#4: Designing for Transitions: Visioning, Backcasting, Assessing the Present, and Transitions Related to the Lack of Affordable Housing
A reflection on our approach to envisioning a future in which the wicked problem of a lack of affordable housing, in Pittsburgh, PA, and beyond, has been resolved.
By Team Emergence: Tomar Pierson-Brown, Joe Nangle, Janice Lyu, Bingjie Sheng
Let us begin by saying that this pillar of the Transition Design approach, Visions for Transition, was the hardest to carry out. Since we were not co-creating these visions with actual stakeholders, we were co-creating future visions as a team of diverse thinkers. As a result, we experienced a range of synergies and setbacks. Some of us tended toward utopias, while others gloried in dystopic visions. For some of us, this process made the benefits of Transition Design more salient. For others, this was the point at which reverence for the Transition Design approach began to fracture. This post will describe the process we engaged in to create two Transition Design boards: one describing a future vision in which housing is a human right, and one that depicts the process of backcasting and milestoning from that vision. We conclude with reflections on our process and the lessons we learned while imagining a future in which access to affordable housing is no longer a wicked problem.
Developing Long Term Future Visions
First, our team was tasked to develop “vision facets” of a long-term future in which our wicked problem, lack of affordable housing, was resolved. We attempted to make these future visions using three different methodologies.
Our first attempt was to try to extrapolate future visions using the initial STEEP (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, and Political) analysis from Assignment #1, which was to map out the wicked problem. Our team went back to the wicked problem map and identified two pressing issues for each STEEP category and imagined what the long-term future would look like if it was resolved. For example
- Housing is recognized as a human right under the political category
- Individuals no longer spend more than 30% of their average median income for housing under the economic category. (Please see image below for more detailed issues under each category.)
For each issue, we identified at what level of everyday life (the household, neighborhood, city, region or planet) they would directly impact and worked our way up or down to imagine how the resolved issue will affect the other levels.
This exercise allowed our team to develop multiple facets of the long-term future and think about the future through social, technological, economical, environmental, and political lenses. We recognized, however, two shortcomings using this method. First, we found that identifying specific issues made it hard to imagine how the resolved issue impacted the future at each level of everyday life. For example, we imagined cities efficiently using abandoned lots to create more space for affordable housing. While this idea was great for our team to anchor and imagine what it would look like at the city, region, and planet level, it was hard for our team to go more local and envision how it affected those at a neighborhood or household level. Lastly, by using this method we found that our team was more or less forecasting, rather than backcasting, something we will discuss further later in this post. Specific issues grounded our team to imagine the future still within an independent and capitalistic America, trying to imagine how we get to that future from today. One of our teammates also questioned whether we were being bold enough, pushing us to revisit our work. We decided to redo the future vision and later overcame this issue via our third method, discussed below.
Understanding these shortcomings, we decided to redo the future visions in the shoes of the stakeholders. In our second approach, we attempted to mimic a real-world situation where multiple stakeholders would get together to discuss their future vision and come to an agreement. We went back to Assignment #2 and asked, “How would a single mom or a private developer envision the future where housing is a human right? Is this something a particular stakeholder would want?”
Working within this framework, our team quickly realized how hard it was to truly envision a future that is desirable from different stakeholders’ perspectives. We were easily able to imagine the future for single mothers who desired abundant, quality housing, but we hit a roadblock with the limited knowledge we had about certain stakeholders, particularly the private developers. Our team kept portraying the private developers as a powerful, yet anti-affordable-housing entity and was not able to imagine them wanting a future where lack of affordable housing was resolved. This reflected our limited ability to interview these stakeholders to truly understand their motive, core concerns, and desires. This exercise, however, helped us think about how we can go about convincing or getting other seemingly opposing stakeholders to come to a unified agreement about the future state.
People say, “third time’s the charm.” For our third and final attempt, we began by setting the stage of this long-term future. We discussed what kind of future we are in and brought in concepts such as Cosmopolitan Localism, Commoning, and Pluriversality. Instead of asking, “What does the future look like if lack of affordable housing was resolved?” we asked “What does housing look like in a future society where Cosmopolitan Localism, Commoning, and Pluriversality are practiced?” While we had to make some assumptions that stakeholders like private developers also desired these futures (with the notion that every human has core basic desires and needs), we had a much easier time imagining a bold future. While some of our team members questioned whether the future envisioned was a bit far-fetched, we found that using the social concepts of Cosmopolitan Localism or Pluriversality helped frame a different future and was much easier for us to see its impact at the level of everyday lives.
After several iterations mentioned above, we finally completed our imagination of a desirable future relatively smoothly. These visions were reflected at different levels, from the household level to the planetary. This also put us in a good position to begin describing a complete narrative in full detail. First we set our imagination of the future in the year 2075. Before all the visions unfold, let’s just say that in 2075, the issue of affordable housing will be a thing of the past, because by that time, housing will have been recognized as a fundamental human right, meaning that everyone will be guaranteed the right to housing. This forms the foundation of our desirable future.
On the planet level, absolute poverty has been eliminated globally, and the wealth gaps between nations have narrowed. A global standard of basic income has been set and is rigorously enforced in every country. Cities actively embrace diversity. As more funds are available to develop unique cultures and support diverse arts, each city has developed a unique local identity. City-to-city interactions and exchanges about culture reinforce and boost each other, making the development of culture always positive and dynamic. Since everyone has the right to housing, homelessness has also been resolved at the city level. The money that used to be invested in housing can be used for sustainable infrastructure renovation or new construction. Infrastructure improvements have a direct impact on the quality of living communities.
In our future, the community will become the basic unit of governance instead of the rigid administrative division. On the one hand, the power of the municipality is decentralized. On the other hand, this allows the residents of the community to actively participate in the construction of their own community. Each community has sustainability as its highest priority. As community members work together to determine the future of their communities, they pay close attention to the possible impacts of construction. Examples include noise and air pollution from building constructions. Rigorous and careful decision making up front further contributes to what makes each community very livable, which also promotes the diversity of population and culture within the community. Diversity is one of the foundations of resilience. Such a positive feedback loop is happening in every community.
Backcasting and Assessing the Present
Part two of this assignment required us to engage a different, but related visioning practice: backcasting. Backcasting can be understood, simply, as the opposite of forecasting. Forecasting to generate future visions involves prediction, using historical data and analysis of current trends, to inform scenarios describing what may take place in the months, years, and decades to come. “In other words, it starts the planning procedure from today’s situation and projects today’s trends and realistic solutions into the future” (Bibri, 2018). In contrast, backcasting involves developing a preferred, desirable, or idealized future and then working backwards to identify the major events and data points responsible for generating that future. As applied to Transition Design, backcasting allows stakeholders to consider the “actions, policies, and programs needed today that will connect the future to the present” (Global Centre for Public Service Excellence, 2018). Once we completed our vision of a world in which the wicked problem of a lack of affordable housing had been resolved, we began to backcast from this desired future to the present day, mapping a pathway through which present interventions served as steps toward our desired future.
The Transition Design process guided us to look both backwards and forwards as we connected our stakeholders’ visions of the present to our imagined future. But after the extensive brainstorming from multiple perspectives, we were often left with visions that didn’t seem entirely compatible with each other. A helpful Backcasting & Mile-Stoning template [COVID example here?] guided us in determining which parts of the present were ready to be transitioned away from, which parts should be kept, which promising innovations might ignite the transformation, and finally, which pieces seem already in place.
After taking stock of tectonic shifts in the STEEP forces in 2075, like the environmental impacts of climate change displacing millions of cheaply-made and flood-prone homes and their inhabitants, or the recognition of housing as a human right, we had to imagine the pathway from today’s capitalistic housing market to a world where quality, affordable housing is the right of all citizens.
So, we began by identifying the things that clearly would not fit in this world. Our immediate target was capitalism. As a team, we simply could not imagine the problem of affordable housing’s inaccessibility being solved under a capitalist system. Instead, we imagined housing as a socialized good, delivered by governments to their citizens with public benefit, not profit, in the driver’s seat. We then identified other components that would need to be discarded, like the stigma around public housing and assistance programs, as well as the media portrayal of desirable housing, which we felt glorified sprawling mansions and unduly favored single family housing. And linking all of these elements together was a common thread of racism — another element that demanded a solution if our vision was to become reality.
As we worked down into the next levels of the template, we wanted to identify what was proving successful and ought to be kept from the regime level, as well as innovations that were still emerging from the niche level, but showed great promise in accelerating the transformation we envisioned.
For example, our research at the regime level highlighted the success of transit-oriented development, rent control, and participatory design processes, all of which have made a diverse pattern of development and housing options more accessible to communities.
At the niche level, Universal Basic Income (UBI), currently in pilot study in Pittsburgh, financial literacy tools, and two building-related innovations: modular 3D-printed homes and the green building principles embodied by the Living Building Challenge, came to mind. While many other factors will certainly play a role, we saw these as a crucially synergistic mix of solutions — guaranteeing affordable, efficient, and environmentally sustainable housing and UBI would allow for a flourishing of the vision of Cosmopolitan Localism at the heart of our imagined future. Freed from the struggle of housing unaffordability, our hypothetical stakeholder single mother might be freed to make art, explore her passions, and invest in her children’s future.
As we imagined the first milestone, just 5–10 years from today, it was easy to see how these niche innovations could combine with existing elements of Pittsburgh’s success with affordable housing. After Pittsburgh’s success transitioning from an industrialized steel-producer to a high-tech & innovation hub, we imagined the irregular COVID-19 stimulus payments becoming a regular promotor of economic growth and prosperity, critically allowing the nation to achieve better public & financial health.
Tracking forward 25–35 years to the mid-term milestone, we envisioned the success of green building and modular 3D home-printing integrated with strong public transit development reshaping cities globally, with renewed focus on the community as the basic unit of governance. Smart cities initiatives and associated data inform better policy-making. These shifts collectively allow for the emergence of socialized solutions to housing and other human needs, replacing their capitalistic foils.
As we approach the final milestone in 2075, our perhaps-utopian vision for housing has attained reality. Global socialism has effectively reduced global inequality and race-based social hierarchies. Rent control, an early feature of the transition, is no longer needed, as housing and basic income are universal rights. Communities thrive in their expression of local art and culture.
Simultaneously, we recognize that the solution of one wicked problem does not mean the solution of all wicked problems. Although we believe that housing is a fundamental social determinant of health, and thus intricately connected to many other societal issues, our vision did not seek to imagine a world in which all wicked problems were solved through the provision of affordable housing.
During this process, our team had a positive learning moment. Initially, we felt that our future vision was a bit “far-fetched,” but as we did the backcasting exercise, we were able to identify pieces of our future that were already here as well as what key innovations that disrupt the current business. We realized how many pieces resembled this new Cosmopolitan Localism and pluriversal future. The fact that our team was able to find several practices and innovations such as transit-oriented housing, participatory design process, or community land trust, our team felt a bit more hopeful. Of course, realistically there are far more barriers and major reconstruction of the system that needs to happen in order for these practices to reach a more regime level where it is widely implemented and practiced. As we learned, however, from our Assignment #3, Multi-Level Perspective framework (MLP), that niche practices can elevate to the regime level with the right circumstances. This of course made our team again reflect what landscape level changes may influence this and provide the opportunity for niche level practices to “kick-off.”
Team Emergence seemed to find backcasting to be the easier, if not more reflexive, of the two visioning practices. It was challenging to stay true to the sequence of visioning first and backcasting second. Members of our team found themselves backcasting in order to create an iteration of our future vision. The mental exercise of starting from problem solved and then asking how it got solved felt more logical — and perhaps, safer — than holding in mind an image of a future reality without considering how that future vision came to be. Setting aside logistics was a challenging way of engaging with the issues implicated in housing inequity and inaccessibility. According to our professors, “Futurists often allege that modern societies have difficulty imagining truly different/better futures because we focus on the impossibility of attaining them…” Team Emergence was not overly focused on the impossibility of attaining a desired future. Rather, we were conspicuously mindful of how the world we envisioned might be plausible. From this posture, backcasting was a much more fluid and enjoyable process.
Learning moments — takeaways from this project
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, this assignment proved more challenging than earlier steps. During the evolution of this assignment, we felt the conflict between our existing perceptions and the future utopia and the inability to successfully connect theory and reality. One example is our attempt to imagine a vision based on the framework of Cosmopolitan Localism. We talk about the decentralization of city government and the use of the community as a governance unit, in order to enable each community to improve the community environment according to its own history and culture and according to its own current situation. While the community maintains its own local identity, there will be close interaction between communities and between cities, and this interaction will make the development of the community dynamic. One can imagine that such a vision falls well within the framework of Cosmopolitan Localism.
But where we have doubts is that this theoretical framework seems to be distant and we struggled to find comprehensive examples applying this theory in reality. This leaves us with a vision that again seems to be based on speculation, and due to the limitations of the pandemic, and the time allocated to this project, we could not truly put our ideas into practice and verify the validity of the speculation with real stakeholders. This may also be a result of the fact that we don’t have much practical experience. We were very curious to know if our vision was really going to work. By which approaches will it succeed? Although past examples may limit our bold imagination, it seems that past experience can be a strong shot in such situations.
Clearly, utopian visions of the future have creative and political value. According to the Transition Design approach, generating shared visions of a desirable future is an important means of securing buy-in and commitment among stakeholders to a wicked problem. However, the practice of creating a Future Vision Map that illuminated the benefits of Cosmopolitan Localism and pluriversality raised questions about whether these paradigms truly provide a compelling and persuasive template for a desirable future. One such question is whether a future in which housing is a human right but racism persists is more desirable than a future in which racism has been disestablished but housing is still subject to the whims of capitalism. Racism is a significant contributor to the wicked problem of affordable housing, yet Cosmopolitan Localism does not address race.
This silence begs the question of whether the paradigm contemplates or even anticipates the continued existence of Black people. Pittsburgh artist, Alisha Wormsley, stated that “There are Black People in the Future” through an art installation in the East Liberty Neighborhood in 2018. The piece was removed after a number of people “said that they found the message offensive and divisive.” If a vision of a future that involves Black people is offensive in the present, serious consideration must be given to whether racial inclusion is a presumptive part of any future paradigm that fails to name racism. The parameters of this project ought to have encouraged the use of Afrofuturist and other visionary perspectives that emerge from marginalized communities, rather than direct students to “Draw from strategies and concepts from Cosmopolitan Localism, Commoning and Mutual Aid, Pluriversality and Manfred Max-Neef’s Theory of Needs for inspiration.” Future visions that do not address the lived experiences of people of color directly are not likely to generate the broad, inclusive stakeholder buy-in needed to leverage interventions. Team Emergence discussed whether this failure to account for diverse perspectives rendered the practice so unrealistic as to be ineffective. It caused some of us to doubt the practicality of this pillar of Transition Design.
Finally, coming to the project of visioning following a project that required us to consider the historical arc of our wicked problem, it was difficult not to consider the persistence of landscape-level mindsets when envisioning the future. Our sense is that this sequence contributed to the emergence of some dystopic elements in our early iteration of the Future Visions Map. This is not to say that we were pessimistic about the possibility of a future in which housing becomes affordable, if not an internationally recognized human right. The dystopia came from envisioning the concessions and catastrophes, the regime and landscape level changes, prerequisite to resolving this wicked problem. The reality is that it doesn’t require any particular future to address the lack of affordable housing. It takes only will. The problem is not unsolvable. Not enough people want to solve it. The compelling question for the futurist is: what does a world look like in which people want to solve the problem of housing inequity? We forecasted that it would take continued exacerbations in climate change to force political will. A future in which once-habitable regions of earth are so scorched or submerged as to be uninhabitable may seem dystopic to some. To others, it may seem accurate to opine that such natural disaster would precede mutual aid. A future in which racism and caste systems are replaced by social hierarchies based on the age and type of housing one inhabits may seem dystopic. To others, it may seem quite optimistic to envision that anything could supplant white supremacy. Utopian visions are only as effective as they are valued. They have leverage only when seen as more attractive than bearing the consequences of harrowing projections.
Works Cited
Bibri, Simon Elias. 2018. Backcasting Approach to Strategic Planning. In Backcasting in Futures Studies. European Journal of Futures Research. Vol. 6:13. pp. 10–27
Global Centre for Public Service Excellence. 2018. Foresight Manual: Empowered Futures for the 2030 Agenda. UNDP, Singapore.
