Our goal with this radar is to showcase emerging solutions that can help people imagine and build the futures of cities. For this reason, our radar organises 80+ solutions into 10 slices, each representing one of the 10 targets of UN’s 11th Sustainable Development Goal - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. We zoomed in on SDG11 to bring awareness and focus to a globally accepted and structured guideline for urban development. Keep in mind that even if an entry is assigned to a certain target, it could also have a role in other targets.

This radar serves as a starting point, a futures literacy tool to help us imagine urban possibilities. There is no silver bullet that can take on this complex task of SDG11, nor are all necessary solutions presented on this radar. In this iteration of the Envisioning Cities radar, we have expanded our selection beyond technologies to also include some policies, ideas, strategies, concepts or trends. This shift illustrates that the futures of cities and their citizens do not depend solely on technology but on changes across the board. Technologies do not work in a vacuum. They interact in social, political, cultural and economic contexts, beyond the technical and academic. For this reason, this material is open and free, in the hopes it reaches the hands of decision-makers, politicians, startups, businesses, policy-makers, educators, and civilians. 

AI Assistant

Envisioning Cities is one of our first AI-powered radars. This interactive radar is equipped with a GPT-powered AI assistant. Feel free to ask questions and interact with the content in a different way. You can ask, for instance: Which could be the most promising solutions for (industry x)? Wait a few seconds, and you get a personalized answer.

New Urban Agenda

The Sustainable Development Goals were created in 2012 at the United Nations Conference in Rio de Janeiro, with the objective to “produce a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges facing our world.” However, the deadline for the SDGs is nearing in 2030, and it’s clear that even if they have helped drive progress, we are late. For this reason, United Nations Habitat launched in 2020 the New Urban Agenda, to accelerate these changes. The NUA is divided into four Core Dimensions: Social Sustainability, Economic Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability and Spatial Sustainability, which are all tagged in each entry that could promote these different sustainable facets. This means you can filter our selection through each of these aspects in the Highlight Menu.

Resilient Recovery: Building Back Better

As extreme natural events have significantly increased in the past 20 years, urban planners have an urgent need to think about how to build resilient cities. We have used The World Bank’s and GFDRR’s (Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery) framework for Resilient Recovery: Building Back Better, which promotes the achievement of “resilience through stronger, faster, and more inclusive post-disaster reconstruction.” Each solution has been tagged according to which moment they can be used, which you can explore as a filter: Humanitarian Relief, Restoration of Basic Services and Reconstruction and Asset Recovery.

co-created by Envisioning and Cappra Institute.