New Application DL: 14 October 2026
How do urban futures flow?
Multiple, interconnected challenges are unfolding simultaneously. Climate change, environmental degradation, technological shifts, rapid urbanisation, migration, and geopolitical instability are reshaping cities and urban life. Planners play a crucial role in co-shaping urban futures through transformative action that addresses today’s rapidly evolving needs while safeguarding the needs of future generations. This task is complicated by the unpredictability and uncontrollability of current challenges, whose outcomes are difficult—if not impossible—to anticipate or steer.
The workshop "How do urban futures flow?" will focus on the application of futuring and related transformative processes to a highly relevant and pressing issue in urban futures: flows. Urban flows describe the movement of people, goods, energy, information and services through the city and how they shape urban form, governance and everyday life. Especially considering the disruptive changes in the technological underpinnings of both urban artifacts (e.g., autonomous mobility, on-demand transportation, physical internet) and information management (e.g., Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, digital twins), the application of futuring to this topic is of utmost importance.
We invite scholars from the fields of futuring, urban flows, mobility, logistics, smart cities, planning and design, and all related and intersectoral fields. We also welcome practitioners and other professionals with interest on the topic. Early career scholars and practitioners are highly encouraged to apply, as participants are not expected to be seasoned experts regarding the futuring topics they have an interest in.
Submit your application by 30 September 2026 via this submission form (+ information below)
Scope and Theme
This workshop will combine the problematics of urban flows with that of futuring.
Futuring will be less of an issue of ‘control the future’, implying a fixed expectation, but rather instead to ‘midwife the future’, in which there is no fixed expectation (Ache, 2017; Ganis, 2015). Instead of knowing the exact outcomes in advance to implement a future according to ‘plan’, we might rather be looking into trajectories and possibilities (Hillier & Healey, 2016). In this context, planners are seen not as linear and order-setting parts, but as complex cognitively charged individuals who carry an individual and partial mental representation, and as part of a two-way selforganizing process between physical environments and mental representations (Portugali, 2011).
Similar articulations of two-way, bottom-up processes can be found in tangential, yet relevant and pertinent, organizational literature (Weick, 1988, Sirolli, 1999). Futuring aims to understand how we try to predict or imagine the future in cities, what old and new approaches and tools are relevant, what vocabulary is needed to capture different, more transformative futures, and what kind of knowledge is relevant. In the midst of these questions, there has been a call for an "advocate planner" figure who not only amplifies voices in shaping the future, but also develops new literacies to articulate them.
The urban flows lens will translate futuring’s macro scope into concrete questions about how flows might be reorganised, intensified, constrained or re-valued - always in view of future cities as a ‘collective oeuvre’ (Lefebvre) benefitting all citizens. Urban flows present a twofold problem for the future of the urban environment. On the one hand, the future of urban flows depends on technological advancements being implemented to adapt to societies’ call for more sustainable futures. On the other hand, human behaviour itself is changing, with significant consequences for the movements, routines, interruptions and encounters that make urban life habitable. This twoway relationship provides an endless source of reflection. Many flows co-exist, come together, influence each other, and must be reconsidered when thinking of transformative futures to create thriving, inclusive, socially just, and sustainable cities and urban areas:
● People: The city has traditionally been a place where newcomers settle. Growth and decline in cities are directly related to the coming and going of people with different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. One of the most difficult things to anticipate when considering urban futures are how people’s preferences and behaviour will change. Flows of people, where they settle, live, recreate, shop, work, interact with people and nature, and work, influence and are affected by the spatial structure of all these activities.
● Mobility and transportation: Urban mobility and transportation flows move people, goods, and services, and are at the same time constantly affected by changing housing, work or recreational preferences, economic principles, and new technologies. Some cities are shifting away from car-centric layouts, prioritizing sustainable, multimodal networks and digital technologies to enable sustainable mobility systems. Add to that the challenge of spatially integrating evolving solutions like autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, and on-demand services in mobility and transportation flows.
● Goods and services: Modern cities almost exclusively rely on the import of resources like food to meet their daily basic needs. At the same time, cities are clusters of industrial production, service provision, or creative industries. Digitalisation adds layers of growing e-commerce and changing consumer preferences. The flows of incoming, outgoing, and internal goods and services rely on centralized infrastructure, logistics nodes, and decentralized "last-mile" delivery networks. Circular principles are becoming increasingly important to shorten supply chains and facilitate sustainable economic urban systems.
● Data and information: Data flows in cities represent the digital and physical exchange of information, people, and resources that keep urban environments operational. These systems synthesize inputs like traffic metrics, energy consumption, and human mobility to streamline city management and improve citizen well-being. The impact of different data sensing and governance models (e.g. corporate, municipal and commons), and the increasing digitalisation (e.g. the Internet of Things, smart cities and digital twins) impacts how urban space is interpreted, remembered, governed and trusted.
● Water and biota: Water proves to be a crucial system for the city, and that system will become increasingly manifest due to climate change. Whereas many cities created hard barricades between water and the rest of the city, or even covered up rivers and streams, integrating water flows within urban areas and living with water is becoming an important strategy to protect communities against the consequences of climate change. Furthermore, biota or living organisms like flora and fauna are crucial for biodiversity, and rely on both blue and green infrastructure networks to move, grow, and thrive.
● Energy: Energy flows are closely connected spatial and economic structures. In many modern cities, energy networks still rely strongly on fossil fuel flows. The energy transition require a rethinking of our energy infrastructure, power networks, and energy flows, require sustainable and renewable sources, and spatial structures to facilitate this transition.
Workshop location and format
From 1 to 3 February 2027 in Porto, Portugal, the Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment (CITTA), in collaboration with the AESOP Thematic Group Urban Futures, will organise a three-day workshop to address these questions.
Participants will engage in various workshop formats, supported by local mentors and working in smaller groups. They will develop and propose new and creative futuring approaches for urban and flow planning in the city of Porto, while engaging in a broader discussion of how the local lessons can inform general key learning about the future of urban flows. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute futuring and similar approaches they are familiar with, or interested in, and to learn from others.
Roundtable discussions will be organised for interdisciplinary debates, and new creative approaches will be encouraged through keynotes and mentor sessions to provide a unifying platform. The meeting, enriched by the sharing of experiences related to local expertise, will feature presentations on the practices of different entities, including the Porto Municipality and the Maritime Port Authority.
The question “How do urban futures flow?” will be examined in depth, and alternative methodologies, approaches, and toolkits for both global and local contexts will be explored.
How to participate
The workshop focuses on generating ideas and achieving results in a short period of time. The workshop will accommodate a maximum of 30 participants. To ensure diversity in groups and facilitate a fair selection process, candidates are expected to submit a brief professional account (submission form), including a short statement of motivation on how the workshop resonates with your own work or interests (300 words) and an extended abstract regarding your actual research or practice project and how it relates and can contribute to the workshop (750 words, references not included).
The organisers plan to document the workshop results in an edited publication (with ISBN), combining group work products, expert reflections, and the individual extended abstracts coming from participants (in revised form).
The submission and the upload of the extended abstract can be done via this submission form.
The deadline for submission is 30 September 2026.
Programme
- Day 1 (1 February, 9:30-18:00): welcome and opening of the workshop, keynote speech, presentations by the invited institutions, group discussion, group formation, recreational visit;
- Day 2 (2 February, 9:30-18:00): groups introduction and first discussion on the project theme (e.g. Method 635), workshop session and general discussion;
- Day 3 (3 February, 9:30-17:00): Final proposals of the participant groups for the local case (Toolkits for the local case and further reflection on “How do urban futures flow?”), short presentation of each group and closing panel session.
The programme may be subject to change. A detailed, final programme will be published closer to the start of the workshop.
Timeline
- Submission of application form deadline: 30 September 2026
- Notification of acceptance: end of October (accepted contributors will receive further information about registration and others shortly after the notification of acceptance)
- Workshop: 1-3 February 2027
Participation fee
Participation is subject to a €35 registration fee, payable upon acceptance. The organisation will provide lunch and coffee breaks. Financial support for travel or accommodation will not be provided.
Organisation and contact
The event is organised by Manuel Caldeira, Sara Cruz and .lvaro Costa from the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University (local organising team), together with the coordinators of the AESOP thematic group on Urban Futures, Peter Ache (Prof em. Radboud University, Netherlands) and Thomas Machiels (University of Antwerp, Belgium).
E-mail contact:
References
Ache, P. (2017). Vision Making in Large Urban Settings: Unleashing Anticipation? In Handbook of Anticipation (pp. 1–21). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_43-1
Ganis, M. (2015). Planning Urban Places: Self-Organising Places with People in Mind. Routledge & CRC Press. https://www.routledge.com/Planning-Urban-Places-Self-Organising-Places-with-Peoplein-Mind/Ganis/p/book/9781138297029
Hillier, J., & Healey, P. (2016). Foundations of the Planning Enterprise: Critical Essays in Planning Theory: Volume 1. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Foundations-of-the-Planning-Enterprise-Critical-Essays-in-Planning-Theory-Volume-1/Healey-Hillier/p/book/9780754627197
Portugali, J. (2011). Complexity, Cognition and the City. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19451-1
Sirolli, E. (1999). Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local Economies. New Society Publishers.
Weick, K. E. (1988). Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations. Journal of Management Studies, 25(4), 305–317. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.1988.tb00039.x
Weick, K. E. (1998). Introductory Essay—Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis. Organization Science, 9(5), 543–555. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.9.5.543
