Future or Futures?

(Opening of the Academic Year 2011-12)



Today I have been asked to give an extremely short presentation about the European Tourism Futures Institute. I believe that time will be sufficient to concentrate only on one single letter in the name of the institute: that will be the S that turns future into a plural futures.
When this name was first launched, we were asked whether this was a mistake: can you speak of multiple futures, while everyone knows there is just one future? This is a deliberate choice of our institute, that is crucial for our research strategy.

During the past centuries we used to imagine there was just one future: a future we would fight for. Depending on our views we could opt for future A or future B, and thus adhere to one particular vision of a world that would lie ahead. These rivalling futures would be exclusive: if future A would prevail, B would be prevented from happening, and viceversa.
In the last two decades, we have seen a paradigm shift in the way people think of their future. The future seems no longer to be the path from the past to a better world we would like to see. We no longer think of the future as a result of the changes we would like to make, but rather it seems to have become the result of uncertainties beyond our control.
This means that when we do research on future developments, we have abandoned the model of linear predictions, or “surprise-free” predictions as they are called now. We can no longer trust trends and extrapolations if we consider our environment to have become unstable; we must find ways to integrate recent history’s surprises into our models.
Let me give one example of these surprise-free predictions and their limitations. At the end of the nineteenth century urban planners were obsessed with the imminent horse manure crisis. In New York, by 1900 100,000 horses produced a total 2.5 million pounds of manure, or bodily waste, per day. Trend extrapolations learnt that in a few decades horse manure would cover the streets of Harlem a few stories high. An unresolvable logistic and sanitary crisis, at least if the future would have remained surprise-free.
In order to anticipate this kind of surprises, today’s future research explores potential outcomes of uncertain factors. Policy makers discuss “what if” questions to prepare for strategic decisions and their consequences. Recent examples illustrate the importance of this perspective: What if we strengthen weapon supplies, prestige and morale of the Taliban? What if Saddam Hussein falls? What if people can no longer pay back their mortgages?
Unfortunately we do not know how to predict the future. We can only explore the alternatives and therefore speak of plural futures. We do this through interdisciplinary research, the value of which is determined by its precision in identifying strategic uncertainties, and by its thoroughness in their explanation of potential outcomes.
This is the broader social context, but is this important for our profession? We think it is: on the short and on the long term we expect major changes in who is going on holiday, where they will go to, what they will do once they are there, when they will go, how long they will go, how they will go, the amount of spare time available, what leisure means to them and how leisure time will be different from work.
Within global, national and regional future scenarios individuals and companies face their own dilemmas and uncertainties. Our research can zoom in on each of these levels. This means that the research at the European Tourism Futures Institute is interdisciplinary, and approaches uncertainties from different perspectives; it is international, because future issues are not limited by boundaries, and it may be academic or applied, aimed at public organisations or companies.
We paint pictures of the future of tourism. We wish you all a successful year in which we hope we may surprise you with our future explorations.