Institute For The Future

Cities are ecosystems. And, as our world rapidly urbanizes, we are creating civic laboratories where experiments to enhance and tinker with well-being may lead to new innovations. But these attempts to expand our capacity for well-being are also colliding with unprecedented health threats and imbalances.We are living longer but getting sicker. Although we are spending more on health care every day, improvements in health have stalled in many places. And across the globe, more people are struggling with obesity, even as malnourishment continues to increase.We stand at the edge of a decade when many of the basic inputs to well-being—strong social connections, good physical health, and access to basic necessities like food and water—are increasingly threatened.The evolution of ecosystems will present us with incredible possibilities—and tremendous uncertainty. To understand the possibilities and prepare for the uncertainties, you need to think systematically about truly different futures, and across different scales.

This map, Ecosystems of Well-Being in 4 Futures: Alternative Future Scenarios in 2021, presents four forecasts, each of which highlights how a different shape of change—growth, constraint, collapse, and transformation—could remake health and well-being over the next decade. These scenarios, which are self-contained, plausible depictions of future worlds, can help you think systemically to create resilient strategies for different possible futures.