Handbook of Anticipation

Roberto Poli, of the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, edited this handbook; its full title is Handbook of Anticipation: Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making.¹ Springer published it in 2019, in 77 entries and 1,753 pages.¹³ Poli was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Systems, and heads a master's programme in social foresight.¹

The handbook argues that anticipation is a serious research topic that can and should be connected to futures studies.¹ It uses the anticipatory viewpoint as a common frame for the human and social sciences, and aims to turn them "from their dominant past-orientation to a new future-orientation".¹ Its contributors come from biology, ecology, psychology, the social sciences, the humanities, engineering and computer science, and it includes a historical overview of earlier thinkers, among them Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Rosen.¹

Among its entries, A. H. Louie writes on the mathematical foundations of anticipatory systems and on relational biology, and John Kineman on anticipatory life and a definition of sustainability.² Others cover anticipatory games and simulations, anticipatory networks, anticipatory disaster risk reduction, anticipation in robotics and in artificial intelligence, futures literacy, and vision making in large urban settings.²

For a team building a predictive model of a place, the handbook puts the theory that runs from Anticipatory Systems and The Art of Conjecture next to applied work on risk, cities and simulation games.¹²