New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking

The creating and implementing of new community paradigms is far from easy and this difficulty has been recognized from the beginning of this endeavor. One reason, from a new community paradigms perspective, is getting enough of those making up a community engaged. This means first developing and providing a forum and process of community governance in lieu of the traditional form of local government institutions then getting those who have become disinterested, disenfranchised or disempowered engaged. The question of engagement has been discussed, to some degree, over the last two blog posts.

Developing new community paradigms requires new ways of looking at and thinking about our communities from multiple perspectives. The last post explored the idea of community engagement by drilling down to the individual level of participation. It also alluded to a more global, abstract, systems related perspective, raising the potential of bringing together two separate perspectives helping to make a whole.

The (upcoming) definition of community will be more of a matter of understanding as a system so will likely be more abstract and involve systems thinking in some aspect. This means taking a few steps back to understand ‘community’ and its ‘engagement’ within an environment as a system. Less passion and more analysis but for the purpose of better understanding where the passion needs to be directed.

New community paradigms must not only be able to incorporate separate perspectives (making a whole) but also different perspectives (diverging paths) and conflicting ones. This is not merely to achieve consensus or compromise but also to test old ideas, make new connections and generate innovative ideas. This is far less likely to happen using the standard system of local city governance conducted by most city halls.

This multiple perspective approach is necessary because the challenges facing communities have become increasingly complex. The Economist Intelligence Unit created a report investigating the rise of complexity in business and the challenges that increasing complexity creates. This is true of both the private and public sectors, though it can be argued that the private sector has made greater strides in addressing this than has the public sector.

To understand why, one must begin with there being an important difference between the ideas conveyed by the word complex and the word complicated. The two words are often used interchangeably in regular discourse and each word can be found in the formal definition of the other, but some have adopted using a more unique definition for each to differentiate them as separate systematic approaches.

I have borrowed this refined alternative etymology from a variety of sources. The first being this short TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity. This was featured in the blog post Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK which recognized the increasing, but not as insurmountable, challenge of complexity being faced by both private and public organizations. Other sources, found in a Google search, approached this from an English language and usage perspective and from more of a systems approach by way of Mike MacDonagh’s Blog.

According to this mode of thinking, complex systems can be seen as being intrinsic having many influencing parts. Complexity emphasizes interconnectedness. What is more important is that events consisting of the interaction of those interconnecting parts are not simply predictable. People are complex interacting in ways based on events and stimuli we can’t predict. Running a large project that involves numerous people as part of an organization is even more complex. Driving a car as an individual within a larger traffic system is also complex, increasing the number of cars during rush hour increases the complexity.

Complicated is more extrinsic and more prone to external influences. Complicated systems are often built upon expert, specialist or professional knowledge. This means that they can’t be done by most people. However, although they might require a great deal of time and skill they are ultimately predictable processes. A computer programming involving a recursive sorting algorithm is complicated, requiring the inclusion of variables, loops and recursion. Not everyone can do it. Regardless, it is still very predictable. Building a car engine is a complicated process.

Complicated should be easy if you can get the right skills properly allocated. Complex is always hard, at least our ability generally to manage it despite what seems to be an innate ability of humans to understand complexity.

Government institutions address the 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 complicated system. It is made worse if the institutionally created complicated system develops its own inherent hinderances, as a means of ensuring its own survival, making it even more complicated and no longer for the benefit of those it was designed to serve. This can be true of either public or private institutions as reflected in this article by Gluu, a digital agency out of Denmark, on organizational complexity and what happens when Complexity brings paralysis.

We don't see it coming. What starts as a simple idea quickly becomes far more complex than anyone imagined. Before we know it all the good ideas lead to a form of paralysis.

If you look at each of the new ways of working and tools in isolation then most of them make sense. They are introduced by smart people with good intentions. The trouble is that when companies employ thousands of smart, highly paid people and then place them into the pigeonholes of a corporate hierarchy, then people do what they get paid for. From each of their pigeonholes they develop intricate systems, structures and processes that they broadcast to their colleagues.

What happens is that different department functions within City Hall become increasingly siloed from each other, from the public and even the political leadership itself, because of the cultural incentives created over time by the political legacy. Getting anything done, because it is inadequate to the complex challenge becomes increasingly complicated.

This does not have to happen intentionally or overtly, though it does, it can happen gradually, almost imperceptibly, changing the culture of the institution. The institutional processes become unnecessarily complicated and an obtuse wasting of energy from running on bureaucratic hamster wheels rather than addressing the original complex issues because the institution has become a maze of disconnected parts requiring the right map or passwords to get through it.

However, stepping back and embracing complexity provides a better chance of finding a simple answers and likely different and better than any simplistic answer provided by a complicated approach. The blog post Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole was an endeavor to at least speak to a light at the end of a tunnel which only then beginning to be charted.

Again, not only do different arenas or sectors need to be brought together in an organic manner so that better reflects the underlying complexity of the issues being addressed but it needs to be done in a systematic manner that creates new opportunities for innovation.

A number of different strategies or approaches have been introduced in the process of building this learning platform for creating new community paradigms. Learning from these has not only provided different and therefore broader understanding but also helped to again bridge previously unconnected areas of inquiry. There is not always agreement with these different viewpoints but they serve to better frame the questions being raised. They have all been featured previously but this time it will be through more of a systems framework.

Strong Towns, led by Executive Director Charles (Chuck) Marohn, is one of the earliest and featured through three separate avenues in the right hand column of this blog. Strong Towns was first viewed as a means of bridging the ideas of Place and Economics. The blog post Strong Towns a closer look leads to a more detailed summary of what they espouse. There are disagreements, including the priority of environmental concerns or over reliance on fiscal metrics as related to community development, but they are still included because according to the Strong Towns philosophy, there are no real solutions to the fundamental problems facing our local communities, just rational responses.

Our local regulatory, planning, financing and engineering systems are designed to work in the Old Economy. If we are to see growth at the local level in a New Economy, all of these systems need to be rescaled to fit the changed reality.

This provides a basis for collaboration while at the same time leaving room for discussion as to what the most rational responses might be. The most admirable resource they provide is a Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf that could be used for community generated grassroots effort to start asking some fundamental questions about one’s community. Strong Towns also sees the economic development of community as needing to fit within a larger system in a financially sustainable manner. Again, plenty of room for discussion as to the best answers but they are asking the right questions.

Another alternative approach to understanding our local communities and economies was considered in the blog post Seeing Economy and Community as Ecosystem Another Way of Shifting the Paradigm. Inspired by a blog post by Della Rucker, Principal of Wise Economy Workshop who wrote So how do we start building Wise Economies? Economies = Communities = Ecosystems it provides for a more organic approach that addresses the increasing complexity inherent in the growth of our communities.

First, we need to change how we think about communities, businesses, organizations and governments. We need to understand that economic vitality depends on the health of a community, and that a community is not a set of separate, unrelated systems – a business district, a school system, a park system, a street system — but an ecosystem.

This concept of an ecosystem, in which the development of the economic system cannot ignore the development of the larger community system. This was also brought out in blog post Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole, which discussed Della’s appreciation of Jane Jacobs insights into organized complexity.

It’s an understanding of “organized complexity,” as she (Jacobs) called it – the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes, of self-organization. This was not a mysterious world, but a comprehensible one – it was just a different kind of world than we had been envisioning. A city, certainly, was a different kind of problem than we had thought. And therein she identified a huge obstacle to learning and progress, and one that is largely still with us.

Again, there is a recognition of a more systems based perspective moving from a narrow focus on the amount of revenues or number of jobs to a wider focus on the overall health, economically and environmentally, of the community.

With this type of approach, instead of cities competing for businesses and tax dollars, they have at least the potential working more easily together in collaborating to create healthy cities and livable communities.

This approach even with something as apparently reasonable as creating healthy cities is, however, a challenge to both our planning systems and health approach in fundamental ways. The objective of such an effort needs to be to pioneer new interfaces between health and planning. Although such a focus is local, the impact can be global such as with the World Health Organization's (WHO) creating a template definition of what is meant by a healthy city which can be replicated. WHO also has a global healthy cities project which is not top down but provides more of a template for successful implementation.

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.

This has been featured in both wiki-pages and blog posts under the wiki-section Livable Communities and not only collaborating to create healthy cities as mentioned above but also Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities bringing this continuing inquiry full circle.

New community paradigms deals with numerous systems, regulatory, planning, financing and engineering systems, water systems, sewer systems and others. All the preceding suggest that a systems approach and more specifically that a Systems Thinking approach could serve as an important component of new community paradigms. This approach was first introduced with the inclusion of the NEW COMMUNITY PARADIGMS SYSTEMS MINDMAP by THEBRAIN.COM.

The newly added component greatly assisted in envisioning new connections and pathways. Explaining the how and why, will be done through this blog. The primary resources will be from the results of participating in an online class on Model Thinking from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor offered by Coursea. The instructor is Scott E. Page, the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics. Model Thinking relates to Systems Thinking, the tactical means to implement strategic approaches to societies challenges. The second resource will be what can be learned from interacting with the members of the LinkedIn Systems Thinking group and the extensive resources that they provide. 

Related Blog Posts

Systems Thinking as a disciplined process for Community Governance

Finding Resources and Connections to Create New Community Paradigms

The last post to this blog only began to look at the gap between the stated ideals that are the goal of creating new community paradigms and the more pragmatic means of achieving those goals.  It did recognize that some level of austerity was going to be imposed and that other means were going have to be found to enhance community wealth.  One suggested source of such community wealth is the people making up the community and realizing that resource through volunteerism.

There are, however, a number of challenges that still need to be addressed.  We have touched upon a number of separate components making up a community, placemaking, the health of a city to make sure it is livable, the economics of a livable city,  even peering into the soul of a community, and now can start looking from a more holistic point of view.  This combining of various vantage points brings up yet even more complexities and challenges. The purpose of this blog and the related wiki is to try to provide some assistance in addressing these challenges.

One of the foundational premises of this effort is that it has to be planted and grown from community, based in the traditional sense of place and on-the-ground social connections. It cannot be done solely online, even though a basic premise of this effort is that the Internet offers tremendous resources that can be used to help bring it about.

This will be a challenge for future organizers and has been for social media. While there has been successes to some degree with combining social media communities with physical locations, the connections were for the most part based online with no parallel connections between physical locations or by people based on those locations.  There are some online programs designed to do this but many are still in market beta.

The primary contribution that this blog will work to make is identify online resources that can be used for helping communities built their own vision.  The secondary contribution that can be made through the New Community Paradigms Wiki is providing the potential for connection with groups that have expertise in these areas. This may be a more valuable contribution though it does require a greater investment by whomever wants to take advantage of it.

The platform for finding relevant groups is Facebook. Both of the wikipages cited above also have links to Facebook sites featuring related organizations as do most of the New Community Paradigm wikipages. A listing of all the Facebook related sites is available through this blog on the righthand sidebar under New Community Paradigms Wiki icon, Facebook Connections for New Community Paradigms.

Facebook was chosen not only because it is the most popular online social media site and designed to be relatively easy to use, it was also chosen because if an organization decides to be on Facebook, it is making an effort to reach out to people and wants to connect.

These resources are not designed to be exhaustive rather they are a starting point for further exploration.  The benefit hopefully being provided is having them in one place in an organized and understandable format. In the next post, we will introduce more resources available through the New Community Paradigms Wiki dealing with direct democracy through Community Governance and People’s Governance wikipages.

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.

Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities

As promised in the previous post, this post will drill down into one of the components of livable communities and better define is what is a Healthy City? Professor Jan Gehl spoke about Healthy Cities in his closing keynote "Cities for People" featured in the previous post.

While this blog is based in the San Gabriel Valley of California, it is committed to looking beyond that for inspiration. The World Health Organization provides a global setting for a Healthy City.

A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and developing to their maximum potential.

In this aspect different parts of the world want the same thing, all of us want to live in a Healthy City. The question is how to bring that about for our own communities. There are a number of pathways available.

One resource available in our local area is Healthy City at www.healthycity.org an information + action resource that unites community voices, rigorous research, and innovative technologies to solve the root causes of social inequity. The first of its kind in the country, our team consists of authorities in public policy, research, technology, and data analysis. We provide actionable information such as data, maps, and service referrals through our easy-to-use online platform. Healthy City also partners directly with organizations to develop targeted strategies that fuel social change. Here is a link to a short video explanation of what Healthy City is about. A longer and more in-depth webinar is available here HealthyCity Introductory Webinar (wiki page/heads up video starts up right away)

This blog will also be featuring other online resources for creating new community paradigms. Here is one on How to use Healthy City California from Cassidy Friedman on Vimeo which was designed to help San Franciscans see how Healthy City can be used to research trends in their community. Healthy City is also featured on the Economic Development in San Gabriel Valley + World Facebook page.

This still leaves the question as to how did HealthyCity.org come about? In this particular case, it was not a governmental entity that created the HealthyCity initiative. The people behind it are the Advancement Project. A public policy change organization rooted in the civil rights movement. More on them here - Who We Are | Advancement Project California. So it is possible to create something without government, though they should be made a partner if possible. All of these resources and more are being made available on the Healthy City wiki page under Livable Communities of the New Community Paradigms Wiki.

This post provides resources showing what is possible if you make use of web-based tools to help you make your community healthy and in turn more livable.  It demonstrates how people have taken steps to implement these resources in their own community. It also though raises a number of issues. Where do you find programs to help with this effort? What other organizations are out there to help? What other issues are there to be concerned with besides economics discussed in the first post and health discussed in this one? Does the local government have any programs for Health Cities? Most importantly, the question as to how to start on the path of creating a new community paradigm has not really been addressed.

The last question will take the most time for this blog, but the second to last, " Does the local government have any programs for Health Cities?"  will be the topic of the next post.

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.