From 2018 to spring 2021, Evergreen and Future Cities Canada spearheaded a project looking at disruption and change in the Greater Toronto Area and the Calgary/Edmonton Corridor (CEC). The project utilized strategic foresight to develop a range of scenarios these regions may find themselves in as the by-product of converging trends and critical uncertainties that could manifest in the coming years. This project was specifically interested in surfacing the known and unknown threats that may emerge and present a range of risks to physical and social infrastructure in these regions.

This process was highly participatory, bringing together an “expert group” of futurists, urbanists, and other professionals from across the country to develop these scenarios and crowd-source a list of potential actions (e.g., policy and practice recommendations) that these regions may consider in developing sustainable and resilient community centred infrastructure.

To converge this work into a formal action plan for the CEC, our team in collaboration with Keren Perla (Director Energy Futures Policy Collaborative) was engaged to analyze the crowdsourced policy and practice recommendations from the Expert Group.

Impact:

Using the Three Horizons of Innovation Framework, this work led to the development of an action plan that articulates tangible strategies for guiding infrastructure decisions in the CEC over the next 30 years. These actions are organized according to those needed to maintain and strengthen what is already going well (Horizon 1), those needed to explore and discover new possibilities (Horizon 2), and finally those that are foundationally novel for the corridor and could serve as transformational pursuits (Horizon 3). In all, the action plan attempts to honour the hard work that began years previous and serve as a foundational piece for informing future discussion and deliberation around what is needed and required in the CEC in the years to come.