The disruption caused by COVID-19 has made it only too clear that the future will be characterised by volatile change and uncertainty. So how can planners and other infrastructure leaders forge a strategy that has the best chance of providing for society in the years to come? Here we discuss why FUTURES – a six-stage process developed by Mott MacDonald and the University of the West of England, Bristol – is the right approach for these uncertain times.
For planners and others tasked with deciding what infrastructure we will require over the coming decades, COVID-19 has added a new layer of uncertainty to an already uncertain future. For instance, the combination of homeworking, social distancing rules and urban business closures have affected patterns of commuting and leisure travel so much that it is hard to make a confident prediction about the demand for road journeys and public transport over the next few months, let alone over the much longer timescales that are relevant for infrastructure investments.
So far it is unclear whether, and to what extent, people’s lifestyles and preferences will be permanently changed by the pandemic. But deferring decisions until the crisis has passed is not a realistic option: other imperatives, such as the need to adapt our infrastructure in response to climate change and to tackle economic and social inequality, have not gone away and are only becoming more pressing. There is also no guarantee of when the disruption caused by the COVID-19 might lift.
So how can planners proceed with important strategic and tactical decisions amid such uncertainty?
Decide and provide
Part of the answer is to stop giving forecasts of future needs such as predictions of passenger demand. Planning has traditionally involved producing forecasts based on understanding of past trends, and then aiming to provide the right infrastructure to meet this need – a so-called ‘predict and provide’ approach. Predicted needs become the reference point for project proposals and cost-benefit analyses, the focus for business cases, and the subject of debate about whether to take action - or do nothing - and all the associated potential impacts.
Before COVID-19, the world was already becoming characterised by increasingly dynamic and volatile change, which made ‘predict and provide’ problematic. Rather than there being one likely future that we can frame our plans around, it is only too apparent that there is a wide range of plausible future scenarios. We need to come up with solutions that perform robustly in a wide range of these scenarios, rather than just one.
Furthermore, it’s clear that in balancing the competing needs of the economy, society and the environment – and particularly in regard to the climate change emergency – planners cannot afford to be neutral about the type of future they want. Infrastructure systems can influence people’s behaviour and actively shape the future, so we need to be confident that they are working towards the outcomes we desire. Recognising this, planners should work with the community and other stakeholders to define a ‘preferred future’ and then seek to provide infrastructure and systems that will contribute towards its realisation. This alternative philosophy is called ‘decide and provide’ and it is at the heart of the Future Uncertainty Toolkit for Understanding and Responding to an Evolving Society (FUTURES), an approach developed by Mott MacDonald and the University of the West of England, Bristol.
FUTURES was designed to help national agencies and infrastructure operators to inform policies and programmes; regional authorities and asset owners to guide strategies and prioritisation processes; local authorities to support the planning process for infrastructure; and owners, investors and developers to set the vision and delivery mechanisms for strategic sites and assets.
Triple access system
FUTURES describes the ‘triple access system’ by which people access the things they want and need, whether that is goods, services, recreation, or social contact with other people. It is access that creates the basis for economic activity and social wellbeing. The three axes of the triple access system are land use (spatial proximity), telecommunications/digital connectivity and physical connectivity. From the planner’s perspective, it is easy to concentrate on physical connectivity –transport – as the most important way of giving people access to the things they need or want. Yet it is often possible, or even preferable, for people to access these things digitally or to live close enough to walk to them.
“During the COVID-19 lockdown, digital connectivity has grown, as has the importance of local proximity – the old adage of ‘live local, act global’ has really come into its own,” says Glenn Lyons, Mott MacDonald’s professor of future mobility and the leader in creating the FUTURES approach. “People are transacting remotely, but also enjoying their local communities a bit more using their feet and pedals. What this has highlighted is that we live in a triple access system, where many of us have a choice about how we access things, and this has helped make the system resilient against the shock of the pandemic. Where people do not have those alternatives – for example, if they are dependent on the transport system to physically go to work – they are more vulnerable. An important part of rethinking the future is considering how we can use the ‘decide and provide’ approach to maximise access, and not limit ourselves to thinking about mobility.”
Where people enjoy alternatives in their access, it becomes more important for planners to work with them to define preferred futures and develop compatible solutions. For example, cycle lanes will encourage more people to leave their car at home for local journeys; faster broadband will encourage working from home; high- speed rail will make the train more attractive than domestic flights.
“For planners, it’s about how we take advantage of evolving behaviours, and changing them further in ways that we think are helpful to society,” adds Glenn. “And part of that of course is how we change the built environment, including new transport and other types of infrastructure.”