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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
The Smart City approach is the favored paradigm of 2010s urban development. Smart cities are hoped to help curb greenhouse gas emissions and improve quality of life. Smart cities strive for these things with technological solutions: information technology can enable new kinds of co-operation and interweave various city elements together…
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It is safe to say that cities in all Western countries see their futures differently compared to their situations just five years ago. Many megatrend-level drivers have made cities, their leaders, and ordinary citizens consider the future as something deviating from the steady development of the past decades: A new…
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This workshop, co-hosted by the Nordic think-tank Demos Helsinki and Meeting of the Minds, will gather urban leaders from cities, corporations, start-ups, non-profits and academia to explore state-of-art methods on urban foresight. The workshop demonstrates how the Nordic way of using foresight in urban regeneration creates better, smarter and more…
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This report shares how young people aged 14-19 helped shape Scotland’s Horizon Scanning through a participatory foresight process co-designed with Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament. It reveals insights on young people’s perspectives on topics such as climate, technology, democracy, and society more broadly, and shows how engaging them meaningfully can strengthen anticipatory governance. The methodology offers learnings and tools for governments seeking to embed long-term thinking into policy, and build trust and momentum towards shared large-scale goals.
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This report, created in collaboration with the EU Horizon-funded LIKE-A-PRO project and over 50 food experts across sectors and regions, underscores the urgent need to change the default protein production and consumption within the next two decades.
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How can countries strengthen their capacity for long-term governance and ensure that future generations are taken into account in decision-making? In this white paper, we highlight ways to promote anticipatory governance based on the views of key Finnish stakeholders. By translating the Finnish experience into a broader context, we aim to provide universally applicable strategies for advancing long-term governance and promoting intergenerational justice.
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Imaginaries on Sustainability Transformation – Report outlines three positive futures
May 19, 2025
Imagining futures where society has successfully undergone a sustainability transformation helps us envision a world in which today’s major negative trends have been brought under control. But what kind of positive futures have been proposed in recent years? At the request of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development, Demos Helsinki conducted a literature review and drafted three preliminary visions of such futures.
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The anticipatory policy cycle: not just preparing for the future, but influencing it
May 14, 2025
Governments that invest in foresight-driven policymaking are better positioned to shape the conditions that they operate in. This is how to build policies that both anticipate and influence the future.
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Innovating urban development: Lessons from M4EG & moving beyond growth
April 17, 2025
Two key lessons from our work in the Mayors for Economic Growth project, in collaboration with UNDP: 1) Innovation needs to occur at multiple levels and 2) If we’re to be effective, we must remain humble.
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