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Scenario development is now an established industry, employing hordes of consultants. This way of considering the future is typically an exercise in compromise. Workshops bring ‘stakeholders’ together to discuss drivers and barriers, opportunities and challenges. Post-it notes – square, round, hexagonal – get stuck to wall charts. Timelines become populated with views, and guesses, on what will happen when. Axes of key cleavages between different futures get proposed and, almost inevitably, four different futures emerge out of the intersections of two main axes. At each stage there is discussion and debate, but perhaps not always in-depth deliberation or examination. Differences of opinion may be resolved, or they may be fudged. Group think can often dominate specific sessions. The resulting narratives will, of course, reflect a wide variety of knowledge but not necessarily great depth. They are the outcome of many different voices being melded into more or less coherent story-lines. The result is inevitably a compromise narrative; and even with careful crafting, tensions, discontinuities and contradictions remain. Involving multiple voices in creating a narrative means that certain points get included, because someone has a strong view about that point, or just has the loudest voice. The consultant is tasked with smoothing out the differences and creating coherence, but it requires particular skills in close reading and textual analysis to do this. Because we all read and write, these skills are often under-appreciated, in a way that quantitative skills, in a largely number-phobic society, are not. In addition, the starting point for much futures thinking is frequently technological change, again privileging a particular way of looking at the world. Understanding how governance and society might change can be comparatively neglected in terms of really thinking about possible futures. So what would be an alternative approach? One possibility – that being taken by the EPSRCfunded CLUES project (UCL, 2013) – is to find a way to enhance the coherence of scenarios that

No limits to imagining London's future