Urbanization will increase in the future causing pressure for sustainable urban planning. Various diverse factors of change, for example climate change and population growth, will affect the futures of cities in uncertain ways. For that reason, futures studies should be utilized while exploring the future. The aim of futures studies is not to predict future but to produce uncertain knowledge of possible futures. Futures studies’ objective is to find out what events might occur in the future and which actions should be taken at which time, for the future to occur as intended or desired. Currently the utilization of futures knowledge in urban planning is insufficient. Futures workshop is a participatory method of futures studies. Futures workshop can be used as a method to gather experts and stakeholders together. The aim is, that an interactive futures workshop is an event bundle for knowledge creation. New insight about the future of urbanization can be created by combining know-how and impressions of the participants.

The aim of this thesis is to study the creation and utilization of futures knowledge in urban planning. As a case study, URMI- and BEMINE-projects’ futures workshop about Finland’s urbanization is studied by using two methods, observation and interviewing experts of cities and municipalities that participated in the futures workshop. The interviews were analyzed by using data orientated content analysis. Observations conducted in the futures workshop were used to support the interview analysis.

The findings of this thesis can be divided into three sections. Firstly, the results showed that there appeared to be more challenges than strengths in the futures workshop method. Most of the challenges appeared in the practical arrangements of the workshops, so improving these noted lacks should be easy. Some of the challenges were similar to those that came up from literature as usual challenges of futures workshops. Secondly, new futures knowledge about the urbanization’s futures was created in three stages with different intensity through different types of knowledge creation. The workshop itself was the most important stage of knowledge creation. Thirdly, knowledge produced in the workshop was hardly utilized in the organizations of cities and municipalities. There was interest to utilize knowledge but since the overall view of the workshop remained unclear, experts had no clear knowledge to share and use. This thesis gives additional value about the knowledge creation process in the futures workshop as a method. It especially indicates factors of futures workshops, which if taken into notice, can result in more easily accessed, shared and utilized knowledge in the organizations of participants.