Futures studies vary all the way from artistic and philosophical descriptions of the future to quantified socio-economic analysis. They differ with regard to their relationship with planning and decision-making—from autonomous studies to integrated parts of a planning document.
There is no one single way of developing a model for futures-oriented planning. In fact, there is very little in the literature about how the results of a futures study can be used in operational plans and how futures studies need to be modified in order to be useful in a planning system. An important requirement in such a model, however, seems to be that futures studies should provide perspectives for policies or proposals in a plan. Linking futures studies to planning and decision-making processes is not only a matter of providing results to serve as inputs in the processes but also a question of organizing futures studies in such a way that experience of new ways of thinking can be transferred to planners in the course of the studies.
The aim of this paper is to examine some important aspects of the relationship between futures studies and planning and to present a model where futures studies have been developed as an integral part of urban planning. The paper is divided into four sections besides the introduction: The first section discusses differences and similarities between futures studies and planning. The second section presents some features of models which were useful for connecting futures studies to planning. The model is presented in the third section which is divided into two subsections: the first deals with methods and the second with experience of integrating futures studies in the planning efforts of the urban government in Västerås, Sweden. The final section of the paper presents some general conclusions about the requirements of imaginative and normative focus in urban planning, the improvement of the conceptual framework and operative features of the Västerås Model, and the role of analysis in policy-making.
