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2 METHODOLOGY
2.1 The Need for a Futures Approach
All that is certain about the future of the Irish gateways is that they will change and these
changes will be rapid, vast and unpredictable. In an environment of growing complexity,
heightened uncertainty and with a quickening pace of change, planners and decision-makers
face a complicated and difficult task of preparing for what the future may bring. For some time,
it has been recognised that the prevailing planning approach towards the future is inadequate
and a slow shift towards new ways of thinking and acting about the future of cities has been
observed. Various criticisms that have been levelled at prevailing planning practice which
include.
Ineffective mechanisms to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of urban
environments.
Widespread short-term orientation of planning.
Inadequacy of the ‘predict and provide’ model, which reinforces the present conditions
and makes it more difficult to consider alternative future options.
Lack of a comprehensive integration of physical planning with economic and social
development.
Limited collaboration of stakeholders from different sectors.
Paucity of real community participation.
Failure to provide visionary and innovative solutions.
Being reactive rather than proactive towards the future.
The recognition of the failures of current planning practice has led to a search for and adoption
of new and more imaginative future-oriented approaches. In Ireland, for example, futures
methods have recently been used, in the Border, Midland and Western (BMW) Regional Foresight
exercise and by the Athlone Institute of Technology. Also, over the past few years, The Futures
Academy, DIT, has been promoting the use of futures methods in the urban and regional
planning field, of which this project is the latest instance.
The futures approach used in this study is the ‘Prospective Through Scenarios Process’,
developed by The Futures Academy, Dublin Institute of Technology. This process has been based
on concepts and assumptions from a much larger field of inquiry - futures studies. Futures
studies is a discipline that aims “to discover or invent, examine and evaluate, and propose
possible, probable and preferable futures” (Bell, 2003). Over the past 40 years or so, futures
studies has developed in both breadth and depth. It is now a globally–distributed meta-discipline
which is taught in a number of universities and which increasingly has the capability to
contribute to corporate strategies, policy debates, urban planning, social innovations and the
like. In essence, Futures Studies enables the forward view. That is, it provides interpretative or
propositional knowledge about the future, up-dates this regularly, assesses the quality of
emerging understandings and uses them for a range of socially-useful purposes. The most crucial
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