Focus: The future's not so bright

Given the first and, according to the researchers, most compelling of the likely future scenarios, The Sunday Times - we're optimistic that we'll still be around - will lead with the following stories on June 14, 2030:

The Progressive Liberals, the ruling government party, have dominated elections in both of Ireland's city-state regions, cementing their power.

In the Dublin city region, the party's popular Mayor Cosgrove, first elected in 2028 on a promise to regenerate the crime-blighted city centre, has been re-elected on a tough-on-crime platform.

Cosgrove has vowed to crack down on the illegal trade in organs, on digital theft, and to continue to rehouse those left homeless in Sandymount, Malahide and Clontarf due to rising sea levels. He also hopes to attract heritage tourists back to the centre of Dublin by forcing out the virtual-reality and cybersex arcades that now dominate it.

Tourism, he said yesterday, can transform the city centre, where unemployment is now at 30%, the highest in the region. Cosgrove also promised to combat people-trafficking into the city region. A recent report by the Crime and Justice Department found that 40% of Dublin's GDP now comes from criminal activity.

An inquiry into the deaths of 15,000 people from malaria in Baldoyle in 2024 will be published next week and will find that many of the mostly African- and Asian-immigrant victims could have been saved had the emergency services not been grossly under-resourced following "unnecessary cutbacks".

Dublin's former mayor, John Hughes, who resigned following the tragedy, is likely to be exonerated by the inquiry.

Tolls on the Dublin-London road are set to rise in 2031. The colourful chief executive of the private operator that opened the road three years ago pointed out that driving by high-speed electric car to London was still cheaper than flying.

"If you don't like it, you can always take the train . . . if the link's ever finished," he said. Completion of the high-speed rail route to the London city region is now expected by 2034.

Good news on the jobs front: a new cloud centre is to open in the Dublin mountains, specialising in nano-technology.

In other business news, Dublin GM Foods made record profits last year, boosted by increased exports to the UK market. A recent study found that the brand was one of the most recognisable among the UK's 120m people.

Another hacker centre has been discovered in Clondalkin. A team of 34 criminals, who were posing as an online-support company, was found to have hacked into thousands of bank-security codes. It is now estimated that 10% of the city's 2.5m people have suffered from a data-security breach.

Another hydroponic tomato plantation has been contaminated by recycled water, this time in north Dublin. Consumers should contact their nearest hypermarket for food-safety advice.

Dublin City Region University has been voted as one of Europe's top 10 "corporate breeding" facilities.

And finally, the weather: hot and wet, all summer long.

So now that the future has been written, what are we going to do about it? Plan for the future, of course, by adopting policies that will encourage the positive aspects - economic strength and technological dynamism - and discourage the worst - inequality, crime and ghettoisation.

Dr Ela Krawczyk, head of DIT's Futures Academy, insists that the department's "scenario" modelling was more than a fanciful academic experiment. She believes it should be a vital tool in long-term strategic planning. "Many companies already use these models to forecast their markets," she said. "So countries and city regions should do likewise."

One example is Shell, the energy company, which developed a series of scenarios for the future of South Africa, an important market and source of raw materials for the company, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"They developed scenarios based on whether Nelson Mandela would be freed from prison and whether there would be a peaceful democratic transition from apartheid rule or a more violent struggle," Krawczyk said.

The fashion business, which typically works 18 months ahead of the selling season, has dabbled in futurology for generations. Designers use long-term economic and weather forecasts to decide on the height of hemlines, or what colour schemes might capture the zeitgeist.

Henk van der Kamp, a former president of the Irish Planning Institute who recently completed a report for the Dublin City Business Association entitled A Spatial Vision for Dublin, said that future studies should deal in robustness-testing, similar to stress-testing employed by banks. "It is useful to take a scenario such as the population of Ireland doubling in 20 years and then planning what sort of infrastructure will be necessary to meet that population's needs. That's not science fiction," he said.

Gerard O'Neill of Amarach Consulting, a market-research company that specialises in trend forecasting, said that all scenario-modelling is based on storytelling. "Future studies is not about being right, it's about being ready," he said. "If we had forecast the growth of the Celtic tiger 20 years ago, we might have been better prepared to invest in infrastructure. But forward-planning has never been our forte."

O'Neill said that while a definitive forecast can only ever be a heroic "guesstimate", it is possible to look at several scenarios and identify likely outcomes. "We can look at population patterns, for example, and predict how many people will be living here," he said. "There's a baby boom at the moment that will continue for 15 years. We also know that there will be water shortages and less reliance on fossil fuels. They're certainties."

To prepare for this, offices and apartment blocks in the city centre should be retro-fitted for families, he believes. "Because of the cost of transport, people will want to live in the city but only if there is room for families. The aspiration for a comfortable family home won't change," he said.

The growth of city regions, competing with other city states or city regions for investment, is also inevitable, O'Neill predicts. "They will drive future economic growth and will drive the welfare of the country as a whole."

According to Krawczyk, a number of recent reports have identified the likely emergence of two city regions, one along the eastern seaboard linking Dublin to Belfast, and one along the west coast. She said: "Several reports have come to the conclusion that the future of the Dublin city region will be a key driver for the whole country's economy."

Seeing Dublin as a city region rather than a city is critical, according to van der Kamp. "All of the local authorities should be merged, with one policy for the region," he said. "Take high-rise, for example. Dublin city council proposes to build high-rise at 'gateways' to the city but it means 'gateways' to the city-council area. Policy on high-rise should be formulated by all the councils collectively."

O'Neill believes that Dublin has been neglected politically and in terms of investment in recent decades because of an "anywhere-but-Dublin" mentality. This can't continue into the future, or the entire country will suffer. "Irish regional development," he wrote on his blog last week, "seems driven by a parochial, atavistic culchie-versus-townie antipathy. But the townies have had enough."

O'Neill moved to Dublin in 1988, the year of the city's millennium celebrations. "The mood was 'could the last one out turn off the lights'," he said. "Nobody envisaged a cosmopolitan European city with enormous opportunities but awful sprawl and massive under-investment in infrastructure and problems with waste and energy. Imagine if we had glimpsed the future then - we would have done things very differently."

In 1985 the Eastern Regional Development Organisation (ERDO), a long-defunct body, drew up an action plan for the entire east coast. The ERDO report brought together academics and industry and community leaders to set out a vision for the development of Dublin, the southeast and northeast. Unfortunately, it was almost out-of-date overnight.

"It predicted nobody would live in the city centre," said Van der Kamp. "Families were getting smaller and the population was getting younger. It didn't realise that young single people want to live in cities."

A series of urban-renewal initiatives, that went on to transform city centres around the country, gave the lie to the report's vision. Proof that crystal-ball gazing can be a futile exercise?

Van der Kamp doesn't think so: "The people who drew up the report used the information available to them but didn't look into the future.

"Now is the time to plan for the next boom, so that it's not followed by another bust in which people ask what we spent all the money on."