Complexity Addressed From On High

In the previous post, Catching Up - Community Engagement, Complexity and Other Issues to Contemplate, a commitment to deal with the concept of complexity more in depth was made.  Complexity has been one of the 800 pound gorillas (there are a number) in the room since this effort began.  

Back in 2011 the case was made by Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK with the featured TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity, that complexity could be addressed through New Community Paradigms but support for such a claim was thin. 

This post will address the issue of complexity from a more global or bird’s eye perspective, except we are speaking of an abstract concept.  Still, this needs to be done if one wants to make the case that complexity can be addressed not only by institutions or their managers supposedly created to do so but even by the constituents of communities seeking to create their own New Community Paradigms.

What was also recognized in the ‘Why is this so hard?’ post by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), as well as continuing to be so by others, and which remains the more defining aspect is that complexity is one of the main if not the main challenge for business in the twenty-first century (pdf).  If this is true for business then it is also true for the public sector.  The difference is that the public sector has more means to cover up or distract attention from the challenges of complexity but more on that later, for now let’s stick with dealing directly with complexity. 

The Catching Up post also spoke of an extensive discussion in the Harvard Business Review LinkedIn group which provided a diversity of perspectives on the role of managers and complexity.  The discussion was based on a 2013 Harvard Business Review Article entitled, Why managers haven’t embraced complexity? by Richard Straub.  The discussion generated 326 comments making this discussion the most commented on within the group by far in recent history and likely going much further back. The topic obviously struck a cord demonstrating what a significant role complexity still has in our world today.  The article fits in a line of past HBR articles based on a similar foundation, Embracing Complexity An Interview with Michael J. Mauboussin by Tim Sullivan and Learning to Live with Complexity by Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath, both back in 2011.  Despite the advice or admonishments provided by those earlier articles, the reaction of the members of the Harvard Business Review LinkedIn group demonstrates that complexity is still a controversial and contentious subject for those that have to face it as a defining factor of their job and career. 

The myriad of comments generated by the HRB LinkedIn discussion contained a diversity of perspectives on complexity which could then be allocated to a variety of different schools of thought as to the best way to address it.  Although these comments were invariably made by professionals in their respective fields, I disagreed with many of the perspectives set forth in the discussion.  It seems necessary to state a position or have a point of view before making any assertions.

At some point, this stops being a purely academic discussion and we start to make a case to set policy that will subsequently have an impact on peoples lives.  Complexity is an abstract subject and seems far removed from the practical daily concerns of most organizations whether private or public. If we have no philosophical or principled basis for addressing it, the result then is that we ignore it completely or at least put off addressing it for today.  This cannot continue if we hope to make a paradigm level change in our communities.  A case can and needs to be made that complexity is not only capable of being addressed but it can be a source of creation and innovation.  Below are nine points based on my own understanding and point-of-view why and to some extent how complexity can be made a viable component of creating New Community Paradigms.

1. Complexity is an emergent property of systems, whether good or bad, efficient or inefficient, anything that can be considered complex can be considered a system.  Complexity, alone, is neither good or bad.
2. As an emergent property of systems, the degree of complexity increases with the intrinsic growth of the system, i.e. the number of possible connections increases faster than the number of connected nodes - Metcalfe’s Law, not even raising the consideration that the nodes could act as autonomous agents, or in the case of business and politics as customers and constituents respectively.  Attempting to take complexity out of a system is like expecting to extract all the heat from a fire but leave the flame.
3. Complexity does not equate to chaos, rather complexity exists at the edge of chaos. This is a factor of Complexity Theory as cited by this SlideShare presentation - Edge of Chaos - second slide.
4. It has been said that, “Complexity is more difficult in the abstract than in the living.”   Instead of thinking in terms of complexity versus simplicity perhaps it should be coherent complexity (closer to a natural complexity) versus incoherent complexity (manmade). Coherent seems the best word here in my view. The role of management today is to get as close to systems of coherent complexity as possible.  Our institutions attempt to create systems that approximate coherent complexity but are in reality, highly and intricately complicated and move to a more incoherent complexity over time.
5. Complexity is not separate and distinct from or in opposition to simplicity.  Systems can contain aspects of both complexity and simplicity.  Nature melds aspects of both complexity and simplicity within the same system through coherent complexity.  We often attempt to tame complexity through ostensibly simple processes which instead turn out to be merely simplistic and shallow subsequently growing increasingly complicated and unsustainable.
6. Complexity should be considered a separate and distinct descriptor of systems as opposed to complicated.  Despite the mainstream dictionary meaning of both words containing the other, we need greater precision in their use. I borrowed my operational use of these terms from others in the post New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking.  Whether the appearance of complexity within an environment is actually inherent complexity or induced complications within the relevant systems would need to be determined.
7. That same post put forth an argument that government institutions address complex challenges facing communities by developing complicated processes. Initially, this makes sense as it provides a means of breaking up a complex challenge into manageable steps, providing the means of creating an algorithmic approach, and allocating resources.  It stops working though when the complexities of the larger system, in which the institution exists, outstrips the capacity of the locally created system which becomes more complicated or increasingly incoherent as a complex system. This is made worse if the institutionally created complicated system then develops its own inherent internal hindrances as a means of ensuring its own survival making it even more obtusely complicated, no longer existing for the benefit of those it was supposedly designed to serve.
8. Man-made complex systems are invariably inadequate attempts to replicate natural evolutionary systems and prone to eventual failure (see John Gall)  through if nothing else some form of information entropy.  Our complaints about complexity are more about our inability to sail with the winds of natural coherent complexity and our expectation that instead it bend to our will.
9. This means that we would not have a modern market based economy without complexity.
   Drastically decrease the nodes and connections of an economic system and we can return to bartering.  Do a little less so and we can return to the ‘yell at the customer sales approach for increasingly crappy products’ approach.  Complexity is not a hindrance of a market economy, it is a basis for it, providing pathways of innovation.   particularly disruptive innovation. Complexity properly addressed through innovation, particularly disruptive innovation as raised by Christensen,  can add tremendous value.

These are some general observations about complexity within our society. I could finish off with stating my position that 20th century industrial management practices are inadequate in addressing 21st century challenges created by the ever increasing complexity of our world.

The problem is that this post does not really address the original question from the HBR article, "Why haven't managers embraced complexity?" Or anybody else for that matter?  Nobody, in reality, deals with complexity in this idealistic, worldview manner by which all parts and connections are fully visible and the total information of the system is completely knowable and understandable.  This may be the beginning to an argument that complexity can be a pathway to New Community Paradigms but it still needs to be established how to transverse that path. 

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Second look at Making Cities Work

It has been a while since there was a post to this blog.  The time has been spent working on the New Community Paradigms Wiki.  Although a few pages have been featured, it is still a work in progress both in design and development.

The end of the last blog post promised that this post would turn from ideal visions of creating a community environment to a more pragmatic perspective on what will be required in the way of changes to help bring it about.  To do this means going back to one of the first posts A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics and "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.  In particular a second look at the video Making cities work: Delivering results in a downturn.  The observations found in this blog post were taken from the Diigo Annotated Link for the video and can also be found under the Diigo group page for this effort.  The Diigo connections, however, are still in beta.

The video is focused on economic development efforts taking place in England but there are still common lessons to be learned.  The notations in the Diigo sticky notes follow the video, the observations written here do not being that they are intended to assist in this effort not mirror it.

It is a hard reality that the future of communities promises to be more austere with less public funding available from either local, state or federal sources.  In part because the economy will not create the wealth necessary to generate the sought after public funds, but also because we are politically committing ourselves to this future austerity through political decisions being or attempted to be imposed now.  Regardless, it will be a reality that must be prepared for in terms of financing, budgeting and discovering alternative means of community support.  Not only to maintain and improve on existing beneficial community attributes but to keep from having those attributes degraded.

There is a danger of social disconnect being brought on by austerity measures, cutting people off from their community.  Other pathways will need to be found to help fund and support our communities.  It needs to be recognized that communities should do more than provide shelter, they should provide opportunities and more fundamentally economic opportunities, while at the same time create and maintain a livable community which respects the environment.

What is needed is a more holistic view, developing local competency, asking the private sector of our communities to work in totally different way from traditional ways, while respecting the desire of business wanting government to get out of their way.  The maintaining of this balance will be a challenge.

Any efforts to bring about new community paradigms will also need to involve outside agencies, both public and private in finding avenues of mutual benefit.  Having a cooperative government entity to work through can also be a plus.  It also needs to be recognized that in some cases government can be overly reactive and not supportive but right now we will assume that it is willing to cooperate.  The challenge is working with experts to create innovative ideas without being snared by ideas that are politically or economically motivated giving advantage to others or because they are expedient for the short term but not truly sustainable.

Working to bring about new community paradigms means creating an environment from which there is more social capital from which to draw.   This will require a good deal of volunteering from members of the community, as participants actively pursuing their role as the producers of democracy.  Volunteering is not limited though to formal volunteering in a community but all altruistic forms of social interaction. Volunteering at its best is a face to face proposition which means creating social connections within a community, helping to increase the democratic participation being sought.

There does need to be something beyond volunteering though in the effort to create a new community paradigm. The notion that a thousand flowers will bloom without government support is without merit.  One challenge is defining what will rise out of the act of creating a viable community paradigm shift.

In creating community paradigms outcomes are as important as outputs. Output is the metric by which an effort is judged and is usually quantitative.  Outcomes are the changes to the community that come from implementing the effort. Your work is meant to leave behind something sustainable in new partnerships, new ways of working, new ideas.  This mirrors the work that came out of Soul of the Community project, more at the wiki page Soul of a Community.  Among those organizations that are potential partners are universities.  Universities are changing their role in working with communities, especially concerning economic development. They can be a great resources without necessarily having an agenda in trying to establish political control. Students can also be a great resource for community change.

Different disciplines including design, technology and business can be brought together to help create innovative ideas. They can, as should community paradigm seeking organizations themselves, challenge the status quo. At the same time there is still a need for structure.  Another challenge is how community paradigm efforts can best achieve that structure?

The video on Making Cities Work suggests that any major community based effort will have three requirements to implement it, leadership, vision and funding.  While this blog post focused on funding or the need to find alternatives, leadership, and even more so vision are of primary importance.

Even when not seeking to institute something as comprehensive as a paradigm shift,  experience teaches that that any major change in an organization or a community must take hold in the first six months of its initial implementation or the existing organizational culture may attempt to put the brakes on the effort in self survival.

Bicycles Build Communities

The importance of 'place' to a community and the need for 'placemaking' was examined through the last couple of blog posts and the resources found on the New Community Paradigm Places wikipage. The blog post Placemaking - for communities the canvas becomes the art and the Community Places wikipage examines the extrinsic aspects of place. The blog post Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms and the Soul of a Community wikipage examines some of the intrinsic aspects of place.

There is one more resource page in the Places wikipage and that is the Bicycles Build Communities wikipage. Personally, I am not a bicyclist. The purpose of this post is not raise the community benefits of bicycling, even though they exist or to advocate for their inclusion in the community fabric, though it will.  It is to look at how other communities have brought about these changes in defining for themselves a new community paradigm.

Living near the traffic-choked City of Los Angeles, the question of  bike lanes can be a contentious one. A recent move by L.A. to give a car lane to bicycles resulted in a number of debates as to its wisdom.  The most common objections being safety and money.

Los Angeles is beginning to change but it has a very different view it seems about bicycling compared to other cities in the world.  The city most supportive of bicycling, it can be easily argued, is Copenhagen, Denmark.

Other communities in the United States are also recognizing the benefits of bicycling lanes and that when properly integrated into the fabric of the community can address the question of safety.

Cambridge Massachusett - Safety Benefits of Bike Lanes

Bike lanes help define road space, decrease the stress level of bicyclists riding in traffic, encourage bicyclists to ride in the correct direction of travel, and signal motorists that cyclists have a right to the road. Bike lanes help to better organize the flow of traffic and reduce the chance that motorists will stray into cyclists’ path of travel.1, 2 Bicyclists have stated their preference for marked on-street bicycle lanes in numerous surveys.3 In addition, several real-time studies (where cyclists of varying abilities and backgrounds ride and assess actual routes and street conditions) have found that cyclists are more comfortable and assess a street as having a better level of service for them where there are marked bike lanes present.

Bicycling cannot only add to the livability of the community in terms of helping to create a healthy city, it can also add to the aesthetic appeal of place.  One notable example in the United States is the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.  The webpage and Facebook page will let you know that the Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a legacy of Gene and Marilyn Glick  by the creation of a world-class urban bike and pedestrian path that connects neighborhoods, Cultural Districts and entertainment amenities, and serves as the downtown hub for the entire central Indiana greenway system.

As to the money question, this blog started with the position that economics had to be considered in the blog post A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics | EIU BUSINESS RESEARCH.

One of the common resources between the Economics of Livable Communities EIU "Liveanomics" wikipage and the Places wikipage is the video on the talk by Professor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects,Copenhagen on Cities for people (Diigo annotated link).

Professor Gehl gave the closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities".  The video provides information on the benefits bicycling and walking, when integrated into the community landscape, can have on creating a livable community.

None of this would have been possible though without advocacy from outside the halls of city government.  In Southern California one such advocacy group that helped bring about recent changes is the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition.

LACBC engages in a wide variety of policy, advocacy, education, and community building work to make the streets of Los Angeles County more bike friendly for all types of cyclists! We engage through our advocacy with the City of Los Angeles' Bike Plan Implementation, Spanish language education and bike repair through City of Lights, policy work in Glendale, Culver City, the South Bay, and Long Beach, amongst other cities, and community building through the River Ride and our Sunday Funday monthly member rides.

Nationally, one can turn to the League of American Bicyclists.

The League of American Bicyclists promotes bicycling for fun, fitness & transportation, and works through advocacy and education for a bicycle-friendly America. 

We do this by representing the interests of the nation's 57 million cyclists. With a current membership of 300,000 affiliated cyclists, including 25,000 individuals and 700 affiliated organizations, the League works to bring better bicycling to your community.

There are both Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition Facebook and League of American Bicyclists Facebook pages.  This is only a starting point to demonstrate that there are resources out there to create new paradigms for one's community and that they can be built upon.

The last few blog posts have looked at creating new paradigms to bring about an ideal community environment.  The next post will go back to take a more pragmatic view on what will be needed in economic changes to help pay for it.

Run the technology; don't let the technology run you

In the last post of this blog which explored the EIU's look at complexity from a public organization perspective,  the question was asked as to whether technical solutions are really fostering inclusion effectively? How using technological solutions to tackle complexity works for community-based governance as opposed to businesses.  For many businesses focusing on technology in itself is not seen as one of the major sources of complexity.  This may not be as true for community governance.  The challenge is finding the proper role for technology and optimizing its use to the greatest extent.

It would be a mistake to focus primarily on technological solutions. This usually means letting the technology do the work for you, similar to using the TV to indiscriminately babysit your two-year-old.

Technology as an end in itself is a wasted investment same as would be an economic development strategic plan being used as an end in itself. These are tools that should help in accomplishing other objectives or goals chosen by the community.

Part of this as to do with the citizen being considered only as a customer as seen by the so-called New Public Management. This sets, I believe, limits to participation in the democratic process. A basic premise of this blog is that people need to see themselves as both the consumer and producer of democracy, as well as the results of those efforts, in their lives.

Technology can help organizations to thrive in complex environments. It is the organization itself that must be prepared to seek opportunities for adaptation and creativity. For this to happen effectively, the social innovation and business process innovations of the organization are as important as the technological innovations, if not more so. Too great of a dependency on technology can distract from the internal changes needed for social innovation or business process innovations to be put in place.

This calls for a different type of relationship between citizens and their government. It is the interaction between the individual and the complex organization of a government institution within the complex system of a community. I am putting aside, for now, any questions regarding complications that may arise from the politics or bureaucracy of an organization.

It is the governmental organization that gives a structured though malleable framework within which integral parts of that organization work.

The individual citizens are not an integral part of that government organization. They do not have a structured framework and therefore must depend on what they are given.

Technology on its own does not necessarily help to open up complex systems for individuals, making them more understandable and clarifying avenues for success. It can sometimes do the opposite depending on the manner in which it is used.

For one, it does not always provide the constituent with optimal access. Second, if the constituent is able to use technology without being directly and openly integrated, it is often confrontational. The climate change debate is a good example, a complex problem with simple answers or denial coming from so many. The reality of complexity is that it can be varnished over and people can potentially be spoon-fed or become disenfranchised and go elsewhere to look for easy answers.

Now, this is not the case with the majority of public agencies employees and officials but even in the best of circumstances, there is often a unilateral control of information under government when it provides avenues for participation.

Addressing the needs of multiple organizations within a community with different goals adds to the challenge of complexity. Governmental institutions should not hand over their decision-making authority to any particular public group within a community outside of the democratic process. Engaging in dialogue with groups of citizens at critical junctures in the policy process does make a significant difference to decision-making is challenging and part of that challenge is recognizing the complexity faced by the individual citizen.

It is the people making up these organizational systems, both in government and within the larger community, that enable these changes to happen when they are provided the opportunity to vision or dream together about different ways of being or doing things with each other and the organization. In other words, they help redefine the organization and in so doing redefine their role in the organization.

The question is how we accomplish that and to what extent we can use technology to do so? It is a multilevel question. Is it possible to provide community groups the same leverage in dealing with complexity that the professionals who "sell" the programs and projects of city hall have? Exploring this further will be one of the goals of this blog.

Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK

The Economic Intelligence Unit, which did the research on Liveable cities | BUSINESS RESEARCH for the Philips Company, also did research on complexity in the business world (featured here at the Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki) focusing on the shift businesses are going through on a global basis, transitioning from the industrial age to the information age. This is seen as a change evolving from being formal structured bureaucratic rule bound organizations based on policies and processes to ones more based on a networks of collaboration among individuals. The key word is transformation in terms of cause but the key result is complexity.  It was the conclusion of the Economic Intelligence Unit that this is one of the major challenges for businesses in the twenty-first century.

Can the same be said of public institutions and if so are they up to the challenge? People are more likely to think of government as being more bureaucratic than business, but there may not be an internal recognition by government institutions for the need to change which means that without outside influence it will never come. With businesses it comes down to adapting to ensure a chance to survive, for local governments it may come down to maintaining the politically convenient status quo and an opportunity for needed change that is ignored.

This challenge can also apply to community-based governance by members of the community. This is the biggest challenge to an effort to create new community paradigms for a community.  The members of the community will either depend upon information which is feed to them by City Hall and interact through a process that is largely defined by City Hall or it will develop its own resources and uses its influence to guide City Hall.

There has been an unstated assumption throughout the posts of this blog that City Hall has failed to adequately address the need for an economically and environmentally sustainable and livable community. That is obviously not going to be true for all cities and the degree to which it is will be different from city to city.  In some cases the effort will find a willing partner and the collaboration will create a new more expansive form of community governance.  In other cases there will be push back from the incumbent institutional government.  The key issue is whether City Hall truly represents the community as a whole or only special interests or privileged key community members.  If it is the later, then there are pathways that can be taken to weaken and subsequently disrupt that control in a sustained and innovative manner.   These will be explored in the future.

In deciding to form one's own community paradigms, it is very important to keep in mind that complexity is different than complicated. Transversing government institutions themselves will be complicated but the issues they deal with are instead complex.  Embracing complexity as a pathway to new community paradigms can lead to an actual greater simplicity in dealing with the community challenges. This aspect of community paradigms will need to be revisited but for now here is a short TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity.

Community groups organized around a principle of community paradigms have some advantages over entrenched incumbent city governments.  The move to globally networked connections is easier for individuals working in community groups than for governments. This still leaves though a number of questions that will need to be addressed.

Do our existing political organizational structures bring an increased level of complexity for community members who have to navigate them to the same degree as what the report spoke to for businesses? According to the report, a majority of firms have an inherent organizational structure that may be adding to the complexity faced by the organization. If the same is true for our governmental institutions or the political processes supporting those institutions, how is this to be addressed?

Of particular significance, the report says that the challenges of complexity cannot be addressed from a top down approach for businesses, calling for the empowerment of employees. How much more applicable is this then to the empowerment of citizens centered on a common communal task or community principle through a process of direct deliberative democracy?

The report recognizes that the single biggest cause of business complexity is greater expectation by the customer. This also applies to the public sector as people often see themselves as consumers of government service rather than having any meaningful role in its planning or policy determination. This blog takes and encourages an alternative perspective.

So far this blog has had three posts to talk about community paradigms and creating livable cities and it has only touched the surface of these issues. Ok, we are talking about creating communities or more to the point finding ways of changing the paradigms that define our communities. We are talking about what we want our communities to provide us including a proactively healthy place to live and not one that just doesn't kill us too quickly. We also talked about how economics will play a significant role in defining how we bring this about.  All of this means talking about how we change our current form of local community governance.

We alluded to other components of creating new community paradigms though we didn't speak about them explicitly. One is the role of usually non-governmental or quasi-governmental organizations that work to redefine one aspect or another towards creating community paradigms. A number of these are currently listed in the right hand column of this blog under PARTICIPATION, PLANNING & POLICY. These will be replaced over time by the new Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki.

These are resources that can be utilized in creating new community paradigms. We have also featured online tools that can be used to create change. One example was Healthy City at www.healthycity.org, another was the Vimeo video which explained How to use Healthy City California. These components work together as these organizations are accessible online and are the ones who created the community based tools that can be used by anyone willing to put in the effort. A number of other online community-based tools are listed on the right hand column of this blog under TECHTOOLS FOR GOVERNANCE.

Another important question is whether these technical solutions are really fostering community inclusion effectively? Businesses are focusing on technological solutions to tackle complexity but for businesses though technology in itself is not seen as one of the major sources of complexity. How this works for community-based governance still needs to be explored more fully. This leaves us with the still pressing question that will be the continuing focus of this blog. In a complex world where and how do we find opportunities to create value as and for our communities?

Collaborating to Create Healthy Cities

This is the third of the first three posts of this new blog. Its mission as stated below the masthead is to help others in defining new community paradigms for themselves. "Paradigms" is one of those words not used much in everyday conversation. Here, the objective is to find means of expanding beyond everyday thinking and discovering new ways of creating our communities. That is going to take some time. It will not be accomplished in a few posts. In this post, we are still digging deeper and finding new avenues for creating new community paradigms.

In the first post, A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics | EIU BUSINESS RESEARCH I wrote about some government staff, consultants, and officials being able to quickly get to "no". It was a caution, not a guiding principle. Local government should be the focal point of inclusion in the process to achieve the best results. Sometimes local government needs help to get away from the "no" to find new solutions, sometimes it needs a kick in the pants. First, though try finding with whom you can work and ways of getting to "yes".

I do not write about any particular city for which I worked directly or had dealings with to avoid any conflicts, but I know from my own experience that if as a government worker you have a knowledgeable, dedicated, independent, and engaged community group which with to work it makes the job all the more meaningful.

I raise this point because, in the last post, Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities we began discussing what a Healthy City is and gave an example of one community-building tool that was not government based but created by an organization dedicated to civil rights. This type of outside influence will remain an important source of the creation of new community paradigms but far more can be done if the local government is on your side. To build a livable city through the use of Healthy Cities type programs is best done with local government playing a major role.

Better yet would be if you as the community members saw yourselves as an active component of the local government and fully understand that this means more than just being the consumers of government but its producers as well. Whatever approach is taken working from the inside or the outside, a guiding principle for making this work as a community is taking a collaborative approach to addressing important issues.

What are the collaborative methods governments can use to incorporate the concepts of Healthy Cities into their planning and decision-making process? This goes beyond the currently prevalent focus of city governments on environmental concerns. It requires recognizing that there is a definite need for action as the statistics on chronic disease become ever more alarming. It argues that both the planning and health professions need to come together in a substantive way to deal with creating healthier, age-friendly communities. This will be a challenge to both our planning systems and the health approach in fundamental ways. The objective of this effort is to pioneer a new interface between health and planning.

In the previous post, we talked about the World Health Organization's (WHO) definition of what is meant by a Healthy City. WHO also has a global healthy cities project.

The Healthy Cities movement promotes comprehensive and systematic policy and planning for health and emphasizes

• the need to address inequality in health and urban poverty
• the needs of vulnerable groups
• participatory governance
• the social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.

This is not about the health sector only. It includes health considerations in economic, regeneration, and urban development efforts.

As stated before, these are factors that all communities can aspire to around the world. What is needed are tools to implement these goals. One tool is a Health Impact Assessment (HIA), which as defined by WHO is a means of assessing the health impacts of policies, plans, and projects in diverse economic sectors using quantitative, qualitative, and participatory techniques.

Health Impact Assessment is similarly defined by the United States CDC Health impact assessment (HIA) is commonly defined as “a combination of procedures, methods, and tools by which a policy, program, or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population” (1999 Gothenburg consensus statement, http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environmental-health/health-impact-assessment).

This definition of HIA is related directly to the WHO definition and demonstrates a global network of cooperation to which communities starting to build their own systems can tap into. Local issues for example transportation can use national studies such as CDC's policy statement on transportation and health.

In the State of Kansas, they used a Community Toolbox, a public service of the University of Kansas, to create HIAs as a way of connecting health impacts to the community from development projects.

Some communities' approach to establishing healthy living in the built environment goes beyond a Health Impact Assessment exercise which means being even more proactive than reactive. Some communities in California are now including Health and Wellness Elements in the General Plans required by California State law.

The city of Richmond, California was one of the first cities in the United States to develop a comprehensive general plan element that addressed the link between public health and community design. A full profile on this effort is available from the Prevention Institute of Oakland, CA and more information can be found at the Healthy Cities blog.

An initial step in the process is to form a community-based Health and Wellness Advisory Committee that helps scope and direct the nature of the element. It is important to conduct several community meetings to ensure the element is responding to the needs and concerns of each individual community.

The experience of many who have done this before demonstrates that these types of programs are more effective when worked through with both professionals and stakeholders who then understand the rationale of the underlying concepts and are better able to apply them.

The City of El Monte, California, with support and coordination with the PLACE Program out of Los Angeles County's Public Health Department, was able to create a thorough approach to achieving a healthy community.

The work does not stop there, though, there is a continuing need to measure and assess. The City of San Francisco has available the Healthy Development Measurement Tool, a tool to guide Health Impact Assessments for development projects. GP RED from Lafayette, Colorado is continuing to develop a "Healthy Communities Surveillance and Management Toolkit (pdf) that can help communities go through a process of convening and engaging the community, staff, and stakeholders to create a warrant for agency action, conduct an inventory and assessment (similar to an HIA but targeted), project outcomes, create an action plan, and again, continue conducting monitorings and evaluations.

These are only some examples out there that community groups interested in creating their own new community paradigms can tap into. Each can be studied more in-depth. While it is obvious that this is not something that one can do alone, it should also be obvious that one does not need to. There are help and resources available out there.  These resources and more are being made available on the Healthy Cities wiki page under Livable Communities of the New Community Paradigms Wiki.

A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics | EIU BUSINESS RESEARCH

In beginning to try to define new paradigms for our communities, we need some idea as to what it is that we are attempting to create.

On the surface that is not that hard. We all want the same basic things at a minimum - to have enough food to eat, to be free from disease, to be able to educate our children. There are other goals that many would add to this list as being as essential, such as ensuring a healthy environment in which to live, access to maternal care and other health providers. Markets that provide for the products we seek without exploiting others or the environment. Then we want to be able to improve our lives beyond that minimum standard.

It seems straight forward enough but what this basically comes down to is trying to create what are being called "livable communities". It is a term that calls for a new word in the English language. It would be the opposite of oxymoron which is two words that don't logically seem to go together like jumbo shrimp. Livable communities seems absurdly obvious and even redundant, of course all communities should be livable, all our communities are livable, we have lived here for decades.  Yet, in many ways our communities are not livable in the fullest sense.

For the professionals in the field this approach may seem naively simplistic, even paternalistic but this blog is not geared toward them. It is targeted toward someone without experience and only minimal knowledge of economic or community development. Someone who is just getting the notion that they could make make a better and more fully livable community and wants to start taking the necessary steps to do so.

To talk about creating livable communities from a grassroots level we need to go further in our definition. One online definition says that livable communities are:

Communities that provide and promote civic engagement and a sense of place through safe, sustainable choices for a variety of elements that include housing, transportation, education, cultural diversity and enrichment and recreation. www.walklive.org/

This definition includes a number of different aspects, housing, transportation, etc. It is not that different from the same list of basic minimum things we all want in life mentioned above. Clearly, creating something such as this is not something anyone can do by themselves. There will be a need for professionals in these fields. There will need to have government officials involved in some capacity as well. Most importantly, there will be a need for other people who are also willing to be educated and to work toward this.

It is the last group that is the most important. Professionals and politicians can sometimes be a hinderance in creating livable communities because it is far easier for them to get to the no as in 'no, we can't afford it' or 'no, we never did it that way'.

As was said, creating a livable community means bringing together a number of elements but all of them have an economic component to them in common. Despite my last statement concerning professionals and the word no, I will be emphasizing the economics component of my economic development background on these pages. In the world we face after the financial mess created in the first part of this century, it will be the economic challenges that will be the most daunting in trying to create livable communities.

This particular post examines the work done through a partnership between the Economic Intelligence Unit of the Economist Group (publishers of the Economist) and the Philips Company.

It provides a good survey of the challenges and means of overcoming those challenges when taking on this endeavor. Although it is from Europe with an English slant in accents (also explaining the different spellings) it still contains valuable lessons. There are two reports with links provided below that are rich in information. The first deals with what people want from livable communities, the second, titled "Liveanomics" explores more closely the economic aspects that need to be considered. I will be breaking this issues down into smaller components in the future.

Both reports offer key findings, case study and multimedia for further study. I am also making links to the videos and other resources provided under the Liveanomics report readily available at a new wiki appropriately named New Community Paradigms Wiki under Livable Communities at the "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.

Making cities work: Delivering results in a downturn A panel discussion at the Economist Conferences event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", which was held in London in January 2011.

Ideas to revolutionise urban living A panel discussion featuring Sir Jeremy Beecham, Former Chairman, LGA and Labour Member, House of Lords; Kate Henderson, chief executive of the Town and Country Planning Association; Rogier van der Heide, chief design officer at Philips Lighting; and Nancy Holman, director of planning studies at the London School of Economics.

Eric Pickles: A vision for the future of UK cities The keynote address at the Economist Conferences event,"Creating Tomorrow's Liveable Cities", held in London in January 2011, by Eric Pickles, Britain's Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

Jan Gehl: Cities for people (wiki page) The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented by Professor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects, Copenhagen.

This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.

Urban liveability and economic growth Iain Scott, editor of the report, discusses the findings of the Economist Intelligence Unit's research with Mark Kleinman, assistant director of economic and business policy and Greater London Authority. The discussion took place at an Economist Conferences event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", in London in January 2011.