City-regional futures in context: insights from the Retrofit 2050 project

Research findings from the EPSRC funded Retrofit 2050 project, aim to advance and explore the theoretical and practical understandings that underpin a shift to sustainability of UK’s core city regions in 2050. Utilising a participatory back-casting and scenario building process at national and regional levels, the Retrofit 2050 project has sought to envisage what a sustainable urban environment could look like based upon the systemic urban retrofitting of an existing UK city-region to 2050. Firstly, it is argued that the construction of normative sustainability oriented future scenarios and vision(s) of a desirable future(s), is fruitful in understanding and managing processes of transition and meeting the goals of environmental sustainability. Secondly, the regional level visioning process described here intends to reflect the observations that retrofitting, by its very nature, does not occur on a blank state and will rather occur in existing social, governance and physical structures. Utilising the Retrofit City Futures, developed during the Retrofit 2050 project, as guiding visions it is argued that city regional futures need to be grounded in a rich understanding of the (economic, political, social and ecological) transformation processes that shape development at regional level. The research reflects on the example of the Cardiff city region and highlights how these transformation processes play out across the variegated (rural, post-industrial and urban) geographies of the Cardiff city-region shaping, influencing and rendering distinctive the visions and city futures of Cardiff