Inventing the future

RICS Research Foundation programme

The RICS Research Foundation is sponsoring a programme to help built environment professionals understand the changes information and communication technologies may make to the town and cities, and the implications for appropriate sustainable development.

The aim also is to ensure that guidelines can be drawn as to what continuing professional development there should be for built environment professionals. The studies will show as well what are the drivers for change currently affecting our urban environment and what therefore will be the demands on all aspects both of the built environment but also on its hinterland natural environment and those of us that live, work, play, worship, learn or indeed shop within it.

The intention from the beginning was to break the mould of traditional research. The underlying process being adopted is scenario planning, a methodology adopted by Shell from the 1970s and in use across the world as a way not of predicting the future but of providing a number of scenarios into which people can place themselves so as to be able better to discover the strains, tensions, ideas, threats and possibilities present in that scenario and hence work out how to respond from the perspective of the 'here and now'.

More details of links to scenario planning are contained within the RICS Foundation web site. This mould breaking research would not work without much help. The RICS Research Foundation commissioned Partnerships Online to effect an ongoing study involving a wide range of built environment, academic and policy professionals; all of whom are contributing in an ongoing way and some of whom were able to attend a workshop in central London, UK.

These pages outline the methodology together with a report of the first workshop, set up to test this approach. It was run by David Greenop, Drew Mackie and David Wilcox.

Briefing and background.
How we ran the workshop, including: