Investigating the future is an established practice for the academy and the world of crafts and industry. From the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893 to the two Worlds Fairs of New York City (1939 and 1965) and so on, the future has been foreseen as filled with technology and amazing architecture. However, not every vision of the future has described promising scenarios: the dystopian novel by George Orwell entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, looked 35 years ahead, painting an anything but reassuring picture of the future. We have entered the third decade of the new millennium, and we must certainly reflect on the objectives we had set for 2020 and on the results we have achieved. However, project into the future (pro-jàcere, from Latin, jump forward), explore and imagine how your life will change, boosted by human ingenuity and with the support of science, is in the human nature. The four visions of the future proposed by Norman Henchey (1978) conceptualized in classes – ‘possible’ (any future), ‘plausible’ (future that makes sense), ‘probable’ (highly likely to happen), ‘preferable’ (the best that could happen) – have been brilliantly described in the ‘Futures Cone’ reinterpreted by Joseph Voros (2003). As we move away from the present, the ‘possible’ tends to ‘preferable’ due to the lack of elements and data on which to base the programming and the planning: in fact, the certainty on the type of technologies and production methods that will be available, on the social structure and user uses, and so on decreases.
By 2030, the world will already be different: Thomas L. Friedman (2016) highlights that the three main forces of our Planet – Moore’s Law (technology), the Market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss) – are all pressing at the same time, with inevitable consequences for the territory, cities, architecture, products and services that will be designed, developed and used in the future. The 17 2030 Sustainable Development Goals presented by the United Nations provide an answer for this time horizon (www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/), tracing the path towards a model to achieve a better and more sustainable future for everyone. But will these Goals be able to accelerate sustainable innovation? However, it is clear that how the future of our planet, its landscapes, cities, architecture and consumer products will mostly depend on the decisions we make today, on our level of ‘vision’ and on how we will deal with the subject of sustainability with respect to the aforementioned Goals. Going beyond 2030, imagining 2050, we will certainly have to deal with a population growth that will reach ten billion people, of which 75% will be living in cities and urban areas (United Nations, 2019); therefore, the cities of the future will become crucial metropolises for the sustainability of the whole Planet. In the meantime, the academic, crafts and industry worlds are raising a series of questions (listed in the pdf of the Call).
Based on the above-mentioned questions, AGATHÓN, turning to disciplinary areas of the Project and in particular of Landscape, Urbanism, Architecture, Engineering, Architectural Technology, Design, Restoration and Recovery, Representation, presents the subject Possible and Preferable Scenarios of a Sustainable Future – Towards 2030 and Beyond with the aim of collecting essays and critical reflections, researches and experiments, projects and actions able to give a vision of the sustainable future of Living by looking at the two-time horizons of 2030 and 2050, providing answers to the main macro-questions:
• Ecology and Environmental Quality;
• Effectiveness and Circularity in Resource Use;
• Mitigation of and Adaptation to Climate Change;
• Energy Efficiency and Renewable Sources;
• Globalization and Glocalization;
• Digitalization, Enabling Technologies and Opportunities linked to Industry 4.0;
• New Ways of Living, Working, Studying, Producing, Consuming and Socializing;
• Challenges caused by Pandemic Threats.