A policy briefing focusing on climate change resilience in cities and a report funded and inspired by the UK Government Foresight Future of Cities project to catalyze discussion about people's 'visions' of the future of Cambridge are two of the outputs of the Forum's cities topic.
The Resilient Cities Policy Briefing
In January 2015, the Forum and the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) Policy Challenges Programme launched a policy challenges briefing that draws on the experience of some of the Forum's witnesses and highlights key policy issues related to the effects of climate change on cities and reflects on the adaptation of existing built environments and modes of governance.
Can we rethink how we design and live in cities? What measures can be taken to make them more resilient to extreme climate events and to long-term changes in climate? The Policy Challenges Programme posed these questions to a range of policy makers, technical experts and researchers drawn from the Forum and their answers have been brought together into a policy briefing that highlights some of the key issues in climate resilience in cities.
Visions of Cambridge in 2065
In 2014-15, the Forum and the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) co-led the “Visions of Cambridge in 2065” project, a Foresight-inspired project that brings together visions of the city from charities, city and county-level policymakers, companies, local organisations, networks, and researchers.
The aim of this project is to imagine possible futures of Cambridge; and to open up the possibility of imagining those futures to a broad cross-section of its citizens. This project was undertaken alongside six other city-specific case studies supported by the UK Government Foresight Future of Cities project.
This report is the result of the first phase of the Cambridge case study. It gathers together 24 visions from a wide variety of people who live and work in the city; who were all asked to think about the issues they considered critical to the continued and future success of Cambridge as a city.
In the pipeline: An output from our meetings
We are also in the process of distilling the key ideas from our meetings into a brief report on lessons for the focus of future research on this topic, and this will be released in May 2017.