Futures Literacy as a reading key for strategic spatial planning: A community learning process for defining shared futures in the Ombrone River Agreement

The capacity of future literacy to emancipate the community is seldom explored in spatial planning, which often refers to governance processes, community empowerment, the role of actors in the implementation of strategies and actions. Being spatial planning an anticipation discipline, its capacity to envision regional futures is usually taken for granted, and the participant’s use-of-the-future capacity has low momentum in both research and planning practices. To overcome this gap, the paper proposes to relate these processes to the concept of FL, and proposes a reflection on the conceptual and practical relationships between FL and methods for thinking about the future in strategic spatial planning. In particular, we read the case of the process toward the Ombrone River Agreement (Italy) in terms of Futures Literacy, considering the process of prefiguring the future as a collective learning process. The 3 FL steps defined by Miller (2007) are assumed to be the interpretative framework from which to approach FL in terms of both learning the future and enhancing this learning process. The findings suggest that application of an FL perspective to strategic spatial planning offers potential for enabling participants to engage in a trans-scalar approach and enhancing the operativity of strategic action plans.