Joe Ravetz is a leading thinker on sustainable futures for urban and regional development, and the methods and tools which are needed to help make the transition. His landmark study ‘City-Region 2020 – integrated planning for a sustainable environment’ provides new insights and new pathways, drawing on a major case study of the long-term future of a large conurbation. Following this the Centre for Urban & Regional Ecology (CURE) is now the base for a range of projects at the regional, UK and EU levels: the agenda covers urban development, environmental and landscape management, economic development, organizational / information studies, policy analysis and future studies. The added value of such transdisciplinary work is in the linkage and synergy between one strand and another – working towards the goals of ‘integrated planning’ and ‘integrated governance’, as the necessary responses to the complex challenges of sustainable cities and regions. This is an ongoing quest, which includes visualization, Web 2.0 and interactive workshop techniques, as well as former experience as a community architect, development manager, carpenter and builder. Many of these strands are now being woven together for an in-depth exploration of possible futures, based on the underlying theme of ‘inter-dependency’. This is the core agenda of the next book in writing – ‘City-State 21 – pathways and signposts for the 21st century’.

 What is the most interesting research project or publication you are working on at the moment?
 
The One Planet Economy Network project (OPEN), which is a long running collection of projects. This is an opportunity to do some innovative thinking about how economics and politics will work in the 21st century and how systems thinking can help us to understand these better. I am trying to write a book on this. The idea of One Planet Economy is that it will work on a sustainable basis in terms of climate, resources, land use, chemical use, etc. There is a quantitative side to it, but I have also focused on the institutional side – the relationships between organisations.
 
If you were able to anticipate the future of one research area or sector, which one would you choose and why?
 
I am working on economics at the moment. I am not an economist, which is probably an advantage in many ways. Until now, the shape of the world and the activity of people in production and consumption has been dominated by economic thinking, which is materialistic, positive, deterministic, etc. I can see great potential for this to change and it needs to change as soon as possible, because we are destroying the environment. We are also widening the gap between rich and poor in the world and we are organising the majority of human activity into work which is alienating and unfulfilling. So things must change. If I put a name to my field, it is applications of systems thinking. Systems do not always change in a gradual, predictable way; they often change suddenly, with great uncertainty and sometimes catastrophes. So it seems useful to look at systems thinking from the point of view of surprising things that happen, i.e. the wild cards.
 
 Can you envisage any major wild cards, positive or negative, that may occur in the next 20 years?  Maybe pick your top five.
 
If you can think of a wild card, as soon as you can think of it, it is not so wild. A lot of them are things we already know about, such as the rise of China, which might happen more quickly or have more consequences than we anticipated. I began to think about what happens if you have three wild cards that are all connected. The thinking was to look at this from a systems point of view. In any system you might find a situation where things are under great stress, so one little thing then means the whole system collapses and everything changes. This is a wild card situation, which then can then flip into a new surprising and unpredictable state. I could see five major wild cards in politics: number one is the collapse of a major nation in a geopolitical area that is already under great pressure – so Pakistan, Iran or Russia. Each of these major nations with large populations is already under huge pressure from internal dissent, terrorist groups, breakaway groups and financial pressure, etc. We can imagine dramatic possible impacts. Pakistan falls to pieces and becomes more of a war zone than it is already. Pressure on Afghanistan, Iran, etc. then escalates and spreads, so there is social, economic and environmental catastrophe and instability, which spreads to Russia, India etc. Maybe the Chinese move into the area, because they are the most powerful player, and take over with military law and millions of soldiers. The shape of the world changes very suddenly. Wild card number two is environmental or climate. Although we know climate change is happening, there could be very rapid changes, which according to our current models are only very low probability. Low probability events often appear to be extremely likely, because they keep happening. So, for example, a large part of the Arctic ice breaks off and sea levels rise, maybe there is a drought and a severe heatwave that jeopardises food supply in Europe, or some combination of those things. Then it is wild not because we did not think of it, but because it is contributing to a situation which is already under stress. The world may be in a bad way politically, economically and socially, etc. Wild card number three is technology, particularly dependence on technology systems – the internet collapses and cannot be restarted, for example. The internet is the nervous system of the global economy, so if it goes down we have a really big problem. Wild card number four is the problem of people’s mental wellbeing and mental health. In previous centuries, people’s mental framework was kept in place by the class system, the dominant ideology and particularly by religion. Everybody went to church on Sunday and the church organised differences between people, so organised the Christians to hate the Jews, etc., but people were helped to organise their lives and their way of thinking. Now religion is in decline in most of the western world, and there is an infinite choice of communications and media, and breakdown in many social and cultural groups. I would predict with high probability some kind of wild card about a rapid increase in mental illness, alienation and depression. This could have all sorts of other effects on the economy and politics. My favourite wild card of the week was the WikiLeaks site. I was expecting more political impact. Maybe it is ongoing and we do not know how it is going to end, but one might imagine a positive wild card along similar lines. What if all the information about almost everything became available to anyone who wanted to know? This would change politics, economy, finance, technology, etc. Possibly in the end it would be a positive move, although many people would lose in the short term. It would be very wild, because it would change the way everything is done.
 
 What about weak signals?
 
I have a problem with weak signals, because the question is: where do you start? There are millions of weak signals. The problem with looking at a weak signal as an item is that it is only one small part of the system. We need to understand the system more than any one part of it, because only then can we say, ‘this system is becoming very highly stressed and one tiny push here could trigger a chain reaction’. The question is: are we trying to find weak signals for that tiny thing which might trigger the change, or are we trying to find weak signals describing the system as a whole, or the part of it which is under great stress? I have not found an answer to that. I am writing a book about social science perspectives on cities. It looks at the mental illness wild card from the angle of a global level of critical science. There are a number of trends going on, such as globalisation, liberalisation, modernisation, urbanisation and new concepts of governance, risk, consumption, etc. Eight or ten mega-scale dynamics are driving change or associated with change in a more direct and physical way, in cities, technologies, human communities, etc. If we are looking for weak signals, should we look for signals of globalisation or the effects of globalisation?  Globalisation is part of a larger process, which is changing not just the size and shape of a city, but also the meaning of the word ‘city’. It is changing a whole system, of which cities are an important part. I am working on how to understand this problem and contribute something useful to policy. In your book, what are your concerns that may need further research, questions which you could not answer completely, but that you still included? Do you think any of your intriguing weird findings may evolve into something with very high impact?What are the signals that you brought to the readers’ attention? They might turn into wild cards in the future, or may become important driving forces. We want to explore whether published books are sources of signals. The book is not a research book presenting new evidence. It is an overview book, bringing in evidence on many different areas. We are aiming for a more integrated understanding to help people to solve real problems. Books about environment in the cities are nearly always simplistic, but we need to see that a city is not a simple machine. It is a very complex system, so lets understand some of that complexity, particularly some of the critical agendas which underlie it. By critical, we mean that these things are not agreed, but are used in argument, debate or ideological contest. The World Bank is saying one thing, the European Commission is saying something different and the markets are saying something else. These different ideologies are competing for the dominant role in cities around the world. We can start to understand cities not simply as a million houses in a place, but also as part of a global system. We can begin to understand why environmental problems are happening and how to be more intelligent, with more of the foresight approach to respond to the problems. The signal which was intended to come from this is about integrated policy, or multi-level governments. There are a number of different names, e.g. anticipatory government, foresight, or the relationships between environment and human systems, ecosystems, etc. There is an overriding concept and different approaches to developing policy which come out of that. The background is the big transitions already taking place, like globalisation, liberalisation, If we are looking for weak signals of globalisation, we can measure trade and investments, science and technology, the integration of the world economy. It is more difficult to measure what is in people’s heads when they do their job, when they go on holiday, but this is equally important.
 
 What are the most important implications for researchers and policy makers? What needs to be changed?
 
The main purpose of the book was understanding the nature of the problem. I left a few policy direction pointers in the book. I have been working in Brussels with Digi Regions on the follow-up to this. We look at policy, at the agenda and challenges for urban governance. The situation is becoming more difficult all the time with the financial crisis. On the other hand, there are opportunities for new social networks, the possibility of social technology and the transparency of information, which is maybe increasing. There are three or four important implications for policy and governance systems that I have been looking at in more detail. One is the interaction of governance with enterprise and entrepreneurs. How does policy deal with urban regeneration in areas of great poverty, crime and unhappiness?  Until now it has not been very successful and has just moved the problem from here to there. If policy wants to respond to these kinds of complex systemic problems, it must also work in a complex and systemic way. A simple solution is usually not enough and may even do the wrong thing.So the role of policy and governance is to encourage the selforganisation of communities under stress, or small businesses that are going bankrupt, or vulnerable large businesses. I am sceptical about the UK Conservative government’s Big Society idea, because it is the way to have a right-wing hierarchical society.The rich will get richer, the government will save money. But it is no coincidence that there is this strand in Conservative philosophy that meets with the anarchist philosophy of self-organisation. Another agenda is to deal with complexity. Working in climate change policy is complex because of all the stakeholders – private sector, third sector, public sector, at different levels. Each of them needs to work with and talk to the others, in order to look for the opportunities that come through working together. Without those opportunities, nothing will ever happen. In Manchester at the moment, we have a low carbon experiment going on, with about 30 stakeholders, and they have not yet found a practical way to work together. This is a challenge for policy. It is a technical issue, but also a social and cognitive issue. It reflects the nature of knowledge and information and how this can be transferred and exchanged around a larger system. It is something we are only just beginning. The question of what signals are coming out to other stakeholders is interesting. It has no simple answer. We can look for multilateral types of policy working, which bring together entrepreneurs and their value chains, social technology networks and their intermediaries and the systemic governance strategy community. This will not be easy or simple, but there are great opportunities and we can look for them, even if we are not ready to see the whole picture.
 
 What is the main difference between the complexity that you were talking about and urban governance? The interaction between these different types of stakeholders, and how they manage to identify these opportunities together, is similar to the urban governance challenge.
 
 It is the same thing, but from a different angle. We are dealing with a system with many different parts, which are all connected. I take four different angles on more or less the same problems and opportunities. Number one is to look at the chains of interaction which generate value – economic value, cultural value, etc. The economic value has until now been dominant, so generally economics is the way of thinking which organises almost everything else. We are now looking at situations where other forms of value seem to be just as important, maybe more so. Another angle is to say, ‘actually it is about knowledge and information’. A third angle is about ethics and responsibility, and a fourth angle concerns the systemic qualities of resilience and adaptive capacity. In other words, we need to build cities which can change, innovate, learn and create. What are the signals that are being communicated to others? Starting from the global problems over the next 40 years, we are likely to have climate crisis, water crisis, food crisis, security crisis, minerals crisis, that no one talks about, and one or two others. These are all at the global scale, but all have direct implications for cities. Life in cities will be difficult a few years from now. An interesting practical question is whether we should have more self-sustaining cities. The most important thing of all is the collective intelligence of cities, which is connected with knowledge transfer, learning capacity, etc. This closely connects with the idea of foresight as the building of collective intelligence. My number one message for the outside world would be that we need to build our collective intelligence.
 
 Is there an issue for which you could do a pilot project or a demonstration that it is possible to achieve this high intelligence?
 
A good place to start would be the low carbon demonstration. I am doing it in theory and talking to people in Greater Manchester. but not in a big funded way at the moment.
 
 Any big wild card events which could be a rapid change for policy makers in the way that cities are run or resources are allocated?
 
The way in which different stakeholders cooperate or share intelligence. I could imagine a wild card based on social technology. Today we have Facebook – in three or ten years’ time we might have something much more powerful. So a wild card based on social technology as the catalyst that helped all the stakeholders in a city to collaborate and understand each others’ opportunities better than ever before. A sudden step change in the intelligence of a city – and intelligence is not just about information, it is about thinking the information is necessary. This would have big impacts. Suddenly we see the possibility for cities to make rapid changes in the way that they work. They can make rapid progress in the low carbon agenda, or on crime, drugs, unemployment, social welfare, environmental improvement, simply by improving the intelligence of the system. Anything is then possible.
 
 What would be the biggest impact?
 
Responding to the climate change crisis is very important, but equally important are social problems, such as mental illness. This is my personal number one social problem, and is connected with drugs and social media addiction, etc. One of these other approaches could contribute to the problem of drugs and drug use in society. A third one might be to contribute to a problem of economic waste and alienation: many people are unemployed, many are employed doing jobs which are not good for them, a lot of people feel miserable, do not have enough money and do not like their work. So maybe we can help a palliative wild card to take place in our demonstration city, which will enable many people to have a better quality of life through work, and a better quality of prosperity through their living situation. Maybe that is an economic wild card. These wild cards could all be connected. So what is the goal?  Cities could be more intelligent, but why, what do we want?  The goal can be economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and social sustainability. For each of those goals we can imagine the possibility of a gradual transition, or of a sudden change, which we did not think of before and then we say it is a wild card. We have seen through WikiLeaks how can one website with 20,000 files can change the whole geopolitics of central Asia. This is the power of information.
 
 We have the technology, so why do you think this social innovation is not happening?
 
There are powerful reasons. Everybody has secret information in their office about other people, projects, money or something, so we can look at the information problem as an area of conflict. One person wants this information, but another person wants to keep it secret, so there is a contest. Is it going to be secret or will it be shared? This is the power of WikiLeaks. Change is happening in many ways. Copyright for books is being challenged by Google. Intellectual property in scientific publishing is changing fast. Multinational companies are taking out patents on genetic information, etc. The idea of what is common knowledge and what is private knowledge is a contest. I do not see the possibility of any simple solutions, where everybody says ‘lets share all of our information with everybody’.
 
 So do we need a city council, and if so, what would be the role of the city council in government?
 
We can look at government as a rational process of taking information and making rational decisions. We can also look at it as a way of conducting ideological debate, for which information is not so relevant. So the city council might have the ideological debates and when they have made a decision, they might give the job to the managers, who will give the job to the computers. The question of governance under that scenario is interesting. There are many assumptions built into the way that economics is done, and economics tends to dominate how decisions are made. We can question these assumptions, and look for positive alternatives in many areas of economics, investment and supply chains and micro-economics, behavioural economics etc. If we put all those together, we can start to envisage the step change in our demonstration city, where we have an alternative kind of economics, based on enterprise, innovation, self-organisation of value added. We can look at the implications for jobs, incomes, households and public government, and promote investors. We could perhaps add all that up and see the possibility of an economic wild card in which our city will rapidly change the way that the economy works and the way that capital is increased, and so on.
 
 If priorities are set from the bottom up, and projects are funded by city councils or similar local authorities on the basis of this city intelligence, would you consider that to be a wild card if it changes the way development projects are carried out in cities?
 
Physical developments in cities are a slow process. It would be more interesting if we were looking for rapid change. In a wild card situation we might want to look for social and economic change, and it is possible to imagine a wild card in a positive way.
 
 Why is the EU funding the urban governance project? What is the main objective?
 
They are looking at the future of the cohesion funds from 2013- 2020. They are aware that the cohesion funds assume that regions are the building blocks of Europe. There is an alternative way of thinking: that cities are the building blocks of the European economy and society, and that the regions are purely the spaces around the cities, so we should look at cities first.
 
Which is your preferred view?
 
I work in systems which work at both levels. If we look at cities as the units where these transformations and transitions are more likely to take place, then I am interested in cities.
 
 What could go wrong in such a system where we have this intelligence?
 
What looks like a positive wild card can suddenly turn very negative. For example, if information becomes more open and transparent, that is fine. But if the people with the most access to information become a dictatorship, with the power to look into everyone’s lives and find and imprison dissidents, then this is a very negative wild card. We can imagine the possibility of both positive and negative.
 
 So what needs to be researched? 
 
 If we are aware of the possibility of both negative and positive outcomes, we need to look for the signals which can show us which one is happening, and particularly the qualities in the system which enable the positive or the negative to take place. Then we need to look at how to enhance those qualities in the system. This is important, but not easy. In a situation under great stress, as most cities are every day, if we look under the surface we may think we have a catalyst, such as the social technology example. But if we introduce social technology into our city system, it is difficult to say whether it will have a positive outcome or a negative one – it could result in both at the same time, and become confusing. Policy makers will see the big risk that the system could go negative. They will want to know what we are going to do, and what kind of research we can design to help us avoid that possibility. There are several ways to design such research. One is to work from what we know already in social sciences of organisations, and the impact of IT on knowledge management in large organisations. Another research idea might be to design laboratory-type experiments with a small group of 10-20 people, maybe like a Big Brother house, with videos and cameras monitoring everything. We then introduce some change and see what happens. A third kind of research might be more in sympathy with the idea of wild card thinking. This is to say, ‘we can do risk assessments but we can’t think of all the wild cards. We can do organisation studies but we cannot really understand what is going on. We can do scenario building, which might help to imagine possibilities, but never the wild card which is really going to happen’. We can use a combination of these things, with an interactive knowledge- and intelligence-generating process. If we take the basic foresight approach, we focus it on the end of the range, which is concerned with high impacts and low probability events, wild cards and black swans, etc. We do this as an interactive process which runs through all the knowledge management and strategic policy intelligence of that group, network or organisation. Policy development has a relationship with knowledge producers and intermediaries. From what we know so far, this way of working is more likely to anticipate wild cards. If we see a wild card happening, it is more likely to respond in a more resilient way.
 
 So could we name this wild card, which combines urban governance plus complexity plus the intelligence, social technology, Smart City?
 
Yes, the name is already used everywhere, but it is a good wild card.
 
 If this is achieved, it requires a lot of engagement from different actors, the public and stakeholders. Would you rather see some headline Smart Cities replace city councils or super city councils? What is the big issue?
 
My preference is to make these things into small stories, so we can imagine a newspaper headline which will sell the newspaper. One way to do wild cards is to imagine: why is this really wild?  It is wild because somebody somewhere is going to be very happy or unhappy. If a number of people are happy or unhappy and are in conflict, then it is a story and you will see it in the news. If it’s a story then this is a wild card that is not simply a technical change in the system, but a step change in the way people are thinking and understanding a situation. Often the best way for that to happen is through the story, the narrative. We can bring that thinking back to the systems analysis of wild card situations. A typical wild card is not one single event, but usually a chain of events. We can tell these as a story running through time or space. Looking at real time, historic experiences, we can see these are not fiction, but they are like stories. Lehman Brothers went bust, then AIG, and the government stepped in and there was a sequence of events which were wild, which add up to the big wild card – the collapse of the global financial system which nearly happened two years ago.
 
 What will be the first big impact/transformation of Smart Cities? Say Manchester becomes a Smart City and radically transforms the city council. What would I see?  Would I still pay my city council each month through the government? What would they do with the money? What are the big implications for citizens, the tax payers?
 
On a national basis, we might say public services will improve, costs will go down, taxes will go down. On a more wild card basis, we might say there are street parties all over South Manchester, bored teenagers suddenly find things to do in their communities, drug users realise there are better ways to use their time. A whole range of possibilities might come from this wild card. There is a danger that some of this is utopian, which is why I am particularly interested in wild cards which have positive and negative mixed up together. We might say in our example the city council is transformed, with a new generation of social technology, future internet, etc. Public services increase and people seem happier. Anyone under the age of 40 is better off, because they know about Facebook. But people over 40 are out of the loop, they can’t organise their Facebook pages fast enough. So there are many positive and many negative effects. The combination is at the centre of the picture and this is one of the most interesting areas of wild card thinking.
 
 Is the wild card just the acceleration of the local governance plans that are already being implemented in some respects?Is it the time aspect that is the wild card here, is it happening more quickly?
 
This is where we come back to the philosophy of wild cards. Imagine there is a trend in our system which is increasing in a gradual and predictable way. It gets faster and, as a result of that increase, there are other impacts which we did not think about before, caused by the speed of change. The wild card seems to go wild, so that we can see something is happening, but we can’t measure it properly. This is like structural system change. In the typology of wild cards, Type A is changes which just increase in speed. Type B is where we have accidents which are waiting to happen, like an earthquake, which will happen but we don’t know where or when or what the impact will be, so when it happens it is a big wild card. Type C are game-changing events from out of the box. So if our system suddenly starts doing this, then the game is changed. We can’t use the same breath as we used before because it does not work. We need a different kind of understanding of the system, different indicators, different weak signals, etc. So your question is relevant, because if you imagine our town hall fixed up with social technology, is this Type A, increasing change?  Is it also possibly Type B?  If we make everything digital, there are huge risks and accidents waiting to happen – it could be sabotaged or taken over by Rupert Murdoch,it could simply crash, or be privatised. Is it a Type C, which is game changing and therefore there will be other possible impacts which we cannot even imagine now?  We can construct a wild card on the Type C model and say it might do this, it is very new and different, so we can only suggest some possibilities. If we construct our wild situation of town hall technology, it is possibly a very positive wild situation but can also turn very negative. So do we want a Type A, Type B or Type C wild card?  Maybe all three, and then the reader can decide which one is most interesting for them.
 
 Which of these types is more likely?
 
We can still ask the probability question. We might look at historic examples and say in this example all three types were happening. There was a gradual change that could be measured, there was an accident that happened along the way, but also the game was changed. From an ICT perspective, it is a Type A, a continuation of technology. ICT has this habit of changing its game very fast. Facebook is about four years old and already has half a billion users and is a game changing thing. The technology existed already. The application and the social technology was a game-changing wild card. It would be interesting in the project to select some examples from the library, and see whether we have a useful typology – can we ‘Type’ them? Can we then put Type A, B, C or D side by side, to get alternative views on a wild card situation?  This also comes back to the application of wild card thinking in risk assessment and strategic policy. It might help to bring back more of a connection with foresight and future studies, capacity etc.
 
 What tabloid headline would you give it?
 
‘Smart City needs a reboot’. This is positive and negative. I would be happier with a positive/negative combination than if we say it is all positive, which is not so realistic. This Smart City notion may also lead to democracy 2.0 or different self-Organisation.It might enable. So you want another wild card about further along the line, what happens after. We could imagine a wild card in which local democracy in Europe suddenly changes because of the changes categorised by the new technology.
 
 What would be the role of national government and of the EU if we had Smart Cities everywhere?
 
That is a good question. Will we need government as we know it?  It could change quite rapidly. I would see combinations of positive and negative outcomes as the most interesting, certainly if social technology is the catalyst. Social technology is in many ways democratic and decentralised, but in many ways it is the catalyst project, highly centralised and easily available for censorship by dictators and so on. The game-changing potential of this is not to bring in some utopia, but rather to change the game of the contest between the forces of capital and the ruling classes and forces of democracy and the citizens. That is very Marxist, but we may find that emerging rapidly, so that is a wild card.
 
 Will that technology be private?
 
The private corporations would rent it to the government and would say, as long as we control the content you can rent it from us.
 
 So this theme needs to be researched?
 
Yes. It is difficult to research the future interest usefully if we are also researching the game-changing potential of the future internet, both positive and negative. I am working on some research tools to do this. They work on a mathematical topology approach, so we can look at the shape of organisations and communities and the shape of networks in a topological sense. I would like to use your mathematical information technology skills to design a project which can do this in a systematic research way.