Students' abilities to envision scenarios of urban futures

Abstract

In this paper, we report on students’ abilities to envision scenarios of urban futures after a lesson series based on futures education. The results on the critical and creative scenario thinking of geography students in three upper sec- ondary schools improved significantly between a pretest and posttest. However, embedding newly imagined ideas in the spatial structures of tomorrow’s cities turned out to be challenging for students. Although geographical knowledge and skills do seem to support students in scenario thinking, it appears to be a complex task to effectively combine knowledge and imagination in scenarios of urban futures.