A native of Warsaw, Poland, Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz has made her mark on this city of 1.7 million people. She was elected its first female mayor in 2006 and is currently serving an unprecedented third term. Prior to assuming her post—where she has faced controversial issues including the restitution of properties seized under Nazi and Communist rule—Gronkiewicz-Waltz had been president of the National Bank of Poland, vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a member of the Polish Parliament, and chairperson of the State Treasury Commission. In November 2012, she was elected for a two-year term as president of Eurocities, a network of major European cities. Gronkiewicz-Waltz, a professor of law and economics at the University of Warsaw, has authored over 40 academic publications. She spoke with Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Flint for this issue of Land Lines.

Anthony Flint: Last year, the national government proposed expanding Warsaw by bringing more than 30 outlying districts within its boundaries, an idea you opposed. In your view, what are the merits of a more regional approach to metropolitan governance?

Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz: The target [of that proposal] was purely political, as one party saw the opportunity to get power in Warsaw through votes from around the region. They wanted to enlarge the municipality [in an effort] to get people from the countryside and the smaller towns to vote for the next mayor of Warsaw. We protested, and in various local referendums the people said no. They preferred remaining independent, with their own local governments and their own mayors.

People understand that our metropolitan policies have been successful. We collaborate as a region through contracts and agreements, and we rely on revenue sharing among the 30 municipalities [that make up our metropolitan area]. Funding is organized through the Integrated Territorial Investments, an EU program, for these municipalities, with investment in everything from administration capacity to bike paths. That is the way to trust each other. And it works. There is an efficient public transportation scheme in place, under which the capital city’s fleet serves the whole metropolitan area. Metropolitan governance should always respect the needs of all its members.

AF: What are the critical elements in your effort to maintain good municipal fiscal health? What has been your experience on the revenue side?

HGW: On the revenue side, we have a property tax, but it’s not very high, though some people complain. We also have a lease tax, which is adjusted to the value of the property. A typical apartment tax bill in the city center is about $400 per year. There is also the commercial property tax and a tax on civil law transactions. However, these are only a few percent of the total budget. The biggest revenue source is the city’s share in personal and corporate income tax, which flows directly from the central government. There are many needs for revenue; for example, we contribute to teachers’ salaries and we have to maintain our infrastructure.

AF: Speaking of infrastructure: How is climate change going to have an impact on Warsaw, and what is the city doing with respect to mitigation and adaptation?

HGW: The main fuel for so long was coal. Step by step, we have to move away from this, changing to natural gas and renewables. First we focused on transportation—new buses, new trams, and a second Metro line. We are changing our rolling stock, replacing diesel buses with electric and natural-gas models. The network is very well used: Seventy percent of our citizens use public transport. The modernization of our district heating network, which serves 80 percent of the city’s residents, is also very important. Ten thousand additional homes have been connected to the system in the past 10 years. Warsaw’s heat is produced in two combined heat and power plants. We are planning to switch one of the plants from coal to gas, which will bring a significant carbon dioxide emission reduction. Also, individuals can apply for subsidies to install photovoltaics, solar panels, and heat pumps, and thus replace old-fashioned stoves. This has been a very popular program, inspiring hundreds of applications. We are active internationally as well; for example, we are part of the EU Covenant of Mayors, [which is committed to implementing climate and energy initiatives].

AF: What successes have you seen flowing from the expansion of public transit? Are you seeing success in terms of ridership and reduced traffic congestion?

HGW: In terms of being car-free, people know one day it will come, though it may have to come from my successors. The way it was done in London—starting with a pilot for one year—was very good. People [there] decided they preferred the congestion fee and supported the money going to transit. Public transport is costly. We have [been able to do] so much because 85 percent of the investment was covered by EU funds. For users, it is important for it to be quite cheap. Thirty dollars per month is the approximate price for users in Warsaw, and our seniors pay $20 for the whole year. Last year, we began offering free transportation for students up to 15 years old; it is important for families to teach the young that it’s OK to go by bus. We have dedicated bus lanes, 500 kilometers of bicycle lanes, and bike sharing. Even with all of that, there is still congestion, though it is not as bad as before.

AF: As Warsaw joins the array of economic powerhouses, how are you addressing gentrification, providing affordable housing, and fostering a more inclusive economy?

HGW: We had to start from scratch. There was no private ownership [under Soviet control]. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a policy that let you buy your home for 10 percent of its value. I was the first mayor who stopped [that kind of] sale of municipal apartments. At the same time, we started to build more housing: 3,500 new apartments over the last 10 years. We use the city’s land and keep the construction costs down, so people’s rent is not so high. I lived in Knightsbridge [in London] for a few years, and I saw how investments by foreign developers made the price of apartments skyrocket. We don’t have that in Warsaw—housing prices are rising gradually, but at an affordable pace. Another problem is that many apartments have not been maintained. That is why the city is directing finances toward revitalization, especially in the most neglected neighborhoods.

AF: What have been the effects of rising nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment on the city’s economy, taxation, and social spending?

HGW: The national government decided to withdraw from Poland’s agreement to accept, under the EU’s quota system, a proportional number of refugees. This was not helpful, as we have abandoned our European allies in the midst of the refugee crisis. Generally, [anti-immigration sentiment] can discourage investment in the medium and long term. It’s a very bad thing when someone with a different ethnic background is attacked on the bus, and it can also prevent others from coming to Poland, including businesspeople. On the other hand, Warsaw does have many foreigners who come as economic migrants, and the majority of them are from Ukraine. Some are teachers, some are doctors; they are nannies or they work in the shops. We also have a significant number of Vietnamese immigrants, as well as people from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Chechnya.

To meet the growing need for integration, the city has created a multicultural center, which offers free language and cultural courses. It is important for the economy [to welcome and train immigrants], because it helps our new residents better integrate into our society. As a consequence, the economy and the labor market are better off. Unemployment is 1.7 percent in Warsaw. The local economy is booming, which can be witnessed through the city’s many construction sites, which have to compete for workers. Economically, we are certainly benefiting from migration. 

Photograph: City of Warsaw/Ewelina Lach

Has anyone ever tried to motivate you to act on a pressing problem by presenting a “nightmare scenario”? By extending current trends into the medium or distant future, these scenarios are intended to illustrate outcomes deemed inescapable unless radical behavior changes occur. Whether the issue at hand is peak oil or crumbling infrastructure, well-meaning interlocutors often use this well-worn device to try to awaken people to desperate futures.

But this approach has flaws. Nightmare scenarios are depressing, and depression immobilizes those one hopes to mobilize.

The remedies required to avert disaster usually seem intractable. And the supposed inevitability of disaster can actually generate a bizarre logic that exonerates non-response, with horrible implications.

For all of these reasons, a different type of scenario planning is called for, one the Lincoln Institute is embracing. Before I explain, let me illustrate the pitfalls of relying on nightmare scenarios with two examples—one from the history books, and one more current.

Thomas Malthus provided one of the earliest rhetorical uses of a nightmare scenario in his 1798 “Principle of Population” essay. In the essay, Malthus contrived a theoretical argument that reverberates today in economics and other social sciences (it was one reason economics was nicknamed the dismal science). Malthus postulated that population grew geometrically (following a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 . . . pattern), while food production grew arithmetically (following a 2,4, 6, 8, 10 . . . pattern).

In Malthus’s view, population growth is fueled by the seemingly unlimited human proclivity to reproduce and, importantly, increases when the poor become better off. Food production, to the contrary, is limited by the fixed supply of land and the law of diminishing returns. The relation between the two could only end in disaster. “Positive checks” like famine, plague, or war would lead to the premature death of a large share of the population and restore temporary balance. Malthus suggested that “preventive checks” like later marriage or celibacy, which would produce fewer children, might forestall disaster, but he doubted that humans would voluntarily exercise this kind of moral restraint. (An Anglican minister, Malthus advocated against contraception.)

Any mathematician knows that a geometric series, no matter where it starts, will eventually overtake an arithmetic series. This made Malthus’s proposition compelling—but the real world proved him wrong on all counts. Fueled by the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions, food production increased faster than population, even in the developing world, beginning in the 19th century. Population growth, for its part, began to abate in the 20th century as a result of the demographic transition driven by urbanization and rising education levels and employment opportunities for women. Across the world, as poverty levels fell, fertility fell commensurately.

Sadly, elements of Malthus’s theory remain with us—both in simple-minded efforts to predict future population-oriented cataclysms (see, for example, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb [1968], the Club of Rome, or Cristina Luiggi’s 2010 essay “Still Ticking” in The Scientist) and in the muddled thinking of those who adopt and adhere to the logical extensions of his work.

The logical implications of Malthus’ theory are terrifying and persistent. They orbit ideas like laissez-faire, divine intervention, and moral hazard, but invariably blame the victim. Malthus opposed assisting the poor based on his assertion that making the poor better off would increase fertility and end in famine once food stocks ran out. Others espoused this view more fervently. Some 50 years after the publication of Malthus’ essay, Nassau Senior, a classical economist and member of the Chancery, wrote that the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845 “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.” Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary of the British Treasury and the colonial administrator responsible for organizing famine relief, described the famine as an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” as well as “the judgement of God.” But no divinity shaped these ends. Throughout the famines of the 1840s, plenty of food was sent from Ireland to England—exports of meats, grains, and butter actually increased during the famine years. The food supply hadn’t failed; only a single crop, the potato—the staple allowed to families of tenant farmers—had succumbed to blight. It was agricultural, social, and trade policy that failed.

During the 20th century, contemporary accounts of multiple famines, including those that caused the deaths of more than two million people in India in 1943 and an estimated 1.5 million people in Bangladesh in 1974, always invoked Malthus. Somehow, the thinking went, the local population had grown beyond its means and famine was the inevitable result. But these and other “Malthusian nightmares” had nothing to do with overpopulation or food shortages. They were the product of policy failures and ineffective responses. They illustrated a shrugging indifference predicated on the theoretical existence of Malthusian nightmares—a grudging admission that sometimes there’s just not enough to go around.

As much as it pains me to admit it, I adopted a nightmare scenario to drive my own policy advice. Over the last couple of years, I’ve frequently cited estimates for the global infrastructure investment that will be required to serve the additional 2.5 billion people who will be added to the world’s cities over the next 20 years. I even play a game with the audience, asking them to guess whether the needed $91 trillion investment is larger than global gross domestic product—the total GDP of all of the countries of the world. It is.

Do I motivate audiences or depress them? I’m wondering whether I should address this challenge more affirmatively.

We need better ways to peer into the future, inform our thinking, and guide our actions. Luckily, we have at least one. The Institute recently launched the Consortium for Scenario Planning, an expert network of scholars and practitioners that is developing more disciplined and defensible methods to help those in urban and rural areas consider alternative future scenarios and find ways to bring desired scenarios to fruition. Scenario planning identifies alternative futures based on current reality, trends, and rigorous empirical analysis of driving forces of change. It accounts for the interconnectivity or interdependency of various systems, anticipates unintended consequences, and evaluates tradeoffs between actions and outcomes.

Scenario planning is first and foremost a process, a way of thinking and structuring decision-making that leverages the skills and wisdom of a large group of people. The consortium is developing software tools to overcome the challenges of working with many participants, managing large amounts of information, and leveraging data and new analytic techniques to quantify specific elements of a plan. Scenario planning engages numerous disciplines, each bringing different approaches and insights to inform and enrich the process. As environments become increasingly complex, constraints become more limiting, and the future remains uncertain, scenario planning can help groups of decision makers better navigate challenging terrain on issues ranging from affordable housing preservation to climate change adaptation to healthier and more equitable communities.

Interestingly, the field of scenario planning originated in the boardrooms of global petrochemical corporations—the very people who coined the term “peak oil.” Instead of being immobilized by the realization that the commodity on which they depended would run out, the corporations chose to consider various future scenarios, find the one that suited them best, and figure out how to get there.

How might I have broached future urban infrastructure challenges as a novice scenario planner? Rather than contextualizing the challenge as an impossible investment that exceeds global GDP, I might have asked: based on reasonable projections of GDP growth, what will it take to come up with $91 trillion over the next two decades? Global GDP in 2017 was around $79 trillion, far less than needed infrastructure investment. In 2037, GDP is expected to be $192 trillion, more than twice the investment needed. What will it take to make a cumulative investment of $91 trillion in infrastructure? About 3.33 percent of global GDP annually. How do we prepare the cities of the world to receive and provide services to 2.5 billion new residents? By building the political will to get national governments to devote one-thirtieth of their respective GDPs to infrastructure investment. Somehow that doesn’t seem as hopeless a task as coming up with more than 100 percent of current global GDP.

My decision to overwhelm audiences with a killer fact was a product of faulty logic and laziness. I wanted to awaken others to urban challenges and mobilize them around the urgency of acting now. But by contextualizing the challenge as virtually impossible, I risked immobilizing them. And I risked building a foundation for future lazy thinkers to accept a reality in which millions of urban residents are left unserved by infrastructure—no water delivered to their residences, no sanitation, no reliable transport to get them to their jobs—a scenario that will come to fruition if we don’t invest. I fear the policy response then will be a familiar refrain: there’s just not enough infrastructure to go around, so some will have to go without.

We can be better than that. And with the help of efforts like the Consortium for Scenario Planning, we will be.

Photograph: Jon Nicholls/Flickr CC BY 2.0.

An emerging field, scenario planning engages diverse professionals, the public, and other stakeholders to identify, consider, and ultimately prepare for various “alternative futures” in ways that ensure not only comprehensive planning processes but also community buy-in, expert input, and practical outcomes. As professional planners and the communities they serve face new and different challenges, from climate change to persistent inequality, scenario planning allows a more diverse array of stakeholders to prepare more comprehensively for a shared, uncertain future.

The Consortium for Scenario Planning, an initiative of the Lincoln Institute, unites planning professionals, organizations, and other stakeholders to share educational resources and research, promote best practices, and improve the state of practice nationwide. After its first year of growth, the consortium hosted its second annual conference last month in Columbus, Ohio. Hosted by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), the conference gathered nearly 60 attendees from across the United States for three days of presentations, discussion panels, working groups, and—of course—planning.

Many participants had previously attended the consortium’s kickoff event in 2017 and were excited to see how the group had grown in its first year. Since then, the consortium has taken fuller shape—with working groups, a 14-member board, and a website—and has expanded to offer educational material including a webinar series and online knowledge base.

For newcomers, the conference was a chance to learn more about scenario planning and the interests and expertise of its practitioners. The relatively small audience meant that participants could really engage with their peers, taking advantage of the niche community to gather lessons learned, best practices, and new ideas that they can bring back to their organizations.

Beyond the networking component, the conference offered an exciting series of organized sessions. Highlights included the tech-focused “Quantitative Approaches for Policy Development” panel and a talk on “Mixing and Matching Scenario Planning Types for Regional Needs,” which emphasized that good scenario planning does not require significant financial, technical, or human resources. Organizers also offered a new “Scenario Planning Basics” track, which helped first-time attendees address specific challenges they may have encountered while establishing their own scenario planning processes.

Also new to the conference was a component meant to challenge a roomful of planning experts: the “unconference,” an informal structure that allowed last-minute agenda additions and participant-driven topics to have their space. With discussions that included “how to visually demonstrate scenario tradeoffs” and “cool data viz apps and modeling tool demos,” the unconference sessions were received well and struck a good balance between formal and informal.

On top of all that, the consortium announced its Request for Proposals for Impactful Projects, which seeks to improve the field of scenario planning in practical ways, and considered its next year of work—from integrating new members and voting on board seats to debating goals and strategies. Looking ahead, the whole group was excited to help more trained planning professionals learn to embrace and respond to uncertainty in an era when resilience and responsiveness is the name of the game. By the end of the event, attendees couldn’t wait for next year’s conference, tentatively scheduled for November 2019. In the meantime, visit the Consortium for Scenario Planning website for news and more information, including photo highlights from the conference and information on how to join the consortium as an official participant.

Photograph: Janae Futrell