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Lugares Futuros (Future Places)

As if climate challenges were not enough, the world is becoming increasingly urbanised year on year. By 2050, it is predicted that two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities. It is against this backdrop of increasingly rapid and uncertain change that the book engages. In this book, we discuss the futures of places.

Place Branding, Placemaking and Strategic Foresight to strengthen places, cities and countries

Lugares Futuros is Caio Esteves’ fourth book and the most ambitious of his intellectual career. Published in 2024, it is both a synthesis and an evolution: it revisits the place branding of the first book, deepens the reflection on identity and community from the second, radicalises the anti-fragility of the third, and goes a step further, proposing Place Strategic Foresight© as a methodology for building places prepared not for one future, but for multiple possible futures.

About the book

While *Antifragile City* asked how to prepare places for an uncertain future, *Future Places* goes further: the future is not merely uncertain, it is plural. There is no single future for a city or country. There are projected, plausible, possible, preferable and absurd futures. And the ability to explore all of them, strategically and collectively, is what separates the places that build the future from those that merely respond to it.

“Rather than waiting for the futures, we needed to project them.”

What is Place Strategic Foresight©

Place Strategic Foresight© is a proprietary methodology developed by the author to apply strategic futurism to places. It takes identity, not vision, as its starting point, and uses the exploration of multiple future scenarios as a means of informing present-day decisions.

Among the advantages of the approach are: the creation of alternative visions of the future beyond ‘business as usual’, the strengthening of a sense of belonging by involving communities in the collaborative process, the increase in the anti-fragility of places, and the development of strategic guidance that contrasts projected futures with preferable alternatives.

What you will find in this book

Future Places is organised around three main themes. The first reconstructs thinking on place branding and placemaking in light of the experience accumulated since 2016. The second delves into the world of futures studies: where they come from, how they work, and what distinguishes futurism from prediction. The third presents the Place Strategic Foresight© Framework: the methodology that maps the uncertain environment, analyses strong and weak signals, constructs scenarios, and translates all of this into concrete strategies for the present.

Who is this book for

Marketing, design and communication professionals working in the urban sector. Urban planners and public managers seeking a new perspective on territorial development. Strategists from private organisations operating in or with places, property developers, development agencies and regional investors. And any reader who realises that the tools of the past are not enough to navigate the present, let alone build the future.

Book details

Author: Caio Esteves
Publisher: Homo Urbanus
Year: 2024
ISBN: 978-65-982627-0-9
Foreword: Lilia Porto
Edited by: Mariane Broc

composição da marca lugares futuros FAQ

Place Strategic Foresight© is a strategic foresight methodology applied specifically to places, cities, regions, countries and urban developments. It takes the identity of the place as its starting point and uses the exploration of multiple future scenarios to inform strategic decisions in the present.

Strategic foresight does not predict the future; it explores possible futures. The distinction is fundamental: prediction is based on the idea of a single, predetermined future. Strategic foresight works with a plurality of futures—projected, plausible, possible, preferable and absurd—to broaden decision-making capacity in the present.

Lugares Futuros is at once a synthesis and an evolution. It revisits the place branding of the first book, deepens the reflection on identity and community from the second, radicalises the anti-fragility of the third, and goes further still: it proposes Place Strategic Foresight© as a methodology for building places prepared not for a singular future, but for multiple possible futures. Each previous book is a layer; this is the one that integrates them and pushes them forward.

A future-proof place is not one that denies the future or attempts to predict it with precision. It is a place that is prepared to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of the different futures that may unfold, capable of adapting, evolving and thriving regardless of the scenario that arises.