Abstract

GONZALEZ-ARELLANO, Salomón  and  MORALES-ZARAGOZA, Nora A.. Weak signals of the future of cities. Bol. cienc. tierra [online]. 2021, n.50, pp.54-61.  Epub Feb 07, 2022. ISSN 0120-3630.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rbct.n50.96769.

During the last decade, Future studies have developed a wide corpus of theory and methodologies where the "weak signal" framework stands out as controversial and complex to apply. In spite of these, there is a growing interest from government, urbanists and academics for analyzing future scenarios of a city. This article aims to revisit the notion of “weak signal” in the urban context, using retrospective analysis of three case studies where we traced weak signals linked to urban innovations in transportation, work and food domains. Our results let us conclude that cities' innovations are preceded by early signs, diffuse and low on visibility at first, which gradually incorporate strong contextual aspects and tendencies that could be associated with foresight scenario building. The three cases analysed, evidence that cities are undergoing great transformations guided by a combination of emergent economic movements and the incorporation of collaborative values that shape the way citizens move, work and feed.

Keywords : future cities; weak signals; anticipation; innovation.

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