Cities are increasingly threatened by changing climate, extreme events, and persistent inequities. There is an urgent need for a future-oriented urban systems science that integrates planning, action, and sustainability transformations inspired by community-based knowledge and visions. This requires a holistic transdisciplinary approach that blends diverse methods for understanding cities as complex social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). We examine the future resilience of cities through integrated processes of participatory visioning and multi-criteria resilience assessments of visions. In a series of three workshops with 35 local stakeholders in San Juan, Puerto Rico, we co-developed six distinct future plausible and desirable visions for the long-term (2080) future of the municipality. With city stakeholders, we identified key future challenges and goals, and then co-developed tangible visions with temporally and spatially explicit SETS strategies, pathways, and targets to achieve the future goals. Finally, we refined scenarios and assessed the tradeoffs among future visions based on qualitative sustainability and resilience assessments, as well as quantitative assessments of land change and resilience to future flood and heat stress projections. The transitions between current and future land use/cover classes in each scenario were simulated based on participant driven rules in a cellular automata (CA) model.
Results/Conclusions
In six future scenarios, diverse stakeholders envisioned the future of San Juan as resilient to coastal, urban, and river flooding, with self-reliant food and energy security, and as a connected and just city. The CA simulated land use/cover changes demonstrated significant differences between scenarios both spatially and quantitatively. In 2080, the high density urban area decreased 44%, 66% and 96% in the Connected City, Food and Energy Security, and Flood Resilient scenarios, respectively, compared to current (2000) high density areas. For example, the coastal flood scenario prioritized coastal retreat as a strategy to enhance resilience, but it resulted in significant tradeoffs between mitigating exposure to future flood and heat stress and a significant loss of cultural heritage in historic coastal neighborhoods. The visions also diverge in key prioritized strategies that enhance overall system resilience, such as capacity for adaptive management and redundancy within the system. We highlight how exploring alternative future visions and their outcomes is an opportunity to explore diverse policy options and enhance cities’ capacities for long-term resilience planning. This participatory futures research integrating collective knowledge with future quantitative and qualitative multi-criteria assessments offers a complementary alternative to traditional projections of complex systems.