Complexity science and theory development for the futures field

Futures 44 (2012) 504–513

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Complexity science and theory development for the futures field Robert H. Samet * The Limes, 1 Main Street, Grasby, Lincolnshire DN38 6AH, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Available online 28 February 2012

Complexity science unifies some forty diverse features that arise from the evolution of the civil system and these underlie theory development in the futures field. The main features of an evolutionary methodology deal with emergence, macrolaws, civil or societal transitions, macrosystem design, and the absorption of extreme events. The following principles apply: (1) The civil system is an open system in which investment capital is the system growth parameter that drives it away from equilibrium, with the formation of spatial structure. (2) The historical circumstances of human settlements provide a path dependency in respect of natural resources, defence, energy, transport, or communications. (3) Emergent properties arise within a complex adaptive system from which a theory of the system can be formulated, and these are not deducible from the features of the transacting entities. (4) Futures research identifies the conditions that will lead to an irreversible civil or societal phase transition to a new stage of development. (5) Emergent behaviour in the macrostructure at regional or continental levels can be influenced through critical intervention points in the global macrosystems. ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction This article is the final part of a trilogy of papers in Futures and is preceded by ‘Exploring the future with complexity science: the emerging models’ [1] and ‘Futurists and their schools: a response to Ziauddin Sardar’s ‘the namesake’’ [2]. The ‘futures field’ can be divided into five major segments, or futurist schools that are subsumed under the terms ‘futures research’, ‘futures studies’ and ‘foresight’ as follows:  Futures research: - environmental and geosciences; - infrastructure and socio-technological systems;  Futures studies: - social, political, and economic sciences; - human life, mind and information sciences;  Foresight: - business and management science. The complexity science models [1] that have been developed for each of the segments of the futures field, contribute to a theory of futures research that is relevant within each of the schools. It has been explained that futures research has a

* Tel.: +44 1652 628590; fax: +44 1652 628505. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2012.02.003

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systems science orientation and for the purpose of new scenario development for climate change, environmentalists refer to futures research as ‘Integrated Assessment Research’ [2]. Since infrastructure and socio-technological systems involve hardware such as urban systems, it is useful to take households and establishments as the transacting entities and these may be located in space and time with postcodes. Futures studies have a social science connotation, and a dominant paradigm in the social sciences is methodological individualism, with the explanation of social phenomena arising from individual rationality rather than instinctive behaviour. There is a distinction therefore between ‘futures research’ and ‘futures studies’, and they are complementary and can be combined with the perception that a built environment substructure co-evolves with a social science superstructure, and both are surrounded by an environment of natural resources. Foresight is the most popular term within government, business and management science and it is distinguished from ‘futures studies’ since the individual dimension would provide a level of detail that would take futurists beyond what is required by the commercial world. Business establishments tend to use a geodemographic classification of households and they examine emergent technologies to assess the viability of capturing investment capital (profit) from a complex adaptive system. Definitions of complexity science vary according to the field of application, such as the physical sciences, ecology, the civil system and social sciences. In the Santa Fe Institute publication [3], Anderson describes complexity science as the science of ‘emergence’, where large ensembles of interacting entities exhibit collective behaviour that is remarkably different from what might be expected by scaling up the behaviour of the individual entities. The civil system is an open complex adaptive system, and investment capital is the system growth parameter that drives it away from equilibrium with the formation of spatial structure. Towns and cities emerge from the combination of households and establishments, but the features of a city would not be deducible from the features of an individual household or an establishment. Complexity describes the stage of evolution or level of maturity of an evolutionary system, in which there is an elaboration of structure or hierarchy as the system adapts to its environment as a condition of future viability. ‘Long-Range Futures Research: An Application of Complexity Science’ by Samet [4] shows how complexity science unifies some forty diverse features that arise from the evolution of the civil system and these underlie theory development in the futures field. These features are introduced in the following sections: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Complexity, open systems, complex adaptive system, system growth parameter. Transacting entities, spatial structure. Path dependence, technological evolution, network dynamics, connectivity. Transactional microstructure, Zipf’s rule, equipollence, civil ecostructures, territorial colonisation, ecodynamics, coevolution, atrophy, heterogeneity, diversity, resilience. Emergent properties, hierarchy, civil emergence, macrolaws, transactional complexity, attractors (static, cyclic, vibrant or chaotic), non-linear dynamics, diffusion of investment capital, gradient reduction. Bifurcation, guided self-transformation, social emergence, artificial societies, information growth, anti-chaotic institutions, cultural diffusion. Civil and societal phase transitions, uncertainty, critical intervention or leverage points. Futures research practices, endogenous growth, morphological analysis, scenarios. Macrostructure, extreme events (Xevents), spatial integration, decomposition.

2. Transacting entities Households are consumer decision-making units that are constrained within an institutional and cultural context. Empirical data on consumer demand generally takes the household as the unit for data collection, although in conventional economic theory the unit of analysis is the individual, who is assumed to maximise utility from the consumption of goods, services and leisure time subject to a budget constraint. In principle the members of a multi-person household achieve greater utility than they could in a single person household through the sharing of accommodation costs, household artefacts, services and information, and an adult member may choose to leave and form another household if the benefits are greater. This is explained in ‘The Economics of Household Behaviour’ [5] by Kooreman and Wunderink. In futures research the household is taken as the unit of analysis, where altruistic behaviour within the family provides not only love, companionship and care but also the sharing of work, income and leisure to maximise the household utility. Geodemographic classifications give spatial structure to the socio-economic grouping of households within urban centres, in the context of the urban classification by size class and category, with postcodes defining the residential areas. The principle behind geodemographic systems is the clustering of residential areas with similar characteristics to provide a first order indication of household consumer behaviour. This is described by Curry in ‘The New Marketing Research Systems’ [6]. The demographic information on residential areas is obtained from census data, which is released at district level in terms of the percentage of households with various attributes to preserve anonymity for individual households. The seven household lifestages are young single people, single parents, young couples with no children, young couples with the youngest child under 5 years, couples with dependent children, older couples with no children at home, and older single people. Household information is then compiled with the allocation of names and addresses from electoral role data and the classification of house types. This household information is then enhanced with credit information, transaction data from credit cards and

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bar code scanners from retail stores, and other electronic data capture from utilities, the internet, cable and satellite television viewing, as well as magazine subscription lists, travel bookings, customer loyalty schemes and promotion schemes such as ‘Air Miles’. ‘Socio-Styles’ [7] explains that the diversity of household behaviours within socio-graphic descriptions, arises from the personalities of the human agents that comprise a household. Psychographics is the term used for labelling behaviours which can be mapped within a matrix, where the horizontal axis ranges from habitual to exploratory and the vertical axis ranges from rational to instinctive. Groups with habitual and rational lifestyles are referred to as traditionalist, whereas rational and exploratory lifestyle groups are termed venturers. Instinctive and habitual groups are described as humanistic, whereas instinctive and exploratory lifestyles are labelled sensualist. Each of the four groups – humanistic, sensualist, traditionalist and venturers have some twenty attributes which are reflected in outlooks that are local, cosmopolitan, provincial and international and in respective behaviours such as the search for security, identity, status and concepts. Humanistic characteristics include romantic, natural, prudent, economical, and simplicity. Sensualist traits include stylish, high-touch, liberal, extravagant and novelty. Traditionalist attributes include responsible, material, moral, value for money and utility. The venturers tend to be enterprising, high-tech, culturally aware, interested in customisation at a price, and can cope with complexity. 3. Path dependence Cities provide an historical and future continuity in the evolution of civilisations and from ‘4000 Years of Urban Growth’ [8], it is possible to trace from 2250 BC the successive stages of growth for early towns and cities of over 20,000 population. The city population estimates are derived by taking families, households and homes as the institutional units of urban settlements. Their subsequent evolution has been dependent upon historical circumstances such as the ecological context of the city region, and a path dependency involving a variety of factors at different points in time such as the available technology for irrigation, water supply, defence, energy, transport and communication. Early metropolises were located at seaports or on navigable rivers, which were later supplemented by networks of canals. Increasing urbanisation of the population was accompanied by technological evolution and waves of infrastructure investment that affected the spatial pattern of urban growth. The industrial metropolis was served by the railway system and its converging radial routes, but then the opportunity for dispersal of industry came along with the distribution of electricity. The road system and the growth of car ownership enabled the decentralisation of employment from the metropolis to outer centres, and air travel, telecommunications and information technologies have connected the global system of cities. Evolution of the civil system involves increasing complexity, which arises from an enhancement of the information structures, with additional hierarchical levels and increasing connectivity between urban centres and the interconnection of establishments. The process of evolution realises potential, and development of one system or subsystem may generate new potential in another system, which leads to further evolution. Urban systems have evolved from a continental urban hierarchy into an intercontinental urban network in which the linkages are as important as the nodes. The future evolution of the urban system has been explored during the next two centuries [1], in which it is important to take a time horizon that extends beyond the ascending phase of the population curve, since the use of resources is linked to the ultimate size of the urban system. Historical path dependence is well understood by development economists and economic historians who undertake empirical studies on national economic development, the origin of industries and the history of technologies. Their works include ‘The Conditions of Economic Progress’ [9] by Clark, ‘The Stages of Economic Growth’ [10] and ‘The World Economy: History and Prospect’ [11] by Rostow. Economic development takes place through investment waves of successive layers of economic infrastructure rather like geological strata in the natural world, and this generates structural changes in the economy with increasing per capita assets and transitions in the composition of the workforce. Infrastructure imposes spatial structure on a region, and creates economies of connectivity at locations, which encourages complementary investments that generate additional advantage. 4. Transactional microstructure Modelling work on the spatial aspects of the economy is described in ‘The Spatial Economy’ [12], which reveals the difficulty in developing a mechanism for the evolution of a hierarchical urban system in a full general equilibrium model. Economics Nobel Laureate Krugman believes that neglect of spatial structure in economic theory has been because it was considered to be mathematically intractable. He has also pointed out that any theory on the size distribution of cities will need to explain the empirical law, referred to as Zipf’s rank-size rule, which fits best for countries with a federal structure such as the USA. However the most likely trajectory for the world urban system to maintain a stable configuration will be towards equipollence (equal power) with the same population at each of fifteen levels in the urban hierarchy [1], since it limits the asymmetry of the urban system. As soon as spatial structure is put into economic theory the notion of general equilibrium becomes invalid, so it no longer remains economics and another term such as ‘Ecodynamics’ would need to be used instead. This would acknowledge the contribution of Boulding [13], a former President of the American Economics Association, who laid the foundations for evolutionary economics. Civil ecostructures (towns and cities) provide an information rich microstructure which evolves through selective changes and movement by households and establishments, with immigration and emigration as they respond adaptively to

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spatial and temporal variations in the environment. In complex adaptive systems the fast dynamics of the flows at the transaction and interaction level are linked to the slower dynamics of long-term adaption and evolution in the macrostructure. An ecostructure is defined as a complex adaptive system of transacting households and establishments that utilise a background flow of investment capital to create order by the formation of urban islands of transactional complexity. Investment capital is diffused in the system of connected ecostructures and dissipated in sustaining, maintaining and reproducing internal order and coherence, which has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Civil ecostructures diffuse investment capital, knowledge and culture and human societies are also dissipative structures that stay in a highly organised state by exchanging matter, energy and information with their environment. The evolution of civilisation follows macrolaws in which the generation of investment capital by the transaction system results in territorial colonisation through adaption and the formation of ecostructures, which diffuse the investment flow in order to decrease gradients in the rate of return on investments. Any rise in the level of complexity is accompanied by an increase in the information content relating to the flow of resources necessary to sustain the system. Progress is reflected by the centripetal forces of agglomeration with increasing complexity and heterogeneity. As investment capital is transformed, the law of atrophy applies as an increasing number of sectoral establishments chase a finite supply of resources. The declining potential in the more mature city regions causes an evolutionary spiral with natural selection, adaption, coevolution and relocation, which is punctuated by periodical transitions with sectoral investment waves and establishment extinctions. These waves of creative destruction to the environment integrate or simplify the system to achieve a reduction in transaction costs and more effective resource utilisation. Alternative pathways are provided for the diffusion of investment in the centrifugal direction of dispersal, standardisation and homogeneity. Diversity is essential to ecostructure stability and ecostructures with a multiplicity of interrelated species of establishments are more resilient to the external changes and shocks that could destroy a vital link in more simplified systems. Urban systems are vulnerable and where there is no real loss of technical efficiency, cities and regions need to provide a significant share of the goods locally to avoid the disruption and destruction that arises from being too dependent on the national and global economic systems. Also communities need diversity in engineering and technological systems, such as energy or transport, to be more resilient to possible failure from a large power plant or railway system, etc. Resilience and the length of time for which a community has existed are the most suitable measures of dynamic stability, and this is achieved where there is a high level of diversity. Natural disasters and unsatisfactory transactions, such as conflict or business failures, create changes to the system with emigration of households and establishments to locations where there are better prospects for survival or growth.

5. Emergent properties and macrolaws The metaconcept of systems science is the existence of hierarchy such that the different levels in a system are a complex of successively more encompassing sets, and spatial structure in the civil system emerges from the combination of households and establishments into residential and business districts, towns and cities, regions, states, nations, and continents. Each level is more complex than the level below, and are characterised by emergent properties. Cities emerge from the bottom up, and a further emergent phenomenon relates to city size and Zipf’s rank-size rule. If the major subsystems within a system are relatively independent of the lower level internal structure of the subsystems, a theory of the system and its behaviour can be formulated at the particular level that is being observed, ignoring both the substructure at the next level down and also the longer time scale and more gradual change in the interactions occurring at a higher level. For example see ‘Complexity and co-evolution’ [14]. An emergent property is a feature of a complex adaptive system or vivisystem that is not deducible from the features of a single entity or lower order processes. The methodology entails selecting a level of detail from which it is possible to discover rules that generate the emergent phenomena, and to formulate macrolaws that describe their behaviour, as explained by Holland in ‘Emergence: From Chaos to Order’ [15]. The macrolaws for the emergent phenomena are complementary to the microlaws that determine the underlying dynamics, and they are not a substitute for research that provides a coherent explanation for the causal relationships of the microsystems. Since the emergent phenomena arise from the combined effects of both causality and teleology (purposeful human intervention), the macroscopic description encapsulates the resulting evolution of the system without having to apportion the effects to either of these constituent processes. The following macrolaws are proposed, but in extreme conditions involving a breakdown in the regime, an examination of the microsystems may reveal new patterns in the emergent phenomena so that a reformulation of the macrolaws would be necessary. 5.1. First law of ecodynamics In an interconnected system of civil ecostructures, investment capital is transferred between establishments such that there is a cumulative transformation of the resource at each trophic position in the vivisystem. This creates irreversible structural change to the system, which evolves through the formation of islands of increasing transactional complexity and connectivity. The potential of an ecostructure is a measure of its capacity to diffuse investment capital within a specific spatio-temporal range. The world urban system is transformed endogenously and remains on a universal attractor to

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increase the overall diffusion of investment capital through the realisation of full planetary potential. Capital is conserved in so far as a local level of complexity can only be achieved at the expense of the temporal global investment budget. 5.2. Second law of ecodynamics Ecostructures of households and establishments are complex adaptive systems for the diffusion of investment capital, and they evolve with increasing complexity to economise on the unit cost of transactions. Capital formation drives the urban system away from equilibrium in the irreversible evolution of spatial structure, which sets up gradients between locations in the rate of return on investment. As populations of households and establishments approach the carrying capacity of a bounded territory, there are diminishing returns on investment so that establishments decentralise and investment capital is diffused to less mature parts of the system. An ecostructure reaches a spatio-temporal peak of diffusive capacity, as less mature ecostructures emerge to provide alternative pathways for the diffusion of investment. The redistribution of investment to less mature parts of the urban system tends to reduce the gradients in the rate of return on investment. Depending upon the rate of investment flow, individual ecostructures may be classed as static, cyclic, vibrant or chaotic attractors. 5.3. Third law of ecodynamics Investment capital is dissipated in the transformation of investment, the maintenance of complex civil ecostructures, and by the coefficient of connectivity in transactions between households and establishments. In mature ecostructures more investment is dissipated in the maintenance of order and less in extending the system, than for less mature ecostructures. When the planetary system of ecostructures reaches the phase of maturity at which no further evolution or technological change will increase the overall diffusion of investment, a dynamic balance will be achieved if the regenerative capacity of the planetary metasystems (astrophysical, geophysical, physical, biological and civil) is sufficient to counter the atrophic forces of decline. Investment atrophy is a measure of investment capital deprivation or undernourishment in parts of the urban system, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital in other parts of the system. 6. Social emergence and changes in social norms Civilisation is an evolutionary process in which the accumulated stock of wisdom is reflected in the institutions, culture, knowledge, information structures and socio-technological systems. Culture embraces traditions and beliefs, value systems, ways of life and forms of art and the ideal of civilisation includes a sense of ethics and a humane approach to life. The future can be visualised by the conceptual construction of a number of evolutionary paths with bifurcation points, and this multiplicity also arises from differing comprehension or interpretation of the possible future changes from the current position. Designed interventions can alter the evolutionary trajectory of the system and in the context of the civil system, technological development leads to engineered transformations by means of the investment flow control parameter. In view of the institutional coordination and regulation of urban microsystems, economic development is a process of guided selftransformation, rather than ‘self-organisation’ as in ecosystems. Self-transformation is the spontaneous emergence of macrostructure, due to the accumulation of the individual micro transactions between a large number of households and establishments [16]. Most sociologists and economists tend to treat social phenomena as if they were reducible to the actions of individuals, whose independent choices can be combined to explain complex social processes. This paradigm is known as ‘methodological individualism’ [17]. In ‘Social Emergence’ [18], Sawyer focuses on multiple levels of analysis with social group phenomena emerging from communication processes. Using a complexity methodology known as multi-agent systems, researchers have begun to model the mechanisms of social emergence. Social simulations using multi-agent systems are known as ‘artificial societies’, and the model developer activates all the agents and observes the macrobehaviour that emerges as the agents interact. Methodological individualism has been a theoretical assumption underlying artificial societies [19], and the two main observations have been the emergence of social structure (differentiated or hierarchically structured groups) and also the emergence of social norms. Institutions are created to provide the structure that societies impose upon the interactions between humans, and the transactions between establishments in order to prevent chaotic conditions. According to North in ‘The Economy as an Evolving Complex System 2’ [20] institutions perform an anti-chaotic role as they define the formal and informal rules of the game, and regulate the interactions and transactions through legislation, codes of practice, convention, and behavioural norms. Institutions are also responsible for the normative enhancement or design of the urban microsystems and also of the global macrosystems. The institutional architecture of the civil system has four main components and these are governance or regulatory systems, commercial systems, human development systems and infrastructure systems. There are institutions of government such as legislatures, regulatory organisations and local government, which require a well run civil service and an effective judiciary. Commercial institutions include banking, financial and insurance, corporate institutions for professionals, and trade unions. Human development systems include public information systems, an education system with academic institutions, a health system, a community system in which the institution of the family or household is protected by society and reinforced by the state, and a social security system. The infrastructure systems

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include transport, telecommunications, utilities networks, sewerage and waste disposal with protection of the environment. Institutional reforms specify new rules or alter old ones to change the behaviour of the system. However the difficulty in altering institutional paths means that institutions also act as constraints with respect to societal choices. The emergence of economic sectors or markets results in trends and patterns that are studied by economists, business strategists and futurists. Political philosophies result in the emergence of democracies, human rights, womens’ rights, economic freedom, class structures, legislation, and military security. Organisation principles regulate the emergence of institutions such as religion, universities, hospitals, prisons or welfare systems. Social behaviour can result in the emergence of residential segregation, stock market crashes, panics, riots, etc., and the popular book by Johnson [21] provides fascinating material. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are able to leverage networks on a global scale with challenges to civil liberties, privacy, power and control. Emergence of language has been important for the communication of ideas and cultural emergence may be reflected in literature, music, dance and art. Societal development results from an increase in the range and number of interactions by humans or transactions between households and establishments. Societies are not only affected by the diffusion of investment capital, since cities or civil ecostructures simultaneously facilitate the cultural diffusion of new fashions, consumer habits and lifestyles through retailers, the advertising media and television. The appetites and habits that are stimulated serve the corporations by the development of consumer markets for their products, and the motivation of society to seek employment that will provide an income to purchase the desirable standard of living. Households organise themselves within urban space to enhance their well-being through a selected pattern of consumption and the generation of household savings or investment to enable agents to reach their full potential. The options available to society become more complex with the accumulation of capital and the evolution of infrastructures. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) measures social progress using the Human Development Index (HDI), and an alternative measure is the City Development Index (CDI), which is applied at the urban level and described in ‘The State of the World’s Cities 2001’ [22]. Five separate sub-indices are constructed for infrastructure, waste, health and education. The infrastructure sub-index is based upon the number of household connections for water, sewerage, electricity and telephone. The waste sub-index is based upon households with wastewater treatment and formal solid waste disposal. The health subindex is based upon life expectancy and child mortality, and the education sub-index is based upon literacy levels and school enrolment. For the purposes of futures research, the importance of social emergence relates to changes in planning standards and social norms that arise as the stock of assets per capita is increased for societies as part of economic development. 7. Civil and societal phase transitions An objective of planning or futures research is to identify the conditions, such as critical resource shortages or resource abundance, which will lead to discontinuities or bifurcations with an irreversible societal transition to a new epoch at a different level of stability. Increasing per capita investment or technological evolution will eventually cause a societal jump to a different stage of development, and conversely longer life assets and resource conservation in an ecopolitan society will also change the dynamic balance of the system. The greatest value from futures research and policy analysis arises from the identification of critical intervention or leverage points in the macrosystems, at which investment capital or the release of resource constraints can achieve a disproportionate and beneficial change to the system. Policy-makers aim to design an adaptive system that minimises the risk of destabilising catastrophes or disasters that create chaotic conditions for brief periods of evolutionary time. The purpose is to identify desirable changes to the trajectory of the civil system that will be more cost-effective than others. The growth of information in the history and future of earth is outlined by Coren [23], and it provides a useful contribution to the understanding of the science of evolution and complexity. The demand for information arises from the uncertainty of dynamic conditions that are changing over time. Information reduces uncertainty and has anti-chaotic properties that create order out of disorder in a far-from-equilibrium system. In the context of complexity science any movement towards complexity involves an enhancement of the information structures, and if that information flow is not forthcoming then a burst of simplification will reduce the complexity and establish a new base from which complexity can grow again. The proportion of establishments in the Quaternary Information Division provides a measure of the transactional complexity for a city region, and it is also necessary to define a Tertiary Commercial Division to determine the civil phase transitions [4]. It should be noted that the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) of business establishments is based upon the category of activity undertaken by the employer and not the occupation of the employees. A brief description of each division follows:  The Primary Resources Division includes agribusiness, mining, energy and water supply industries.  The Secondary Industrial Division includes construction, property and manufacturing industries.  The Tertiary Commercial Division provides tangible economic services including banking, finance and securities, insurance, transport, wholesale and retail trades, travel, hospitality and consumer services.  The Quaternary Information Division encompasses the information service industries such as media, business and legal services, telecommunications and information technology, design, technical services, research and development, education, health, welfare organisations, associations and government. For the purpose of futures research eight stages of development are defined – traditional, agropolitan, infrastructural, industrial, distributional, informational, ecopolitan and planetary with an indicative GNI per capita. These civil transitions

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Table 1 Civil and societal phase transitions. Stages of civil development

GNI per capita 2010 US$

Quaternary Information Division

Typical countries

Traditional Agropolitan Infrastructural Industrial Distributional Informational Ecopolitan

Under 1000 1001–2500 2501–6000 6001–13,500 13,501–30,000 30,001–65,000 65,001+

7.0% 10.0% 20.0% 25.0% 30.0% 40.0% 45.0%

Ethiopia, Somalia India, Indonesia Algeria, China Mexico, Turkey Greece, S. Korea USA, UK Norway

form the core to the evolutionary approach, and the system growth or control parameter for moving conditions from one stage to another is the flow of investment capital. The cumulative investment at each stage of development gives rise to an increase in the urban proportion of the population, together with an increase in the proportion of establishments in the Quaternary Information Division. From the World Bank publication ‘World Development Indicators’ [24], Table 1 above shows the civil phase transitions and in traditional countries such as Ethiopia and Somalia the Quaternary Information Division is assessed at around 7% of employment, and this rises to 40% in countries at the informational stage of development such as the USA or UK. The table also provides a framework for developing social norms. The number of doctors per 10,000 population increases from 2 at the traditional stage to 35 at the informational stage, and the corresponding number of hospital beds increases from 12 to 60 in the most advanced economies. Secondary school enrolment increases from 25% in traditional countries to over 90% at the informational stage. In the more developed countries tertiary enrolment increased from 15% to 50% between 1960 and 2000. With a reduction in economic growth in an ecopolitan society, there will be a shift in expectations from expansion and growth to human development, ecological consciousness, and quality of life. However, a shorter working life in the more developed countries (MDCs), with fewer working hours, will result in a decline in lifetime incomes. Also increased investment in the MDCs runs into diminishing returns, which drives down the available return on investment, and reduces the capability of the MDCs to provide adequately for retirees. 8. Futures research in practice Complexity science applications have been outlined for each of the futurist schools [1], and these provide evolving theories for futures thinking. Environmental and geosciences treat the earth and its various components as typical out-ofequilibrium systems with dissipative processes. Infrastructure and socio-technological systems emerge through the diffusion of investment capital, with the endogenous transformation of the urban system. Social, political and economic sciences describe social emergence by means of agent-based models. Human life, mind and information sciences are evolving with the development of complexity models in neuroscience, immune systems, epidemic modelling, and artificial intelligence. Business and management science involves examining the viability of successfully undertaking transactions in a complex adaptive system, in which the systemic structure evolves over time. In practice there are futures research techniques or methodologies that have a theoretical basis such as modelling and simulation, technological forecasting, trend-based foresight, backcasting, morphological analysis, etc. Theory development in the futures field is particularly important for the scrutiny and assessment of statements in support of alternative futures scenarios. Each of the five major segments of the futurist field have ten or more sub-categories, with a total of 50–60 sub-categories, and so there is a wide diversity of futurists and branches within the field with their own specific methodologies. The Millennium Project’s ‘Futures Research Methodology – Version 3.0’ [25] provides a range of 38 techniques and the Appendix by Aaltonen [26] classifies these methods into four groups, which are described respectively as engineering approaches, systems thinking, mathematical complexity and social complexity. The first two of these groups dominate thinking and practice in strategic management, whereas complexity science provides a contrasting and complementary view of how the future emerges and is not yet widely used. A more general list of futures research techniques follows:           

Horizon scanning and indicators. Technological forecasting, Delphi method and cross-impact analysis. Social forecasting and trends analysis. Projective futures and forecasts. Prospective futures and scenarios. Evolutionary futures and landscapes. Systems science and complexity science. Modelling and simulation. Morphological analysis and backcasting. Causal layered analysis [27] and integral futures [28]. Normative futures, agendas, platforms, designs and visions.

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Evolutionary landscapes emerge from a coherent set of qualitative and quantitative descriptions about the evolutionary parameters that are driving world development, in order to explain the behaviour of the system. Investment capital is the system growth parameter that creates spatial structure with the evolution of the world’s system of cities, and the change in capital stock drives the per capita Gross Regional Product (GRP). There is also a qualitative evolutionary driver of the system, which is the increase in planning standards or social norms and the physical quality of life that correspond to the stages of development. Sustainable civil development involves intervention in the system to extend life expectancy and the lifetime of our civilisation, through the release of resource constraints and the conservation of our natural environment. The normative drivers of the system would include the following:          

Geopolitical – planetary governance with continental integration. Demographic – sustainable population peak by 2150. Civil – urban transition with rising infrastructure standards in LDCs. Economic – increasing per capita GRP with an upper limit for MDCs. Social – international economic convergence and social equity. Land-use – allocation for settlements, agriculture, forests and wildlife. Technological – decarbonisation and dejouling of energy with renewables. Environmental – resource conservation through dematerialisation. Security – reduction in crime, terrorism and war. Hazards – protection from geo-hazards, bio-hazards, socio-hazards and techno-hazards.

In exploring an evolutionary vision for the planet in the period 2000–2150, a combination of different policies need to be identified that would minimise the possibility of a disastrous scenario in a multi-polar world, and to achieve a viable future with a desirable end state. A morphological analysis may be undertaken for the conception of subsystem parameters that can be combined to produce an overall system design with high performance characteristics. The co-evolutionary path for each of the macrosystems will be dependent upon the dynamics of the complex adaptive system, which will have inevitable design defects that may be overcome eventually by trial and error. The future state of the planet in the period 2025–2150, during which the proportion of the urban population is expected to increase from say 60% to 90%, may be explored by interpolation between the extrapolated near future in 2025 and a prognosticated long-term future state in 2150 when the population may peak at 12.5 billion. By the year 2150 each of the following macrosystems and their subsystems will have reached a possible condition or configuration, and a themed combination of the various states for each system will give rise to a scenario. A

Planetary governance

B

Geopolitical context and military deterrence

C

Continental integration and cultural diversity

D

Population policies and demographic trends

E

Life sciences and medicine

F

Land use and food supplies

G

Resource conservation and the environment

H

High technology and space research

J

World system of cities and the planetary infrastructure

K

Urban technology and telecommunications

L

Community systems and human development

M

Societal transformations and employment

N

The world production system and transnational corporations

P

The world economy and globalisation

Each configuration for a system may be identified by coding as for example A1, A2, A3, A4, etc. will represent different conditions for planetary governance. The approach can be taken to any level of sophistication that is desirable for a specific purpose. The following five global scenarios are representative of the concerns of the different schools of futures studies, namely environmental science, infrastructure systems, social science, human life science, and management science schools:     

Biotech wave: An ecological scenario for the world’s living resources. Settlements first: A scenario without slums and with a more level global infrastructure. Continental cultures: A cultural diversity scenario within a multi-polar world. Transhuman cognition: A scenario for enhancement of human mental capacities [29]. Generica rules: A scenario with a worldwide mass market and a global superculture.

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In reality the future outcome is likely to be a hybrid version of all the scenarios, with different elements being played out in the various continental regions of the world. 9. Macrostructure and the absorption of extreme events At the micro level the urban system is a set of interrelationships linking intra-urban levels such as individuals, households, establishments and institutions. At the meso level the city may be considered to be a systemic entity that responds to both competition and complementarity with other neighbouring cities. These levels generate emergent behaviour in the macrostructure at higher levels, such as the regional or continental levels. The macrosystems for an interconnected world will need to co-evolve to create a civilisation that is adaptable, robust and resilient to extreme events or Xevents [30] such as natural hazards that include floods and famine, bio-hazards such as epidemics or transmittable diseases and social hazards such as currency speculation, riots, terrorism or civil wars, and technological hazards such as accidents, explosions or contamination leading to civil disasters with loss of life, damage to the built environment, and severe disruption to human activities. Global financial integration (connectivity) weakens the ability of governments to steer their economies, particularly the stimulation of weak economies with high unemployment. A sensible contingency plan is to create the equivalent of ‘firebreaks’ as for forest fires and buildings, by the formation of continental economic unions that could prevent global financial collapse and deep worldwide recessions. A robust strategy will be one that creates sufficient wealth to provide a safety factor against poverty for the least developed countries. Currently life is far too precarious for billions of people who are living on the edge of survival, and investment is required for adaption, mitigation strategies and hazard management. Geopolitical potential is achieved through the continental union of states or territorial expansion. Political regimes determine how resources are exploited for the benefit of their own populations, which are protected by boundaries and military deterrence. The geopolitical system increases the size and diversity of the resource base and the primary markets that can be served. The realm of influence is dependent upon the information networks and the range and speed of transport and military technology, and also the potential difference between adjacent states. Systems that have the highest evolutionary potential are those that develop a rich diversity within a coherent unifying structure. But the greater the potential difference between parts of the global system, the greater the disorder and chaos that will prevail in the territories of least potential. Whilst the international importance of nation-states is declining, more countries are being created and there are on-going negotiations for regional trading blocs and the formation of continental unions. It is envisaged that sustainable ecopolitan states will form the building blocks of civilisations, and they will reach a sufficient level of complexity to achieve economic specialisation and economies of scale for a niche within a continental union. It should be noted that international or interregional trade allows one country or region to draw on the ecological carrying capacity of another, and they may be unsustainable in isolation, even though sustainable as part of a larger trading bloc. Successive generations of governments will modify and rearrange the building blocks in the light of experience, or new alliances may be formed in line with trading agreements or events such as an invasion. For the evolution of a complex adaptive system the building blocks for larger groupings should ideally comprise populations that are socially coherent, with clusters of establishments that are stable and can achieve economies of agglomeration. The emergence of ecopolitan states as basic geopolitical units or bounded landscapes with evolutionary potential, is a necessary construct to enable long-range futures research to encompass geopolitical, social and environmental issues that affect the contextual macrostructure. An Ecopolitan Index (EI) could be developed along the lines of the City Development Index, to measure the extent to which an ecopolitan state achieves social and environmental norms for efficiency, equity and sustainability. The term ecopolitan state has been selected to avoid ‘lock-in’ to the existing terms for describing territorial entities such as empires, sub-continents, colonies, countries, nations, states, regions and provinces. Ecopolitan states of 5– 20 m inhabitants will emerge by 2025 and a significant number of them will correspond to nation-states, such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Sweden, or Switzerland. Similarly Scotland with a population of over 5 m would be an example of an ecopolitan state that was part of a larger nation-state. In the USA the 50 individual states would also correspond to ecopolitan states, and in accordance with the slogan ‘‘think globally act locally’’ each state would be responsible for cleaning up its act to meet the economic, social, and environmental challenges of the future. In the large subcontinental economies such as China and India, regional states could be re-designated into around 300 prospective ecopolitan states, and it is estimated that the world total of potential ecopolitan states by the year 2150 will be 1000. If the potential of the world system of cities could be modelled as a dynamic network of nodes for the diffusion of investment and the attraction of human populations using adaptive computation, then the diversity offered in the transactions between some 15 m large establishments, or 10,000 cities of over 100,000 inhabitants, within 1000 ecopolitan states would provide a robust and resilient system. Complex adaptive systems include redundancy with a multitude of establishments acting in parallel so that minor failures are absorbed in the vivisystem, and major failures or Xevents may be contained by becoming less significant failures at the next highest level in the hierarchy. This characteristic would create a considerable ‘‘damping’’ effect in the system dynamics models that ignore the evolutionary behaviour of a complex adaptive system and exaggerate the prospect of global collapse. However, history has shown that civilisations rise and decline as natural phases in the evolution of humankind, and continental unions may decompose back to the basic building blocks of ecopolitan states for recombination into different groupings with an emerging planetary civilisation.

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10. Conclusion This article is the final part of a trilogy of papers that commenced by defining the major segments of the futures field, which have complementary but differing research methodologies and time horizons. In practice futures research techniques have been extensively documented with little reference to any underlying theory. Futures research is an evolutionary science and complexity science, or the science of evolution and complexity, provides a unifying framework for some forty diverse features that are applicable to all segments of the futures field. Path dependence and emergence are two of the most significant features for futures research, and at the micro level the transacting entities of households and establishments result in the civil emergence of towns and cities that may be explained by macrolaws. Social emergence arises from the interaction of individuals and institutions that may be quantified in terms of trends in changing social norms. Increasing complexity involves an enhancement of information structures, and civil phase transitions can be defined in relation to GNI per capita and the proportion of establishments in four economic divisions, Primary Resources, Secondary Industrial, Tertiary Commercial, and Quaternary Informational. Investment capital is the control parameter that enables societies to progress to a further stage of development, and at each stage there is an increase in the urban proportion of the population. Geopolitical potential can be enhanced by the continental union of states, but these may decompose back to the basic building blocks of states for recombination of different groupings. International policy making is a design problem with multi-stage decision processes, and the course of world development can be changed and extreme events absorbed through critical intervention points in the global macrosystems. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]

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