Imagining urban futures: Participatory scenario planning London’s mobility to 2050

Abstract

Urban planning faces increasing uncertainty as cities grapple with climate change, technological disruption, and widening social inequalities. While futures and foresight methods are widely used in strategic planning, their integration into urban studies remains limited. This paper examines how participatory foresight can enrich urban studies by integrating collective imagination into scenario planning. Using London’s mobility futures to 2050 as a case, it explores how structured foresight methods, including trend scanning, weak signal analysis, and participatory workshops, can generate scenarios that move beyond technocratic projections to embed governance, equity, and lived experience. Four scenarios, namely Symbiotic Progress, Innovation in Devastation, Regeneration Stagnation , and Business-as-Usual , demonstrate how collective imagination reshapes foresight outputs, challenging assumptions and highlighting tensions in London’s transport futures. The findings contribute empirically by showing how diverse publics alter scenario content, and conceptually by positioning participatory foresight as a framework for interrogating power and imaginaries in urban planning. The paper argues for embedding participatory foresight more systematically into urban scholarship and practice to navigate uncertainty and advance equitable, sustainable mobility futures.