GEOG 4330 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PUAD 6806 POLICY DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABLE FUTURES

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GEOG 4330 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENTPUAD
6806POLICY DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABLE FUTURES

• Michael D. Lee Ph.D.
• Dept. Geography Environmental Studies

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CLASS 5Sustainable Communities

• Michael D. Lee Ph.D.
• Dept. Geography Environmental Studies

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Communities a key scale

• In 1996, the Presidents Council on Sustainable
  Development published a blueprint for achieving
  national sustainability.
• Goal 6 stated that America should. encourage
  people to work together to create healthy
  communities where natural and historic resources
  are preserved, jobs are available, sprawl is
  contained, neighborhoods are secure, education is
  lifelong, transportation and health care are
  accessible, and all citizens have opportunities
  to improve the quality of their lives

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Community? Sustainability?

• Definition A Community - a group of people
  residing in the same locality and under the same
  government, or
• Definition B Community - a group of people
  having common interests.
• Sustainable community A B?
• Sense of community - a feeling of belonging
  (place), of participation, of shared experience,
  of common interests, of shared goals.
• Sustainable community - residents and other
  stakeholders who share a sense of community and
  who are working together for their common good
  and the good of the next generation(s).

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Oh-oh! We have a disconnection

• Sustainable communities are built on sense of
  belonging and a contribution to the collective
  good by members and interested stakeholders.
• According to Robert D. Putnam of Harvard,
  Americans are becoming disconnected from each
  other by avoiding organizations, civic
  involvement and even social interactions (Bowling
  Alone, 2000).
• Putnam says this represents a decline in social
  capital that has bad consequences for
  neighborhoods, child welfare, health and
  democratic institutions among other things.
• What causes such disconnection?

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Defining sustainable community

• Northwest Policy Institute defined sustainable
  communities as follows "Sustainable communities
  foster commitment to place, promote vitality,
  build resilience to stress, act as stewards, and
  forge connections beyond the community.
• For many, achieving a sustainable community
  requires understanding the connections between
  and achieving balance among the social, economic,
  and environmental pieces of that community.

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EUs sustainability model
Environment Preserving the ecosystem and its
service functions
Futurity Actions that dont cheat on the next
generations
F
E
Public Participation Individuals have the
ability to influence decisions
Equity Providing equal access to resources
E
P
Modified from Deakin et al, 2002
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The four corners

• Environment
• Does urbanization consume resources?
• Does urbanization produce pollution?
• Is development reducing biodiversity and
  ecosystem services?

• Equity
• Do all individuals have access to resources,
  transport, utilities, jobs, etc.?
• Are citizens safe, secure, healthy?
• Is cultural heritage preserved?

• Participation
• Does governance reflect community values and
  perspectives?
• Do urban settlement patterns promote justice?

• Futurity
• Are time scales appropriate to capture
  longer-term costs and benefits?
• Does planning adequately link the short (lt5),
  medium (5-20) and long time scales (gt20)

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What does it mean?

• Sustainability is related to the quality of life
  in a community - whether the economic, social and
  environmental systems that make up the community
  are providing a healthy, productive, meaningful
  life for all community residents, present and
  future.
• How has a community been changing economically?
• How has a community been changing socially?
• How has a community been changing
  environmentally?
• What linkages exist between these three sets of
  changes?
• How does it what to change in the future?

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The Triad of Community Sustainability

• When society, economy and environment are viewed
  as separate, unrelated parts of a community, the
  community's problems are also viewed as isolated
  issues.
• Economic development councils try to create more
  jobs.
• Social needs are addressed by health care
  services and housing authorities.
• Environmental agencies try to prevent and correct
  pollution problems.
• Each part of the triad needs to be developed in
  conjunction with the other to take advantage of
  positive synergies and eliminate negative ones.

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Unbalanced Actions

• A piecemeal approach can have a number of bad
  side-effects
• Solutions to one problem can make another problem
  worse, e.g. creating affordable housing is a good
  thing, but when that housing is built in areas
  far from workplaces, the result is increased
  traffic/stress and the pollution that comes with
  it.
• Piecemeal solutions tend to create opposing
  groups and views. e.g. If the environmentalists
  win, the economy will suffer, and If business
  has its way, the environment will be destroyed.
• Instead, sustainable communities need consensus
  and shared visions.

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Importance of community-level SD

• Individual sustainability efforts may be thwarted
  by ineffective communal decision-making and
  institutional responsiveness
• e.g. a desire by more people to take public
  transport is thwarted by increased road
  construction by counties or cheap parking in
  cities that keeps too high a on the road.
• e.g. a desire to reduce the waste of natural
  resources is thwarted by a lack of recycling
  programs for reusable materials.

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Creating a Sustainable Community

• The most successful sustainable community
  projects all seem to have three characteristics
  in common
• First, the community created a vision of its
  future that balances economic, environmental and
  social needs. The community viewed its future in
  the long term not on the order of years, but on
  the order of decades or generations.
• Second, the vision incorporated the views of a
  wide cross-section of the community.
• Third, the community figured out how to keep
  track of its progress in reaching that vision.

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Practicalities

• It is important that the community itself become
  involved in the project.
• A sustainable community needs to be developed by
  the people who make up the community - it cannot
  be designed by a consultant or taken off the
  shelf.
• It cannot be implemented by experts hired
  specifically for the project - it needs to be
  implemented every day by the people who live and
  work in the community.
• Discovering the needs of the community and
  finding ways to meet those needs is not difficult
  but it does require some effort. It begins by
  deciding what the sustainable community would
  look like.
• This can be very site-specific.

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Keeping on track

• Just as important as knowing what a community
  wants to become is knowing how to reach that
  goal.
• Communities need ways to tell whether the
  decisions they make are increasing or decreasing
  their overall communal health.
• Indicators of community sustainability provide a
  practical way to measure progress toward
  sustainable communities.
• Indicators measure whether a community is getting
  better or worse at providing all its members with
  a productive, enjoyable life, both now and in the
  future.

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QOL Indicators

• One of the biggest benefits of SDI/QOL indicators
  is that they can be used in conjunction with
  policy changes to see if measurable impacts are
  occurring in the direction the policy is designed
  to achieve from actions the policy is designed to
  bring about.
• e.g. if there is a policy to increase the use of
  public transport in a community, then an
  indicator would be the level of ridership on
  buses as a percentage of commuters, the actions
  that the policy would bring about might be to
  offer more convenient service on new hydrogen
  fueled buses (to be consistent with other
  policies about air quality and asthma levels),
  and the signal that things are becoming more
  sustainable would be a measured increase in the
  percentage ridership over previous levels.

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Sustainable Seattle

• One of the most oft-quoted initiatives in
  sustainable community development is Seattle.
• Seattle began by selecting SD indicators
  sensitive to decision-making concerns, choosing
  those
• that would change.
• that offered personal (per capita) dimensions
• that showed clear direction toward/away from
  sustainability
• with observable and explainable linkages to other
  indicators
• that were agreeable to a broad base of 190 civic
  leaders, key individuals from many sectors the
  public.
• Note that a number of observers have seen the
  Seattle initiative stagnate and fail to fulfill
  early expectations.

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Key themes

• Sustainability through building design.
• Building choices commit us to decades, if not
  hundreds of years of resource consumption
  economic and environmental performance of
  buildings is thus very important.
• Sustainability through spatial planning.
• Community layout, zoning, transportation system,
  and other spatial decisions are important for
  both engendering a sense of community/place and
  efficiency in resource consumption.

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Key themes

• Sustainability through greater local control and
  resource flows
• Communities can often determine whether the
  resources on which the quality of life of
  citizens depend are generated locally or must
  come from off-site sources e.g. whether there
  is still green belt and farming around the
  community or whether urban growth is allowed to
  swallow this up, whether local watersheds produce
  sufficient high quality water or suffer
  degradation, whether investments are made in
  solar power or bioenergy using community waste or
  the community must use fossil fuels, etc.
• Sustainability through load management.
• Communities are calculating their ecological
  footprints and other awareness-raising indices to
  judge themselves.

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Key themes

• Sustainability through promoting citizens
  adoption of sustainable lifestyles and ethics.
• Communities, through education, public service
  provision, tax structures, local ordinances and
  so forth can either encourage/facilitate or
  discourage/inhibit the adoption of sustainable
  lifestyles.
• Sustainability through setting trends and forcing
  change
• Communities, through their collective spending of
  taxpayers contributions, can exercise
  considerable influence in the market place
  decisions to go green with buildings and public
  services, invest in socially responsible ways
  (pension funds,etc.), pass particular bond
  measures requiring public officials to implement
  particular measures.

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Key themes

• Sustainability through attracting and
  encouraging/requiring sustainable businesses and
  business practices
• Communities are the residing places of businesses
  who offer employment to local residents and are
  also responsible for local and more broader scale
  flows of inputs (e.g. energy) and outputs (e.g.
  pollution) with local to global impacts.
• By requiring that businesses meet more stringent
  operating practices or by offering special
  subsidies or other incentives to locate in the
  community if practicing sustainability measures
  (like eco-effectiveness), a significant
  contribution can be made.
• Clearly natural synergies and mutual
  reinforcements exist which should be maximized.

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Town planning for sustainability

• Town planning, urban and regional planning,
  master planning ..whatever local planning is
  called, it is key to achieving sustainable
  development.
• This process generally regulates land use, adopts
  medium to long time scales, encourages/requires
  public viewpoints, has implicit environmental
  impact considerations and fosters/requires
  sectoral integration (regionalism).
• Mainstream planning doctrines are now leaning
  toward sustainable settlements, cities, etc.
• Key elements include higher densities, reduced
  car dependency, integration of transport and
  development (esp. at nodes), reduced dispersal of
  paired functions (e.g. home and work), more
  effective sequent occupancy (brownfield
  rehabilitation and reuse), integrated energy
  planning (e.g. power gen. and heating),
  preservation and enhancement of greenspace as
  amenities and community assets, etc.

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Planning and sustainability

• Manta and Berke (1998) provide a very useful
  summary table of how planning relates to
  sustainable development in terms of how
  communities develop and how they are changed by
  decisions with respect to what takes place and
  what gets built and where?
• Their six principles of sustainable development
  articulated from the city planners perspective
  are
• Work in harmony with nature
• Create livable built environments
• Achieve a place-based economy
• Create equityM
• Make polluters pay
• Practice responsible regionalism

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Some questions we must ask.

• What does or should a local economy attempt to do
  for its citizens?
• What sorts of local actions really contribute to
  personal satisfaction?
• What sorts of local actions detract from
  satisfaction and well-being?
• What costs as well as benefits do growth and
  expansion impose?
• How can the role and value of the specific and
  unique community resources (water bodies, open
  space, surrounding agricultural land, geographic
  features, etc.) to the community be assessed?
• What factors really contribute to the
  satisfaction of a sense of community and
  life-enhancing inter-relationships? (adapted from
  Beaton Maser 1999)

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Recipe for community sustainability

• Each person contributing to the enhancement of
  the community needs to get a return equal to or
  greater than his/her contribution.
• Forces for positive change must be greater than,
  and at least equal to, the forces for negative
  change, especially when they are directly opposed
  (e.g. rehabilitation v. vandalism).
• What can begin (and usually does) as a minority
  of active contributors must gradually change into
  a majority for each given aspect of community
  enhancement.
• The number of free-riders that reap benefits but
  make little contribution must diminish over time.

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Potential roadblock

• Yanarella (1999) states that sustainable
  community programs envision a pathway moving
  toward greater sustainability i.e. away from
  unsustainability -and pick indicators that try
  and capture this.
• However, they merely promote measures that
  undertake the technically easiest, economically
  least expensive and politically most palatable
  changes.
• While readily acceptable like motherhood and
  apple pie, later will likely come a set of
  insurmountable political, social, and economic
  obstacles.
• Future measures will have higher incremental
  financial costs for actions, lower economic
  dividends, and greater political resistance.