Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques - forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production- to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

Cities, Railways, Modernities chronicles the transformation that London and Paris experienced during the nineteenth century through the lens of the London Underground and the Paris Metro. By highlighting the multiple ways in which the future of the two cities was imagined and the role that railways played in that process, it challenges and refines two of the most dominant myths of urban modernity: A planned Paris and an unplanned London. The book recovers a significant body of work around the ideas, the plans, the context and the building of metropolitan railways in the two cities to provide new insights into the relationship of transport technologies and urban change during the nineteenth century.

Cities, Railways, Modernities chronicles the transformation that London and Paris experienced during the nineteenth century through the lens of the London Underground and the Paris Metro. By highlighting the multiple ways in which the future of the two cities was imagined and the role that railways played in that process, it challenges and refines two of the most dominant myths of urban modernity: A planned Paris and an unplanned London. The book recovers a significant body of work around the ideas, the plans, the context and the building of metropolitan railways in the two cities to provide new insights into the relationship of transport technologies and urban change during the nineteenth century.

As the world rapidly urbanizes, its cities sink themselves into the ground in sprawling tendons of tunnels - conduits for transport, utility, communication, shelter and storage. The excavation of these spaces, at ever-increasing depths and speed, has changed our lives in ways that we tend to take for granted. For the first time, this book charts the global reach of urban underground spaces, bringing together a collection of 80 stories of subterranean sites around the world. The book draws out the extraordinary range of meanings suggested by urban underground spaces, whether their power as places of hope, fear, memory, labour and resistance, or their capacity to evoke both long histories and futures in the making. Illustrated with often breathtaking photographs, Global Undergrounds creates a new sense of the richness and global diversity of urban underground spaces. Its breadth and depth will appeal to all those who are engaged with these spaces: from urban planners, geographers, architects and engineers to urban explorers, photographers and anyone who encounters underground spaces in their cities.Indeed we inhabit a world where the material stuff beneath our feet is constantly in flux, where layer upon layer of things, people and substances circulate, dream and dwell.