Trend report for planner 2025

This is the fourth Trend Report for Planners developed by the American Planning Association (APA) in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. As in previous years, the core of this Trend Report is a list of the most impactful existing, emerging, and potential future trends that the APA Foresight team, together with our Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identified as relevant to planning. The trends are
structured within three timeframes (Act Now, Prepare, Learn and Watch), indicating the urgency of planners’ action. Within each timeframe, trends are grouped into themed clusters. For each trend, the report gives insights and explains why it is important for planners to know about and consider the trend in their work. All trends and signals are based on facts and are described neutrally and without judgment. The purpose of the report is to share potential drivers of change and shifts that will possibly impact the work of planners and the communities we serve as planners. While most of the trends and signals from previous Trend Reports are still relevant, we didn’t repeat them in this Trend Report unless there were major updates that were important to highlight. All trends and signals from this report and previous reports are also available online in APA’s Trend Universe where they will be regularly updated, reflecting the accelerating pace of change today and in the future.

Furthermore, the report addresses the future of planning, explaining how the planning profession will have to evolve to keep up with a continuously changing world, what new skills planners will have to develop, and what new tools are worth trying. Additional features throughout this report include deep dives, future scenarios, and trend talks. This year’s deep dives focus on three innovative concepts, their opportunities, and their risks. We dive deeper into artificial intelligence and its promise to resolve climate issues while at the same time exacerbating those issues due to its energy and water consumption. We highlight the progress in the development of robots, their myriad potential applications, and how planners can prepare for them. And we explain why fungi might have the power to resolve a wide range of challenges, from climate change to health and others.

Like last year, based on different trends and signals, we also did some time travel and created a variety of future scenarios. These scenarios are examples of how planners can use the trends from this report to create multiple plausible futures with their communities and how they might affect the path forward. We traveled to the year 2035 to better understand what living with heat might look like. We looked at the year 2045 to imagine how the increasing pandemic risk might play out in the light of emerging robotics. And we explored plausible scenarios for the year 2055 on the intersection of current longevity and health innovations with the uncertainties of the housing market. For more information on scenario planning, you can visit APA’s Scenario Planning Knowledge Base Collection and the Lincoln Institute’s zonsortium for Scenario Planning. Finally, this year we conducted trend talks with three experts about the futures of the public sector, transportation planning, and planning in outer space. These conversations are available on the APA podcast, and short versions are featured in this report.

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