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Planning for the complexity and uncertainty of urban socio-environmental futures

Nature Cities volume 2, pages 187–197 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Owing to the rapidly evolving complexity within urban social and environmental systems, planners are increasingly facing the unenviable task of making important decisions about our socio-environmental futures with incomplete information. Rather than sacrifice environmentally responsive projects to future unpredictability arising from myriad, interactive urban complexities, we build on a range of literature on uncertainty in decision-making to develop the RAFT (reversibility, adaptability, flexibility and tailoring) framework. By humbly admitting the inevitability of unforeseen change and knowledge gaps, RAFT advances projects and decisional processes that are reversible, adaptable, flexible and tailored to changing conditions and policy contexts. It therefore supports the development of successful, forward-looking interventions, notwithstanding unpredictable futures.

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Fig. 1: RAFT guidance for complex problem assessment and policy-process flow.
Fig. 2: Selection of global locations where RAFT may be applied.
Fig. 3: Simplified illustration of the implementation of the RAFT framework for policy actors contending with loss of developed land owing to sea-level rise.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Smithsimon, D. Hess, J. Gilligan and the University of Washington CSDE for their help and encouragement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA

    Daniel A. Shtob

  2. State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Jordan Fox

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Patrick Trent Greiner

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  1. Daniel A. Shtob
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  2. Jordan Fox
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  3. Patrick Trent Greiner
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Contributions

All authors contributed equally to this work. D.A.S. conceived the original idea, D.A.S., J.F. and P.T.G. developed the idea, concepts and intervention, reviewed the literature and wrote the paper. P.T.G. designed the graphics with assistance from D.A.S.

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Correspondence to Daniel A. Shtob.

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Shtob, D.A., Fox, J. & Greiner, P.T. Planning for the complexity and uncertainty of urban socio-environmental futures. Nat Cities 2, 187–197 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00195-6

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