These are where the next two decades of Indian urbanisation will actually happen, and where most master plans still assume the monsoons, heat patterns, and demographics of a city that no longer exists. On World Environment Day, the honest question isn't how cities respond to climate shocks. It's whether they can see them coming.

This is where foresight comes in. Foresight is not prediction; it is the structured practice of taking many possible futures seriously enough to act in the present. Where forecasting extrapolates from past data, as traditional urban planning does, foresight builds multiple plausible futures  and tests today's decisions against all of them. It does not predict cities what will happen. It guides cities to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to emerging future risks and opportunities.  

Climate resilience in cities is collective by nature, though not in the loose multi-stakeholder sense. Cities are the one scale where collective action must work across three axes at once: across sectors (water, transport, housing, energy), across classes (the gated community and the informal settlements) facing the same heat dome differently), and across generations (the fourteen-year-old who'll inhabit the 2050 city is rarely in the room when the 2030 master plan is drafted). Foresight is one of the few practices that can legitimately hold all three together.

Following are the collaborative foresight  tools that enable communities, governments, and experts to collectively envision and shape future-ready cities (Image 1).

At Transitions Research, the People's Urban Living Lab (PULL) works in exactly this space across mid-sized Indian cities. Four methods anchor the work. Participatory visioning  (Image 2) brings residents in through oral histories, imagination walks (with Travelling Dome in Panaji, INTACH in Kolhapur), and co-design workshops with municipal partners like GEDA and the Kolhapur Municipal Corporation. These produce scenarios: the Net Zero Panaji 2050 Vision Report and Net Zero Kolhapur 2050 Vision Report, where 2050 is told through people: For eg; a retired fisherman at Panjim Market, a 78-year-old in a co-living cluster near Rankala Lake, a boutique owner cycling to work. Systems mapping then stress-tests how those futures would actually arrive, laying out the dependencies, actors, blockers, and enablers around each action. And in PULL's Policy Labs, backcasting runs time in reverse: starting from the 2050 mobility future Panaji has already committed to, it asks what must have been decided at 2026, 2035, and 2045 to make it possible, translating long-horizon vision into the next budget cycle.

Cities can leverage on foresight exercises effectively by embedding it into existing planning processes rather than treating it as a standalone exercise. By combining tools such as horizon scanning, systems mapping, scenario building, and participatory visioning, cities can better understand emerging challenges while building shared ownership among stakeholders. This can then be translated into clear transition pathways that connect long-term aspirations with actionable strategies, investments, and responsibilities for a collective action. Building a climate-resilient future requires more than faster action. It calls for collaboration, long-term thinking, and a shared commitment to shaping the future together.