Mission-oriented scenarios: a new method for urban foresight

1. Introduction

The mission-oriented approach (Mazzucato, 2018a; Deleidi and Mazzucato, 2021) aims to make public policies more effective by promoting pragmatic, multi-sectoral and multidisciplinary governance. Its main characteristic is to facilitate and encourage private contributions to the achievement of public benefit missions and to concretize the objectives in specific models of inter-institutional strategic action. Organizations involved in innovation processes are, therefore, called to strengthen their capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004) and improve their preparedness (Fuerth, 2009).

To this end, foresight and, particularly, scenario methods provide a valuable source of techniques that can be supportive in expanding the projective and anticipatory capacity of mission-oriented public policies. Over time, scenarios have gone from being a tool for strengthening the strategic potential of certain apparatuses, such as the military (Bell, 1997), to being a tool for economic planning, not only for states but also for large companies (Schwartz, 1996). Within foresight trans-discipline, dozens of techniques have been developed to explore probable futures, as in the case of Delphi (Barrett and Heale, 2002), but also to explore possible futures, as in the case of scenario planning techniques (Bishop et al., 2007), or to support the construction of preferred futures, in the case of so-called normative scenarios (Glenn, 2009).

In particular, Jim Dator's Manoa School Four Futures Dator (1998, 2009, 2017, 2020) is a method in which exploratory and normative functions find a convergence: it is useful to investigate unexpected futures, to reinforce awareness of the risk/opportunities of current trends, but also to facilitate decision-making to project a certain organization’s agency with respect to its preferred future (Cairns and Wright, 2018). At the same time, Manoa does not provide a specific framework for operationalizing scenarios into strategic actions, which can instead be derived from the mission-oriented approach.

The project “Turin 2030 – future proof” is an interesting case study because it applied the four archetypes and the mission-oriented approach in an integrated way on six different focal issues regarding the future of the city of Turin. This paper critically analyses the project and, starting from the strengths and weaknesses of the experience, proposes a methodological innovation – the “mission-oriented scenarios” – through the integration of some steps of Dator's four archetypes and Mazzucato's mission-oriented policies framework.

The results of Torino 2030 have already been described in a book (Barbera et al., 2021). The article updates and completes the analysis proposed in the book, introducing the revision and systematization of the methodological innovation steps experimented during the execution of the project.

2. Previous research

Mission-oriented policies can be defined as systemic public policies that draw on frontier knowledge to attain specific goals, or “big science deployed to meet big problems” (Ergas, 1987). The mission oriented approach was born in the USA innovation policies with respect to essentially military and geopolitical goals, such as the Manhattan project and the NASA project for moon landing (Mowery, 2010; Nelson, 2011). However, this approach has proven to be partial and inadequate to tackle challenges such as those posed by wicked problems, where interests and visions on the objective to reach diverge, and solutions are not only referred to a specific techno-scientific findings (Foray et al., 2009; Fagerberg, 2017). This is the reason for which Mazzucato (2018b, p. 1;) proposed a new approach in which public and private sectors “join forces”: the public actor has the role of guiding innovation processes, in particular in defining their direction, but, it encourage the private and research sectors to find autonomously solutions and to benefit economically from them.

According to this new reformulation, missions should have some distinctive characteristics (Mazzucato and Semieniuk, 2017; Mazzucato, 2021):

• to be related to people's daily lives;

• to be operationalizable in sets of indicators, set a well-defined time horizon and involve public and private research and development;

• to provide opportunities for synergy between multiple economic sectors and multiple levels of government; and

• to encourage the construction of heterarchical organizational networks (Stark, 2011), where there is freedom to experiment with different methods to achieve the goal of public interest.

As a guide for policymaker, Mazzucato (2018b, p. 2) proposed a framework to operationalize the mission-oriented approach in four different analytical steps, which consists of identifying a SDG, then a set of missions consistent with the SDG, the sectors and social actors directly involved by the missions and different kind of strategic actions to fulfil the mission. This framework, which initially was elaborated for be applied to the innovation policies of European Union, has been also used in the urban policies arena: In particular, in the programme Horizon Europe 2021–2027, five mission boards were established to develop visions and missions for the future of the Union, including a specific board on climate-neutral and smart cities.

In implementing the mission-oriented approach at multiple levels of public policy, references to foresight as a source of useful techniques and methods to strengthen the projective and anticipatory capacity of programming have been recurrent (van Asselt et al.2014). Among the pioneers of this line of research is Ben Martin (2010) and the University of Sussex's SPUR, which has focused on the role of foresight as a policy-making tool in the governance of scientific and technological change. Mazzucato and Perez (2015) explicitly referred to foresight as a resource for developing more forward-looking public policies based on missions. Rosa et al. (2021), when describing the results of two participatory foresight projects, highlighted the usefulness of implementing citizen visioning methods (future dialogue, narrative generation) to improve the quality of strategic planning by integrating expert knowledge and experience in everyday life. Bradfield et al. (2005) focused properly on the role of scenario techniques as a structured consultation process, which allows different stakeholders to collaborate on policy-making.

Specifically on the urban policies, an extensive literature has conceptualized and investigated the application of alternative futures methods for urban planning (Ratcliffe and Krawczyk, 2011), through the use of macro-historical analysis (Daffara, 2011), futures triangle and CLA (Inayatullah, 2011; Russo, 2015) and different kinds of scenarios methods, among which the Dator’s Manoa School Four Futures Dator (2009, 2017, 2020). This method was developed and used over the course of more than 30 years of applying strategic foresight methods in heterogeneous organizations and communities (Bezold, 2009). The peculiarity of this approach, particularly with respect to other scenario methods (Bishop et al., 2007; Chermack, 2022), concerns the articulation of narratives. Instead of being generated “inductively”, scenario narratives are developed “deductively” by projecting the interrelated outcomes of driving forces (DFs) of change into four predetermined archetypal images of the futures – continue growth, collapse, discipline and transformations – which correspond to the four abstract imaginaries most frequently held by participants in futures and foresight interventions (Figure 1).

According to the guidance that Dator (1998, 2017, 2020) gives, and which other authors who have revised and updated the method also reconstruct (Fergnani and Song, 2020), the four archetypes process involves about eight different steps:

1. the community devising the futures exercise must make a shared analysis of its past;

2. reasoning about the risks and opportunities of the present;

3. focusing on a focal issue to which the futures exercise must respond;

4. identifying the DFs that are likely to have an impact over a long-term time horizon, 20–50 years;

5. “move” the DFs according to the direction envisioned by the four archetypes in order to establish a narrative for each;

6. identify among them the preferred vision of the future;

7. identify strategic actions to realize the vision; and

8. repeat the exercise periodically, to update the narratives and consequent action plans.

Several academic works have described the use of the scenario archetypes methods for policy connected with urban issues. Daniels et al. (2021) described the application of the scenario archetypes method with other methods (including Delphi), in Houston, with a long-term time horizon (2050) and with a focus on the impact of climate change, particularly extreme weather events that cause frequent flooding in the city. Firoozpour et al. (2021) applied the Manoa School Four Futures Method to local development policies of the Theran metropolitan area, extracting the main DFs from a qualitative analysis of historical and policy-related documents of the city, and sorting them with the six sectors approach grid. Dubois and Dimanch (2021) used the four archetypes to analyse the future implications of COVID-19 pandemic for entertainment dependent cities after the decline of touristic fluxes (Dubois and Dimanch, 2021).

The Turin 2030 project, which we illustrate in the following pages, differs from the these case studies in at least three aspects:

1. the process was led by researchers of two universities, University of Turin and Polytechnic of Turin, as part of a research project aimed at testing a foresight method for strategic urban design;

2. scenario development was not carried out by the authors of this article, but by mixed panels of researchers, institutional and business stakeholders, privileged observers and activists; and

3. the use of scenario archetypes was integrated with the steps of the mission-oriented approach, in particular in the definition of the focal issues, in the selection criteria of the participants, and in the strategic implementation of the narratives.

3. Context

Turin is the fourth largest metropolitan city in Italy by number of inhabitants (2.26 million in 2020). For decades, it was the one town company [1] of FIAT (now FCA), one of the largest automotive companies in the world. As early as 1981, the local manufacturing industry employed 442,701 workers, and the secondary sector employed about 50% of the workforce (Berta et al., 2004). During the past few decades, the outsourcing of manufacturing and tertiarization of the economy have affected Turin, progressively taking away from its original role as an industrial hub (Bagnasco, 1986; De Rossi and Durbiano, 2006). In 2020, workers in the secondary sector decreased by 65% (Barbera and Marciano, 2021). Deindustrialization has left abandoned industrial plants and increasingly uninhabited working-class neighbourhoods. These “urban voids”, while generating degradation and insecurity in some cases, have also functioned as attractors for urban regeneration processes.

From the late 1990s, the electoral continuity of the left wing city councils, and the consolidation of collaborative relationships between entrepreneurial, academic and political stakeholders, brought about the establishment of an urban coalition, which shared objectives and priorities for action. One of the most interesting outputs of this polycentric network are the three strategic plans (2000, 2006 and 2020) that the city has developed since the new millennium, accelerating Turin's positioning as a hub for urban innovation. Indeed, the city's new economy is distinguished by an increasingly relevant role of tourism, capital-intensive industries, major public events (e.g. the XX Winter Olympic Games in 2006), creative industries and universities (Barbera and Parisi, 2019). The outcome of these processes is an urban agenda defined by Belligni and Ravazzi (2019) as “polytechnic, polycentric, and pyrotechnic”, because while it shines in terms of originality and number of initiatives, it fails to intercept widespread social problems, such as youth unemployment, lack of inclusion of migrants and gentrification (Semi, 2015).

For the future, Turin is preparing to face wicked problems typical of advanced capitalist metropolitan contexts. In particular, it will have to manage an aging population, which in 2030 will see the over-65s make up 30% of the total; it will have to improve integration policies for migrants and the “second generations”, which will make up 40% of the population aged 18–35, also starting in 2030 (Barbera and Marciano, 2021). Finally, it will have to understand how to relocate its impressive heritage of disused industrial infrastructures for activities capable of creating income and maintaining an average urban gross domestic product higher than in the rest of the country.

The project “Turin 2030” was born in this context of lights and shadows (Bagnasco et al., 2020), and is part of a debate on the future of the city, which in 2019 appeared “postponed”, according to the definition proposed by the analysts of the Giulio Einaudi Institute and which in the following years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic has become even more suspended and indefinite.

4. Turin 2030 methodology

The project “Turin 2030” was carried out between June 2020 and September 2021. The main objective of the project was to develop, in a time horizon of 10 years, a set of strategic actions to be carried out in the urban policies of Turin.

The project consisted in the following stages (Figure 2) of implementation:

• Generation: The six focal issues (Figure 3) investigated by the project included the reindustrialization of the city from a green-smart perspective, the implementation of a unified governance strategy between the metropolitan city and inland mountainous areas, local welfare, urban regeneration of certain areas and environmental and cultural policies. They were chosen because they were relevant to the public debate on the future of Turin but also because they reflected the disciplinary areas of expertise of the researchers involved in the project's scientific committee. Finally, researchers and institutional and business stakeholders with expertise in the six fields were identified.

• Exploration: The second part of the project consisted in the organization of six public webinars held, each one, by four experts of international standing, with the task of carrying out a global environmental scanning in the field of the identified focal issues. At the same time, the editorial team conducted a qualitative analysis of the trends in the metropolitan city of Turin from the socio-economic, technological, environmental and political points of view, including flow data relating to the 20-year period 2000–2020.

• Analysis: At the end of each seminar, a workshop was organized with the same focal issue. The panels, in this case, were composed of 12 experts operating in the city of Turin, of which 50% were researchers in various disciplinary fields, and 50% stakeholders from the local business and political world. Basically, they experimented the Four Futures steps for each focal issues of the project and they elaborated narrations.

• Strategy: The scientific committee of the project used the following scheme (Figure 4), inspired by the one proposed by Mazzucato (2018a, p. 2), to strategize the narratives of scenarios. For each focal issue were pointed out two missions, which, always following the Mazzucato's model, operationalize the general challenge by identifying long-term objectives and expected results. Then, for each mission, were identified sectors, which are organizational fields characterized by actors with a specific agency power. The last level concerns the strategic actions, i.e. innovative projects geared towards achieving the objectives set by the missions, led by the sectors and stakeholders involved in the previous steps.

Due to the restrictions imposed by the global pandemic, all phases of the project were held online, although the initial design called for a physical presence. Several web platforms (Zoom, Webex) and collaborative software (Miro) were used to allow for maximum visibility and interaction among participants.

5. Generating mission-oriented scenarios

The content of scenarios and strategic actions for each of the focal issues is available in the publication dedicated to the project results (Barbera and Marciano, 2021). In this section, we proceed to illustrate the operational and methodological limitations encountered in project implementation and to formulate our proposed methodological innovation, the mission-oriented scenarios.

6. Conclusions

Mission-oriented scenarios can contribute to the generation of more sustainable and inclusive urban public policies. This methodological proposal is based on an original mix of knowledge exchange procedures borrowed from methodological approaches with different backgrounds: the mission-oriented and the archetypal scenarios. Their conjunction could support the formulation of ambitious yet pragmatic policies, giving a plurality of actors the opportunity to act and establish fruitful and lasting partnerships.

The privileged application of this approach is urban policies for several reasons. The first is that the urban level is where global challenges and local action meet, requiring tools that stimulate both political imagination and strategic design. Moreover, the urban level is the one where it is possible to involve multilevel local actors and where it is easier to encourage the exchange of knowledge between experts and non-experts. Finally, strategic planning with a medium-long time horizon (5–10 years) is often located at the urban level.

It is clear that a single application, however complex, does not entitle one to speak of a new foresight “method”, let alone of new public policy management. Moreover, in its “academic” version, this method requires a certain amount of time and economic resources to invest, which are not always easy to find in the local government context.

However, the assumptions made about the standardization of this new process could inspire other applications. Indeed, foresight is increasingly embedded in the institutional thinking of public administrations, particularly in Europe, where the pandemic has shown the limitations of public policy analysis and accelerated awareness of the potential of futures and foresight.

Finally, the use of the mission-oriented scenario is designed for strategic urban planning, such as the elaboration of an urban plan or the realization of a major work, and not for small “wiring” actions. This should help local governments, universities and others potentially interested in conducting the process to find the time and money to carry out all the steps of the method, or at least those they consider necessary.