Ricerche – Fondazione IIF-Italian Institute for the Future

What Space Logistics in 2050? Big Pictures, Trends and Scenarios in the Emerging Space Economy

WHAT SPACE LOGISTICS IN 2050? BIG PICTURES, TRENDS AND SCENARIOS IN THE EMERGING SPACE ECONOMY

What role does Space play in the evolution of the economy? And of humanity? How useful is it to anticipate possible future developments?

These are questions that until a few decades ago were of interest to a few experts or enthusiasts, but which today must be considered by companies, international organisations, and even voters. Technological accelerations in fact promise epochal developments: Space is a candidate to become a context of possible productive ecosystems, this will require the ability to manage and administer new levels of complexity to bring out desirable dynamics for human and planetary development, rather than new areas of conflict.

With this book we want to offer hints for possible answers and to make people think about strategic issues that will potentially affect everyone. For this we try to imagine and narrate a variety of possible futures, based on different sources (including opinions of authoritative experts from ESA, UN, and multinational companies) and original applications of strategic foresight methods (Horizon Scanning, Exploratory Scenarios, Causal Layered Analysis, Systems Archetypes). The ambition is to help anticipate and prepare desirable futures in the medium and long term and to disseminate an attitude of farsightedness.

THE REVIEW

“Pietro Guerrieri and Rocco Scolozzi have worked diligently to link systems thinking with space futures. However, while most books stay at the litany level extolling the virtues of space travel or arguing against space travel due to the problems on Earth, Guerrieri and Scolozzi take us further. Along with scenarios (space colonization, the missed spaceboat, Elysium – space for the few, and space wars), they use CLA to go deeper, to uncover the core assumptions of our space futures. This is likely the first use of CLA to space futures. The book truly becomes alive at his juncture. The authors move us from numerous litanies (nationalism, an exciting enterprise, a profitable context, and an environment to defend) to the systems that support these litanies, the worldviews that are used to make sense of them (no limits, the destiny of humanity) to the core metaphors. These include: the El Dorado and the Explorer, the Alchemical Philosopher’s stone, the Ark, and the Utopia.

All in all, a welcome book critical for understanding space futures.”

– Sohail Inayatullah – UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. IIUM. Professor, Tamkang University. Editor, the Journal of Futures Studies, and researcher. Famous for introducing and pioneering the futures technique of causal layered analysis (CLA).

THE AUTHORS

Pietro Guerrieri is a senior executive. In his experience of more than 30 years in the Space sector, he had the opportunity to integrate the needs and the business perspectives of the different players active in the value chain. He currently heads strategy at D-Orbit, with a keen eye on corporate strategy and long-term strategic scenarios.

Rocco Scolozzi is a professional futurist, expert in social-technological-ecological systems, PhD in Environmental Engineering, devoting much of his time to participatory strategic foresight, with the ambition to democratise the futures and spread the futures literacy.

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06/07/2023/by Roberto Paura

CEF, News, Ricerche

Call for Paper – The Futures of Europe in a fast-changing Global System

As for the past two years, also in 2023 the Center for European Futures launches a special issue of Futuri journal entirely devoted to the futures of Europe and of the international system. The aim of the issue is publishing theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions that, through the perspective of Futures Studies, aspire to analyse the future scenarios of Europe and of the World. In this direction, we recommend studies that make use of methods within the field of Futures Studies and social forecasting – and/or that emphasise the long-term consequences, megatrend effects or multiple scenarios of the topics addressed.

The issue is thematically open: essays from different and (possibly) interdisciplinary approaches are solicited within different and heterogeneous fields: institutions and politics at the national, international and comparative level; economics (including political economy and labour policies) and society (including gender issues); cultures and languages; territorial cohesion, inequalities and/or demographic scenarios; new developments in specific fields such as ecology and the digital sphere, or the new arms race.

Theoretical and empirical analyses specifically addressing the possible future developments of European integration process – and the European Union more broadly – are welcome. Also in this last case, analyses can encompass virtually all aspects of EU integration and its institutional complex: common foreign and security policy, the internal market and/or international trade, environmental policies, interventions such as the NextGenerationEU and its policy implications, political parties and Europe, institutions and integration between systems, and gender issues within and outside institutions.

Deadline and publication schedule

25 February: Submission of abstracts*
3 March: Notification of selected abstracts
30 April: Submission of articles
31 May: Feedback from peer-review process
30 June: Submission of articles revised in the light of referees’ suggestions
July 2022: Publication of the special issue

Instructions for authors

For any information, including content, on Futures Studies, authors interested in publishing in the issue should contact the series editor at the following e-mail address: a.cozzolino@europeanfutures-iif.it.

Abstracts, of between 200 and 350 words, must contain the main indications on the topics to be addressed, theoretical and possibly methodological perspectives. They must also be accompanied by a short biography of the authors.

Articles can be in Italian or English. The evaluation of contributions in this issue will be subject to a participatory double-blind referencing mode: authors agree to evaluate at least one contribution from another author. Articles must be between 25,000 and 35,000 characters (including spaces and bibliography). The bibliography, cited with the American author-data system within the text, will be written following the examples below:

Arnaldi S., Poli R. (a cura di), La previsione sociale – Introduzione allo studio dei futuri, Carocci, Roma, 2012.
Beckert J., Imagined futures: Fictional expectations in the economy, “Theory and Society”, vol. 42 n. 3, 2013.
Campa R., Un decalogo per la tecnoetica, “Futuri”, 11 maggio 2020: http://www.futurimagazine.it/dossier/un-decalogo-per-la-tecnoetica/
Fucile G., E rimarrà solo un apriscatole. Cultura del consumo e apocalissi letterarie, in Paura R., Verso F. (a cura di), Antropocene. L’umanità come forza geologica, Future Fiction, Roma, 2018.

Within the text, quotations will be made using the following: «». Footnotes should be limited to the essential and in any case should not be used for bibliographical references. Please include also a short abstract (750-1000 charachters).

FUTURI is a six-monthly journal on futures studies published by the Italian Institute for the Future. It is recognised as a scientific journal in Italian academic system for “Area 14” (Political and Social Sciences).

30/01/2023/by Roberto Paura

CEF, Ricerche

Healing culture, reclaiming commons, fostering care: a proposal for EU cultural policies

Since 2020, the pandemic and closure of cultural venues across the EU have made the precariousness of the sector even more evident. In response, the commons have been arenas of transformation and communities of resistance for social relations and culture, “as a way to create empathy, give voice to the voiceless, overcome social distance and the emptiness of public spaces”.

“Healing culture, reclaiming commons, fostering care” presents the cultural policy proposal born from a participatory research within the community of l’Asilo (www.exasilofilangieri.it), conducted between May 2020 and May 2021 by a research team composed of academics from different disciplines, artists and activists, in connection with social movements.

The reflection starts from an experience of commoning to suggest bottom-up actions and recommendations for the European Union to give voice to commoners and workers themselves in cultural policies, promote inclusive decision-making and guarantee support for groups made even more fragile by Covid-19. The theory is enriched by examples of grassroots empowerment such as La Tela, a collaborative digital artwork, and the artist residencies in Roccaporena, as a project of social cohesion and innovation to build an empathic connection between artists and inhabitants in the internal areas.

Such proposals question us and act as a bridge towards a sustainable cultural production, capable of fostering principles of cohesion, equality and solidarity.

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03/06/2021/by CFE

Ricerche

Education 2050: Suggestions from Italy for the UNESCO Initiative on the Futures of Education

UNESCO has launched the “Futures of Education: Learning to Become” initiative with the aim of redefining learning models for the future. The initiative is a global debate on how knowledge, education and learning should be re-imagined in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty and precariousness, to shape the future of humanity and the planet. The Director-General of UNESCO has convened an independent International Commission for this purpose under the direction of the President of Ethiopia, Mrs. Sahle-Work Zewde, to develop a global report on the Futures of Education. The members of the Commission include leading figures from the worlds of politics, academia, arts, science, business, and education. The Commission will carefully evaluate all inputs from the global consultation process launched with the Futures of Education initiative, in a collective intelligence effort that will feed into a final report and other in-depth papers. The objective is to rethink the role of education, learning, and knowledge, in the light of the great challenges we are facing and the opportunities offered, by predicted, possible and preferable futures also following the so-called futures literacy approach.

The “Futures of Education: Learning to Become” initiative is involving citizens, organizations, bodies and networks all over the world since September 2019, in order to spread the debate on how knowledge and learning can change the future of humanity and of the planet, by defining a set of different perspectives on challenges and opportunities for education and learning that can be both anticipated/foreseen and imagined/visualized by looking at the year 2050 (UNESCO, 2019). The public can be involved in different ways, for example through a three-minute questionnaire or by sharing thoughts in form of text and documents/articles or even artworks.

That’s why the organizing and scientific committee decided to contribute on such an important topic, by launching a participatory in-depth work including different stimuli. The Millennium Project Italian Node, an independent futures study network working with the contribution of 67 nodes all around the world, the Italian Institute for the Future, a non-profit organization on futures studies, Generation Mover™, a professional network working on building future through multi-generational approach, and Novus Lab, a cultural association focused on design thinking, organized and facilitated this participatory structured debate dedicated to “Education 2050“, with a focus on Italy. The event was organized in partnership with UNESCO and included within the Festival of Sustainable Development promoted by ASVIS, the Italian National Alliance for Sustainable Development. The contributions that emerged during the debate about the topics of “Education 2050”, and specifically hopes and fears to 2050 (topic 1), purposes (topic 2) and implications of learning, (topic 3) were included in a report sent to the UNESCO Commission to contribute to the initiative and now out for public release.

The scientific and organizational committee of the event is composed by Mara Di Berardo (Millennium Project), Roberto Paura (Italian Institute for the future), Isabella Pierantoni and Silvia Rigamonti (Generation Mover), Gloria Puppi (Novus Lab).

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11/11/2020/by Roberto Paura

Articoli @en, CNS, Ricerche

Scarica il volume gratuito “Scienza e società verso il 2030”

L’Agenda 2030 per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile è un programma d’azione sottoscritto nel settembre 2015 dai 193 Paesi membri dell’ONU. L’Agenda ingloba 17 Obiettivi per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile (Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) che i governi si sono impegnati a raggiungere nell’arco temporale di 15 anni e un totale di 169 “target” o traguardi. La conferenza Between Science and Society, organizzata dall’Italian Institute for the Future nell’ottobre 2019 a Napoli, ha focalizzato la sua attenzione su cinque di queste diciassette sfide-chiave. La lotta al cambiamento climatico, la salute, la lotta alla disparità di genere, le fonti di energia pulita e l’innovazione tecnologica. Obiettivi “comuni” che – anche se a prima vista può sembrare diversamente – sono collegati tra loro al punto che lavorarci considerando come ogni sfida-chiave sia collegata alle altre può rivelarsi la scelta vincente. In una fase di accelerazione del progresso tecno-scientifico, anticipare le sfide a venire diviene essenziale, dato che storicamente ci si è spesso limitati a inseguire i problemi anziché prevenirli. Da qui i grandi fallimenti del dialogo tra scienza e società: dalla gestione dell’energia nucleare agli organismi geneticamente modificati, dalla crisi della mucca pazza ai vaccini (tornati sulla cresta dell’onda nell’attuale emergenza pandemica), ogni volta la comunità scientifica e chi si occupa di comunicazione della scienza si trova a reagire di fronte a una crisi, anziché ad agire in ottica anticipante. È evidente allora che manca un passaggio essenziale: non si tratta di colmare un divario, come spesso si sente ancora dire nel mondo della comunicazione scientifica, quanto di costruire ponti nuovi tra scienza e società, vale a dire modelli di dialogo innovativi e anticipanti. I contributi di Between Science & Society – Scienza e società verso il 2030 non rappresentano pertanto un lavoro finito, ma il primo passo di un percorso volto a elaborare un modello di progresso inclusivo e solidale in grado di anticipare e affrontare efficacemente le grandi sfide di questo secolo. Un percorso che l’Italian Institute for the Future porta avanti attraverso il suo BSS-HUB (Between Science & Society HUB) che, grazie al comitato scientifico e alla collaborazione con enti e istituzioni di ricerca, promuove iniziative volte a facilitare questo dialogo e ad anticipare le future sfide derivanti dall’impatto sociale dei nuovi sviluppi tecnologici e scientifici.

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31/08/2020/0 Comments/by Roberto Paura