Planning Scenario and Policy Workshop (PLAN30001)

A key challenge for urban planning is to develop and assess a range of possible future scenarios that can confirm, question, and sometimes challenge ongoing processes and trends. Scenario planning provides planners a framework to make non-emergency decisions more effectively by providing insight into plans, budgets, and forecasts, and painting a clearer picture of key drivers for urban development and growth, and the potential impact of future planning decisions or development problems (e.g., climate change).

In doing so, scenario planning can provide a competitive advantage by enabling planners and decision makers to react quickly and decisively — because a situation has been thought through and actions documented, no one must scramble when during a crisis. Thus, scenario planning aims to define planning’s critical uncertainties and develop plausible scenarios (situations) in order to discuss the impacts and the responses to give for each one of them. If planners are aware of what could happen, they are more likely to deal with what will happen. So, how can planners use scenario planning to help to make planning decisions agile and able to adapt to multiple eventualities?

This subject uses a range of publicly available, quantitative and qualitative data, along with key policy documents, to analyse selected current processes and trends in urban areas. These trends and issues are used as a basis to generate goals and assess a range policy for managing urban processes and ongoing change under different scenarios. Students will critically examine existing policy, alongside their assessment of key trends, as a basis for developing and justifying new policy options. More importantly, students will learn about scenario planning as a disciplined method for imagining possible futures that planning applies to a great range of urban issues.