Anticipating Cities of Wellbeing
Keynote & Three Horizons workshop at Ljubljana Forum 2025
A futures-driven session connecting the “City of Wellbeing” agenda to practical anticipatory governance, and closing the day with a participatory Three Horizons exercise to surface pressures, aspirations, and transition leverage points toward 2045.
Challenge
Urban futures conversations often swing between two familiar poles: glossy progress narratives (smart tech, speed, growth) and a growing unease that these trajectories are stretching cities socially, environmentally, and emotionally faster than our capacity to govern them. The Ljubljana Forum’s “City of Well-Being” theme made that tension concrete: wellbeing is widely valued, but hard to operationalise into planning, investment, and governance choices.
The forum needed a session that could do more than inspire. It had to help a mixed audience of city leaders, planners, practitioners, and partners move from “wellbeing as an outcome” to wellbeing as a direction-setting compass, with methods for anticipating change and translating it into decisions.
Approach
1) Panel & Keynote: Anticipating the City of Wellbeing
The keynote framed anticipation as a civic and leadership capability: the ability to imagine, prepare, and act before shifts become crises. It connected wellbeing and the transformation of Copenhagen to the larger “Urban Transformation” megatrend and the structural pressures cities face (growth in urban populations, climate and emissions pressure, inequality, loneliness, and mental health).
The talk also offered a pragmatic interpretation of ANTICIPATE’s ACT approach for cities:
Scan signals and frame plausible paths
Involve stakeholders early so legitimacy grows with the idea
Run a portfolio of small bets people can feel
Then codify learning into rules, budgets, contracts, procurement, and zoning so progress survives leadership cycles
A set of concrete “city-of-wellbeing” design prompts anchored the narrative, including: participation as infrastructure, affordability as a design choice, learning loops via open data, and proximity & care by design.
2) Three Horizons workshop: Vision 2045
To close the day, we facilitated a Three Horizons exercise with close to 40 participants, designed to bring the conversation out of plenary abstraction and into collective sensemaking.
The workshop asked participants to map:
Horizon 1 (today’s pressures and patterns): What is overstretched in current city systems
Horizon 3 (the ideal city in 2045): What a city designed for wellbeing could look like
Horizon 2 (leverage points for transition): Bold moves and pragmatic shifts that could bridge the gap
The debrief captured the outputs as a snapshot of “what the room saw”, as collective input that can guide future-oriented governance and action.
Outcomes
1) A grounded wellbeing agenda that could be acted on
The keynote reframed wellbeing from a soft add-on to a concrete orientation for city decisions, linking it to governance mechanisms (participation, affordability, learning loops, proximity) rather than only infrastructure or branding.
2) A clear map of present-day urban pressures
Participants surfaced 53 signals of current urban strain, clustered around themes such as housing and cost of living, car-centric congestion and aging infrastructure, weakening social fabric (loneliness and mental health), governance tensions (short cycles vs long vision), inequality, cultural identity loss, and environmental pressure.
3) Collective leverage points for the transition to 2045
The group produced a set of actionable “bridge moves” for Horizon 2, including the most-voted themes: sustainable nature-connected urban living, more conversation/less screen time, civic service to rebuild empathy across generations, education reform toward values and care, and embedding foresight as a civic capacity in planning.
