Back from the future. A backcasting on autonomous vehicles in the real city

Backcasting is often mentioned as a scenario-building technique that can help decision-makers facing uncertain and complex dynamics, such as the transition to autonomous driving. This article presents a backcasting carried out in the city of Turin (Italy), aimed at defining a policy pathway to steer the transition to autonomous driving towards objectives of sustainability and liveability of the city and its neighbourhoods. It reflects on this exercise and highlights some critical issues that proved to challenge the effectiveness and the potentialities of backcasting when applied to autonomous vehicles (AVs); these issues are mainly related to: factors and levels of uncertainty, contextualization of the vision, involvement of relevant stakeholders, definition of the policy pathway. Nevertheless, the exercise showed that some solutions can be adopted to deal with these challenges, in terms of: reference to existing background socioeconomic scenarios; combination of a range of participatory techniques to broaden the number and type of involved stakeholders; integration of collaborative and think-tank methodologies to review, enrich and systematize the outputs provided by the stakeholders; reference to mid-term planning tools to organize policy packages that are consistent both internally and with the more general mobility strategies. These solutions can support further backcasting exercises for AVs.