Our Subtopian Future

Ecotopia's great and all, but what about the future of the grungy part of town? An exploration using the basic "atom" of scenario-based foresight planning: the 2x2 matrix.

When COVID lockdown hit Toronto, the city made some streets pedestrian-only. One was at the end of my block. We weren’t doing much driving anyway, but I found to my surprise that as a driver, I didn’t miss that main thoroughfare at all. I just rerouted around it. But the impact on the community was immense. People congregated. It wasn’t a park, but it was a public space open enough that we could, as Prime Minister Trudeau so eloquently put it, “keep two meters apart, and avoid speaking moistly.”

I remember that, and the silence. An urban area of eight million people, and you could only hear the birds and the wind in the trees. It was amazing, and it led me to begin thinking seriously about what the post-oil, post-automobile city might look like.

Lockdown was an unsustainable regime, born out of a global tragedy. The idea of a quiet city—the ecotopian urban model—is instead all about sustainability. Getting a clear focus on what it would feel like to live in such a place is hard, because there are so many visions, and so many articles that focus on just one or another of the innovations needed to make a fully sustainable, carbon-zero, walkable metropolis possible.

I figured I’d put them all together as a visioning exercise (something we do in strategic foresight) and describe the place (something we do in science fiction). And lastly, I’d talk about how you can contribute to the ‘great renovation’ of our currently unsustainable cities into ecotopian regions that will still be sheltering your descendants centuries from now.

But then I thought about it again, and abandoned that idea.

In general, if everybody’s excited about some trend, the creative possibilities are no longer there. In foresight we talk about hunting for ‘weak signals’ of change. At this point the 15-minute city isn’t a weak signal, it’s a blaring horn. If we’re talking Ecotopian visions, where’s the neglected place? The place where the really new weak signals might be found?

Subtopia, that’s where.

First, let’s get the ecotopian city out of the way. It’s pretty clear that what we’re aiming at, in one or two generations, is to concentrate the human population in very large urban regions that have these characteristics:

• They have great public transit infrastructure combined with the ‘15 minute’ or ‘walkable city’ features that make using that infrastructure unnecessary for many people. They are automotive accessible, but e-bikes, delivery drones, work-from-home for white-collar laborers, access to locally grown foods, neighbourhood doctors’ and dentists’ offices make the long-distance commute a thing of the past.

• There are new ways of getting around. ebikes, evTOL air-cars, self-driving electric vehicles (EVs), Muskian tunnels under every street, and the mad cable-car networks of Whoosh provide many more options than we have at present.

• They are heavily robotized. Mountains have been written about this, so I won’t add to that here. But, economically, despite energy abundance and a robotic workforce, they pursue degrowth strategies and circular economics.

• They are energy self-sufficient. A combination of photovoltairc electricity (PV), battery storage, or next-gen geothermal for energy and district heating makes even northern cities unreliant on fossil fuels. Actually, PV+EV is better than EV+battery, and this seems to be the trend.

• People live in Habitat-67 inspired modular, stacked, heavily gardened neighbourhoods. These replace the anonymous 20th century apartment blocks that sprout everywhere now.

• There’s a right to repair that goes with the robot workforce; a revolution against patent and copyright might happen, resulting in a proliferation of open-source software and hardware, combined with 3d printing and small-scale manufacturing. The next-gen, high-tech city looks shabby, like the ‘lived-in’ worlds of Star Wars, rather than shiny and new like Star Trek, because things are built to age gracefully. We want to be using the same wind turbines that our great-grandparents put up a hundred years ago.

• They grow vegetables and fruit in vertical farms, and produce meat, cheese and milk in precision-fermentation vats. They feed themselves.

• They permit the restoration of wilderness beyond their regions of influence.

And on and on; yes, there are things you can do speed along such a vision, and they mostly involve changing the zoning laws in your neighbourhood. The rest will follow.

This is cool and all, but there’s something of a whiff of nostalgic futurism to it—it has the air of the blinkered optimism of the 1900s. (Habitat ‘67 being a perfect example, far-sighted though it was.)

These next-gen metropolises are going to be great for those people who actually get to live in them. But what about the rest of us? The people who never wanted to move to the big city? What’s the fate of the small town in this future?

If everybody’s eyes are on the city, maybe the smart move is to ask what’s going to happen to the fringe, the hinterland—the subtopia.

Robot Empires of the Warehouse District

Subtopia is a real thing. The word refers to that part of a city, usually on its fringe, that is dominated by strip malls, warehouses, light manufacturing, and rail yards. If you pause to wonder what the future of those regions is, then you might start to ask an inconvenient question, namely: what supports the ecotopian heart of the future city?

Sure, these cities are supposed to be self-sufficient, but that’s aspirational; absolute autonomy is a limit, like light-speed, that none will ever reach. Ecotopolis will, for good or ill, have its own subtopia. Even The Line in Saudi Arabia will have systems that feed into it. These will have an impact on the ecology of the region, and they will have their own networks and economies. You might wonder how detached they’ll be able to become from the packed urban cores they supposedly serve.

And some people have wondered this. The IPCC devotes a chapter of their 6th report to Cities, Settlements, and Key Infrastructure. Arup have studied urban prospects as part of their 2050 scenarios. The University of Michigan has a really interesting course called Scenario Planning for Urban Futures; their approach is what I want to talk about here. And the most famous, and easy, way of generating foresight scenarios is using something called the 2x2 matrix.

In the rest of this post, I’ll show you how the 2x2 matrix works, use one to generate some scenarios around the future of subtopia, and then write some short speculative vignettes to bring them to life.

Critical Uncertainties

The 2x2 matrix method is widely used because it’s a simple and intuitive tool to help non-experts think about the future. It starts by identifying two critical uncertainties that will most shape one problem domain. These are issues that are extremely important but whose ultimate outcome is very hard to predict. For example, you might pick "centralized vs. decentralized governance" and "high vs. low climate action" as two critical uncertainies for the near future.

You then use these as the axes of a matrix, creating four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a distinct future scenario based on different combinations of the uncertainties. This way you can explore a range of plausible futures, challenge assumptions, and test strategies against multiple outcomes. It's widely used because it's intuitive, visual, and effective for engaging diverse stakeholders in long-term thinking.

Scenario-based planning can get as complex as you want it to be; the ultimate version is called morphological analysis (MA). This is a foresight method used to explore complex futures by identifying all key dimensions of a problem (e.g., energy source, governance model, population trend) and listing multiple plausible options for each. These options are arranged in a multi-dimensional grid, and combinations are explored to generate a wide range of internally consistent scenarios. Unlike the 2x2 method, which focuses on two core uncertainties and yields four scenarios, MA is more flexible and granular, allowing for dozens or hundreds of possibilities. It's better for mapping complex systems, while 2x2 is faster, easier to communicate, and ideal for strategic conversations. MA usually requires dedicated software and a lot of hand-holding to work.

So we’re not going to go there. Usually, critical uncertainties are identified through a long process of collecting ‘weak signals’ then grouping them to find domains of interest, then looking for the ‘drivers of change’ that are affecting those areas. Generally this is a team effort. But let’s not do that. It’s perfectly possible to just pick two likely candidates and make a 2x2 matric yourself, as a back-of-the-envelope exploration. In this case, what’s interesting about subtopia is that it’s the interface between the city and countryside; this makes it a region of flows—energy flows, information flows, and material flows. With this in mind, we can cherry-pick two critical uncertainties that seem likely in such an environment:

1. Doies the subtopia of an ecotopian city depend on the urban core for its material needs?

2. Are the hinterlands energy-independent, or is energy production and distribution built around and routed through urban centers?

We can plot the possible combinations of these two axes as four possible futures: one of high material and energy autonomy for the hinterlands, and another of high material autonomy but centralized control of energy and its distribution; one of low material autonomy but high energy independence, and a last one of low material autonomy and centralized energy control. The result is four possible futures for subtopian and hinterland regions, which we could name, as in the following chart:

What remains is to work out how likely each of these is, and what life would be like for you in an ecotopian future where you remain a country-bumpkin refusenik.