The Andorra Scenario and Policy Engine is a national-scale model for comparing possible futures, developed by the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group with Andorra Research + Innovation. In a country of under 90,000 people living in a single valley system, national planning is effectively urban planning, and that is the scale the engine works at.
It brings scattered public and government indicators into one consistent, auditable picture of the country. Population, housing, tourism, land use, emissions, air quality, water, electricity, hospital capacity... are linked by explicit rules, so they can’t drift into contradiction. Population follows the economy through labour immigration, which fits a country where most residents were born abroad. Every parameter is labelled by its source (calibrated to official statistics, taken from the literature, or assumed by experts), so any result can be traced back to the assumptions behind it.
From there, the engine projects the country 25 years in the future under four contrasting pathways: Continuity, Overgrowth, Degrowth and Density. It is deliberately not a forecasting tool. Each pathway shows what follows if its assumptions hold, so trade-offs and hard limits become visible. A policy layer lets planners test an intervention against these futures, and a spatial layer shows where the effects land.
Results can be explored on a web dashboard, a 3D map, and a tangible table that puts the choices in decision-makers’ hands. The engine is designed to connect with Behaviorally Grounded Synthetic Populations, so projected futures can be traced down to specific households and neighborhoods. The aim is not a replica of Andorra, but a shared, evidence-based way to debate its futures.