Design (and design research) have a rich history of developing ways of making possible futures visible and tangible through prototypes, models, scenarios, or visualisations. Less common are platforms that gather multiple perspectives in the same space about possible futures. Thinking about diverse, rather than alternative, futures is particularly relevant in the context of cities. This paper suggests an alternative way of developing future visions for cities, moving away from coherent narratives to more pluralistic composites. Using the Liveable Cities project as a mechanism for exploration, it reflects on how participatory design methods and information visualisation techniques can engage participants in developing visions of urban futures. The paper will describe the details of the approach. It will present a summary of the findings as well as a discussion on the methods, which will include challenges and shortcomings.

Abstract:Recently, much of the literature on sharing in cities has focused on the sharing economy, in which people use online platforms to share underutilized assets in the marketplace. This view of sharing is too narrow for cities, as it neglects the myriad of ways, reasons, and scales in which citizens share in urban environments. Research presented here by the Liveable Cities team in the form of participant workshops in Lancaster and Birmingham, UK, suggests that a broader approach to Sustainability 2017, 9, 701; doi:10.3390/su9050701 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2017, 9, 701 2 of 16 understanding sharing in cities is essential. The research also highlighted tools and methods that may be used to help to identify sharing in communities. The paper ends with advice to city stakeholders, such as policymakers, urban planners, and urban designers, who are considering how to enhance sustainability in cities through sharing.

Visualisations of future cities usually depict coherent scenarios that rarely express the complexity of urban life. Our research explores ways to articulate conflicts and diversities, rather than mitigate them, when reflecting on possible futures for urban life. We define Visual Conversations on Urban Futures as visualisations of future scenarios that utilise visual methods to generate, facilitate, and represent dialogues of multiple voices imagining possible futures for life in the city. This paper will introduce our research on this topic and reflect on a number of significant examples to draft a description of methods and processes of Visual Conversations on Urban Futures. It will then present three design experiments in which we adopted this approach in the context of interdisciplinary academic research on possible scenarios for urban futures. Finally, as this is an ongoing research project, we will suggest a number of open questions and possibilities for further practical and theoretical exploration.

This data article presents the UK City LIFE1 data set for the city of Birmingham, UK. UK City LIFE1 is a new, comprehensive and holistic method for measuring the livable sustainability performance of UK cities. The Birmingham data set comprises 346 indicators structured simultaneously (1) within a four-tier, outcome-based framework in order to aid in their interpretation (e.g., promote healthy living and healthy long lives, minimize energy use, uncouple economic vitality from CO2 emissions) and (2) thematically in order to complement government and disciplinary siloes (e.g., health, energy, economy, climate change). Birmingham data for the indicators are presented within an Excel spreadsheet with their type, units, geographic area, year, source, link to secondary data files, data collection method, data availability and any relevant calculations and notes. This paper provides a detailed description of UK city LIFE1 in order to enable comparable data sets to be produced for other UK cities. The Birmingham data set is made publically available at http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/3040/ to facilitate this and to enable further analyses. The UK City LIFE1 Birmingham data set has been used to understand what is known and what is not known about the livable sustainability performance of the city and to inform how Birmingham City Council can take action now to improve its understanding and its performance into the future (see “Improving city-scale measures of livable sustainability: A study of urban measurement and assessment through application to the city of Birmingham, UK” Leach et al. [2]).

This article considers the pedagogical importance of noticing nature at the hyperlocal scale, and the role that design can play in nurturing and supporting these processes. Biodiversity Logbooks are a set of educational resources that promote direct engagement with everyday environments through a variety of creative methods, including cyanotype photography, physical computing, collaborative mapping and journaling. These tools are intended to be used in combination to develop skills of noticing plants in their habitats and understanding how different environments support different life forms. This article argues that while complex environmental phenomena are often addressed at the global scale (with local impacts presented as scalable outcomes), focusing on small, often overlooked details can have beneficial pedagogical outcomes. These consist of increased attentiveness and care for the needs of other species, better retention of knowledge generated through embodied experience and stronger connection with place. In the article, the impacts of the project as described by the teachers who participated in the experience are discussed in connection to broader epistemological issues. These include plant blindness as a widespread phenomenon in urban populations, and the importance of observing messy entanglements and non-scalable dynamics when building knowledge about the environment.