- Experts from Chile Future Territory gathered again this week, using the signs of change prioritized in the previous meeting as a starting point for a day of reflection and dialogue regarding the critical uncertainties these imply.
- Among the many subjects focusing on future scenarios for Chile were representativity and organization of territories, governance and citizen participation, and the climate crisis and states of emergency.
- The initiative of the Enel Foundation and the Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD) aims to set guidelines for action in public policy, both for private and social actors, based on the scenarios that the experts constructed today. For this reason, a third event will occur in October, with the final product delivered in December.
Santiago, September 9, 2022. Chile Future Territory, the initiative coordinated by the Center for Innovation in Cities of the Faculty of Architecture of the UDD and promoted by the Enel Foundation, once again brought together a panel of experts from different fields to consider the future of Chile. The challenge for this day was to construct future scenarios based on the critical uncertainties proposed by CFT’s team of analysts and based on the signs of change prioritized by the expert group during the previous event.
Critical uncertainties are a group of elements associated with a particular topic and, when viewed as a whole, can herald transformations in behavior, beliefs, organizations, systems, regulations, etc. Some of the critical uncertainties considered by the experts as those with the most transformative power were the climate crisis, states of emergency, and forms of governance and citizen participation. Dialogue and reflection were at the core of the thematic groups, who later shared their visions in an open plenary. The multi-disciplinarity of the experts and the methodology of future studies gave rise to ten possible scenarios for Chile in 2050. Each scenario puts forward situations that could result from the current critical uncertainties. The focus of the next meeting will be on the actions required to start to promote desirable scenarios and avoid or mitigate whatever the consequences of negative scenarios will be.
What characterized the day was collaboration and the willingness to think collectively about the future of our nation. The recent plebiscite only helped to encourage the participants to tackle with urgency the construction of paths of action that will allow facing the challenges that each critical uncertainty presented. What stood out in this matter was the debate around new forms of exchange and representation, which are seen as transitioning to new community and local-scale models.
The conference results will be published together with the other intermediate Chile Territorio Futuro products at www.chileterritoriofuturo.cl.