins, extra green, special pavement), in a dialogue with representatives of residents, local entrepreneurs and interest groups;
- Investing in housing and urban retrofitting in public-private partnerships, for meeting a cities' objectives in housing demand, energy transition objectives and particular social-economical and spatial-environmental objectives in particular areas of a city or at the urban-rural fringe; 
- Urban and Regional Mobility systems, for example analysing transport modes, behavioural choices (bike, bus, car), analysing congestion, travel time, costs and environmental footprint. 

Background:
Making spatial visions for the future is a central step in strategy formation, and a central role of a planner. But the role of planning changes over time. The 21st century planning community consists of opportunity coalitions with new relational networks between civil society, public and private organizations, and the public at large. The introduction of new multi-level governance arrangements in spatial planning and climate policy in the Netherlands are tangible manifestation of a shift in mindset. Long-term societal transformation processes are happening all around and through us, based on sustainability challenges, changing demographics and lifestyles, and also based on societal discourses and ‘mental models’ of how societies should work and be governed. In terms of sustainability, current policies are responding on new knowledge in many forms, but with an encompassing coherence between the various themes, indicating that a cross-sectoral approach is needed: about climate, energy, mobility, environmental pollution, lack of green in cities, transformation to circular economies, etc. In terms of changing demographics, one can observe a growing divide between high-pressure and shrinking regions and districts, and growing diversity of types of households and lifestyles. In terms of social-political discourses, governments are experimenting with direct forms of democratic decision-making as a response to social and political unrest. In public debates, the boundaries of ‘markets’ as coordinating principle and the drawbacks of individualism are discussed, in a setting where traditional lines between ideologies are blurred (between liberalism, neoliberalism, socialism, communitarianism, conservatism, anarchism). In civil society, a growing bundle of social movements is developing new practices based on self-organization and a “Do-It-Yourself” mentality, re-discovering legal arrangements to collaborate and share risks, burdens and profits, such as in place-attached local energy cooperatives. All these dynamics drive change, and the multitude of forces and movements are motivating factors for initiating and designing visions for alternative futures. But how can society re-organize itself? 

Vision-making processes serve to “stand still” for a moment and re-think signals, to make sense of the world from a different perspective, and to seek options for change in practices, rules, infrastructures, collaboration arrangements, and physical objectives. But who initiates acts of vision-making, with its inherent ‘costs’ in terms of time, effort and dialogue-for-consensus-building processes? In Spatial Planning processes, multiple levels of governance and societal groups are usually involved in policy preparations, organizing dialogues within society in both top-down and bottom-up directions. Both analytical and political arguments are part of the strategic dialogue among parties. Ben Davy is calling this “polyrationality”, as planning involves many voices and many rationalities, including more political, more economic, or more physically oriented types of reasoning. Other planning scholars also think about concepts such as spatial justice, polyrational planning, and psychological aspects of group-decision-making over 'commons.'

Collaborative resources or commons are important to consider in spatial planning, as they are, other than public and private goods, non-excludable but rivalrous in their use, which asks for a thoughtfully executed monitoring and allocation of scarce shared resources, as empirical research of Elinor Ostrom has shown. Interventions for large projects in urban fabric can evoke mechanisms of 'groupthink' and of what Bent Flyvbjerg calls 'the politics of megaproject approval' or 'design by deception’. This is a process of ambitious planning where "moral hazard" is lurking, because decision-makers (city planners, alderman) are not the ones baring the risks.  Does this mean that incremental, stepwise and adaptive planning is almost always better than radical interventions with large mega-projects? 

When new challenges and new opportunity coalitions emerge, people need to relate to one another, create patterns of interaction and share the ‘transaction costs’ of planning and coordination. This means, that analysis and design capacity need to be mobilized (by whom?), while actors keep being sensitive to their own practical conditions within a particular institutional and physical context, where existing structures bring about reproductive patterns of (habitual) behavior and cultural codes of conduct. Old arrangements have created path-dependent structures in society, with inherent boundaries that are perceived as constraining by some, and protective or reassuring by others. Spatial planning, if conducted on an ‘automatic pilot’, tends to serve privileged interests while ‘skimming’ qualities in already degraded districts or invading with new projects in the territories of vulnerable groups and inhabitants.

Collective action requires conscious considerations of collaboration, participation, democratic decision-making, integrative quality and long-term focus, considerations of spatial (in-)justices, and more. This raises difficult questions: How can a vision-building process include integral decision-making, while avoiding group-think, make use of the best available knowledge under uncertainty, and while mitigating and compensating for new spatial injustices of proposed interventions?

The focus in this course for "Urban Future Lab 2021 - 2022" is targeted on the theme of sustainability challenges of cities and regions after the Corona crisis: with limited budgets of city governments, but with grand challenges for affordable housing, sustainable mobility systems, climate resilience, renewable energy (and energy saving), and sufficient environmental and health qualities for its citizens, residents, workers, and commuters alike.