Contemporary urban environments face increasingly complex and interconnected challenges—including climate change, evolving mobility patterns, urban sprawl, and resource scarcity—that demand strategic and forward-thinking planning approaches. In this context, the ability to envision and design future urban scenarios has become a key competency for students in engineering programs related to urban and regional planning, such as Civil and Environmental Engineering. These professionals must not only understand existing urban systems but also anticipate future conditions, explore alternative development paths, and assess the long-term impact of planning decisions. Developing this kind of prospective thinking requires interdisciplinary knowledge and technical skills spanning environmental sciences, ecology, geography, cartography, spatial analysis, and land-use planning. Accordingly, scenario-building methodologies have been integrated into the Bachelor's Degrees in Forest and Natural Resources Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), particularly through subjects focused on geoinformation technologies and 3D representation.

As part of this evolving pedagogical approach, increasing attention is being given to innovative tools that help students better conceptualize and communicate future scenarios. In this context, virtual reality (VR) technologies offer promising opportunities to simulate and explore urban environments with greater spatial depth, interactivity, and immersive realism. Building on prior research highlighting the educational value of VR, this study explores its potential to support students in illustrating and communicating future urban scenarios more effectively than conventional media such as maps, diagrams, or narrative texts. It presents an educational innovation project based on immersive scenario-building within a challenge-based learning framework. The project involved a group of students who conceptualized and designed future urban scenarios for a central area of Madrid shaped by anticipated climate change impacts. Students used CityEngine to generate 3D models, which were then visualized in an immersive VR environment developed in Unity. Two questionnaires were administered to evaluate students’ perceptions of the tools’ usability, the effectiveness of VR for communicating spatial transformations, and the overall learning experience.

Results show that the VR experience enhanced students’ understanding of scenario-based thinking in urban planning and improved their ability to connect real-world contexts with prospective futures. The immersive environment strengthened spatial awareness, helping students better perceive dimensions, proportions, and spatial relationships, and identify design issues not evident in traditional 2D formats. Students also reported that VR was more effective than conventional media for communicating design intentions to external stakeholders. Despite some technical limitations—such as initial unfamiliarity with the software and limited free assets—students considered the activity valuable and meaningful. These exploratory findings support the integration of immersive technologies into engineering education and urban planning pedagogy. Future iterations of the project aim to expand the methodology, improve tool accessibility, and embed VR more fully into the design and decision-making process.

Keywords: Urban Scenario-Building, Virtual Reality (VR), Immersive Learning, Engineering Education, Spatial Representation, Climate Change Adaptation.