Back to Systems Practice USA Again

The previous post will be the last one on the SP UK course or OpenUniversity course on Mastering Systems Thinking in Practice for at least a while. There was a gap between the last post and the one previous of about a month. During that time, a second SP USA course was started, which is what I will be calling the Systems Practice: A Practical Approach to Move from Impossible to Impact, and am now finishing up with the fourth week.

While there was an overall philosophical disagreement with the SP UK course, there were a number of valuable insights gleaned from the course. There are also distinct differences in approach between SP UK and SP USA.

The lead instructor for the SP USA course is again Rob Ricigliano, (intro video). This time was not begun with immediately starting with mapping on one’s own as was the case the first time. That over-eagerness put me out of sync with the SP USA process and made any post critique problematic. The process, for the most part, worked well. The course was successfully passed, the other team members who saw the process to the end seemed happy with the results though there was also an issue for me of not having pushed far enough with the systems analysis.

The SP USA course, for the first time, helped bring everyone to a consensus on a potential approach to addressing homelessness in Portland, Oregon through food trucks to feed homeless living in camps and others unsheltered. An idea that was first considered in the Modeling the Last Mile to Feed the Homeless series during an Acumen Financial Modeling course.

The process followed by the team was generally in line with that put forward by the SP USA course. The independent but parallel path I took, along with helping with the SP USA processes, however, revealed potential issues further along. Throwing a wrench into the effort at the very end of what was a first time educational experience for everyone else did not seem a positive step. The question that could not be answered at the end was whether the outcome would have been different if I had followed the SP USA path more closely.

This time there will be no jumping the gun, sprinting ahead, or going off with completely separate explorations. So far, that intention has been followed, with perhaps some pushing interpretations of other's intentions, pretty closely. Hindsight though tells me the balance remains elusive.

Attempts, begun later than they should have, were made to join about six different groups. This time the objective was to be subordinate instead of taking the lead. Whichever team I could get on would decide the direction of the challenge chosen and I would do my best to support that vision.

MOSS, the last group, accepted making me one of a four member group with two of the members being associated with the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Dr. Steve Kennedy, Academic Director - MSc Global Business and Sustainability and Sander Fleuren, a Learning and Development Manager, work closely together.

Dr. Kennedy (Steve, using the egalitarian practice applied in the course) has provided the general direction for the endeavor, addressing plastic pollution in Bangkok Thailand. Also part of the team, Dohn Taylor from Australia, and recent addition, Shawn Ng with connections to Malaysia, East Africa, and Rome, Italy. This creates some challenges with communications which are all asynchronous being that we are in GMT+8, 2 in GMT+1, and GMT-8 time zones, and that we only communicated through the course.

With introductions made, the next step was letting my fellow teammates know of my previous participation in the course and of the intention to blog about the experience as is being done now.

Despite having some resources in the NCP Wiki, Environment and Sustainability, are not my primary focus and my general knowledge is limited. It is even more limited regards to the current state of Thailand though having lived there, as a member of the United States Air Force, during the time around 1975-76 when the US was turning bases over to the Thai government. Any impressions that were held from that time were quickly proven false during the early stages of the SP USA course. 

This relative lack of knowledge though helped test my own particular hypothesis explored through the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking wiki page. That systems thinking can be used by a group in a civic setting to help develop a better understanding of a complex situation and addressing it. One that is better enough to make the necessary extra effort, and there is extra effort, worth the trouble. The challenge is to create a system practice that is efficient enough that it allows others to concentrate on effectiveness. 

This hypothesis was first developed in the post A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking and Kumu map Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

The first assignment of the SP USA course was to present the system challenge to be addressed through a Complexity Spectrum, consisting of sets of spectrums made up of polar choices, to select one or somewhere between them.

• Level of Understanding: 
• Well understood vs Not Understood 
• Engagement: 
• Consensus vs Diversity of Opinion 
• Environment: 
• Stable vs Dynamic 
• Self-contained vs Interconnected 
• Goals: 
• Small Scale vs Broad Change 
• Short-term vs Sustainable 

While relational Kumu mapping was curtailed at the start, there had been recent experimentation with Plectica which arguably fitted rather well with the first SP USA course assignment, in this instance, proving more helpful than Kumu. The configuration made possible with Plectica allowed me to create a map that reflected the Complexity Spectrum’s hierarchical nature and provided spaces for each of the members of the team to provide their individual input. Plectica has, unless you sign up for it, an interfering banner across the screen. Here are the results of the Complexity Spectrum in a narrative nutshell.

Plastic pollution and its impact on Bangkok

The level of understanding regarding plastic waste pollution was seen as high by team participants, although likely not consciously considered by most people having less of a general public awareness of the consequences of social and ecological functioning and the sources of the pollution. What may be less understood is the interaction of economic inequality and environmental degradation within communities.

The Diversity of Opinion regarding solutions to the issues is seen as high based in part on the diversity of opinion on what parts of the system need to be addressed, individual consumer buying habits, government interventions, or the market extracting rents but sourcing cleanup to the local communities, moving to a petroleum-free economy or creating a circular economy which processes at or near 100% efficiency or creating substitutes for the petroleum-based products.

Plastic pollution is seen as a highly connected problem to the local and global consumption and production systems. The root causes may be found outside of the locality - plastic being produced outside of Bangkok and transported into the city in the shape of products and packaging.

The problem is ever-changing, governments seeking a solution often pass the problem to someone else. These types of projects may gain momentum and a life of their own through community involvement, despite the government. When people decide to act government often plays catch-up.

The problem of plastic pollution in terms of the quantity of material flows is seen as relatively predictable. However, it was envisioned that the system has a high potential for self-organization and the emergence of new dynamics.

The project aims at small-scale operations making a sustained and broad change. The goal(s) of the social entrepreneur would be relatively small scale - considering perhaps impacts on the neighborhood or perhaps stopping pollution events of one particular input. However, if this can be somewhat replicated or incentivized by others to pursue the goal (potentially even the local administration) then a much broader scale change could be achieved. The change being sought in the reduction of plastic pollution seems broadly applicable, particularly if scaled up. Likely several steps will need to be taken with intervening objectives. These solutions need to be long-term and sustainable and infer a change to the system's purpose.

The Complexity Spectrum map also became the basis for an early systems concept map using first Plectica and later Kumu. As was stated above, some of these ideas would later be further tested or revised later in the process. I, in particular, learned a good deal more about plastic pollution in Asia and especially Thailand. More on those details will be provided in the next post.

Asset Based Community Development Lessons for Systems Thinking

In the last post, Cormac Russell, faculty member of the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University, Illinois, now DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois and Managing Director of Nurture Development, the leading Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) organization in Europe, was introduced by this blog. He was contrasted with a more ‘Collective Impact’ approach to ABCD. In this post, we will look at the approach taken by Cormac and Nurture Development and contrast them with the approach taken by this effort, especially Systems Thinking. Such contrasts are more in the nature of different sides of a dice rather than mutually exclusive opposites. 

As was mentioned in the last post, Cormac seems far more likely to write about 'collective' in terms of, “direct collective energy towards collective action” or, “a way that is inclusive and supports people to generate disparate energy into collective democratic power", rather than the often top down methodology of Collective Impact. A problem with Grasstop oriented Collective Impact is that citizen leaders can often be stuck in silos as readily as government departments can. 

At the recent TEDXExter 2016, Cormac gave a talk on Sustainable community development: from what's wrong to what's strong, arguing that we need to start with what's strong within a community instead of trying to right what we see as wrong. We can grapple with humanity’s toughest questions by helping people in discovering what gifts they have and using those gifts to enrich those around them and help people to define and to live a good life. For more background there is John McKnight Keynote Speech about the history, practice and future of Asset Based Community Development from the 2016 ABCD Festival and What is Asset Based Community Development? (in under four minutes)  (more videos).

Now the videos will provide you with a pretty clear, concise and complete idea of what Asset Based Community Development is and what it tries to accomplish, so if you are still reading and haven’t watched yet, you should. If you have watched then you might want to stop and reflect a bit then come back.

In Cormac's TEDXExter video, he uses a familiar term in Systems Thinking, 'unintended consequences'. In this case, of our current institutional, often bureaucratic attempts at helping people in our communities, listing four of them.

The first unintended consequence is defining people not by their gifts, capacities and what they can bring to the solution but by their deficiencies and their problems. The second unintended consequence resulting from a top-down obsession is that money doesn’t go to those who actually need the help.  Instead, it goes to those who are paid to provide the services to those who need help. The third unintended consequence is that active citizenship, the power to take action and to respond at the grassroots level, retreats in the face of ever-increasing technocracy driven by professionalism and expertise and finally. 

With the fourth unintended consequence, Cormac mentions another Systems Thinking term or tool, mapping. Entire neighborhoods, entire communities which have been defined as deficient will start to internalize an imposed a negative 'map' and believe that the only way that anything is going to change for them is when some outside expert with the right program and the right money comes in to rescue them these so-called unintended harms.

At this point, I may have a tendency to start having some different perspectives from Cormac. Before making too much of this though, I should state my own perspective that maps should be seen as raising questions, not providing answers. Maps are launching points for exploration, one can always provide more detail and deeper understanding or one can move beyond the edges. It is easy enough to take maps for granted which is invariably done all the time but that is merely intellectual laziness. 

A viable way to be collective and inclusive from the bottom up, according to Cormac and those with a similar mind set, is to work through the concept of the communal Commons to enable some type of Coalition of the Doing in determining the relationship between Capitalism And the Commons. Such an approach encourages communities to ask questions such as, does growth equal success? (Hint - no it doesn't).

ABCD has the capacity to encompass a rather expansive view of community. It can take a neighbor to neighbor approach as did Tamarack's Abundant Community Edmonton which is part of its campaign to work towards the promise of deepening community. It can also take an institutional city government approach, as with Our London is a city of Neighbourhoods, London, Ontario, Canada that is.

Cormac is concerned with institutions using asset mapping to build data about the assets of communities, like an inventory, instead of supporting those communities by first building relationships and then connecting the assets. Even so, he provided a practical and fun way to start a conversation about community assets without any theory. The point according to Cormac is remembering asset mapping is an inside job focused on relationship building not data collection. Similarly with Systems Thinking, it is the relationship between people and assets that brings about the potential for emergent capacities of the community. The challenge is keeping the focus on the community. 

One possible way of keeping the focus on community could be through a digital community and virtual collaboration. The later is one area I am currently working on through a Systems Thinking approach. The Leeds Digital Festival is one example of a real world community, working as a digital community, leading the process to understand themselves, rather than depending upon others to do it for them. This, however, presents a whole new set of decisions according to Usman Haque. 

Being that we are focusing on community, it seemed that there should be a potential but true synergy between the work of Placemaking, as in the creation of Community Places (wiki-page) done by organizations such as Project for Public Spaces and Asset Based Community Development (wiki-page) work being done by Nurture Development and other organizations, if one takes the view that Placemaking is to places what ABCD is to people. Having admitted not knowing that much about ABCD, I asked the experts. Project 4 Public Spaces told me Placemaking is indeed inspired by and connected to Asset-Based Community Development and the good folks at @ABCD_Global agreed.

The area of greatest interest is in the creation of Healthy Cities (wiki-page) and communities. Cormac Russell is seen as a sort of Medical Heretic, in a good way, by the Home | World Health Innovation Summit's blog. In particular with efforts at Place Based Health through which community social work moves away from an assessment/case management approach and shifts from what's wrong to what's strong. This approach promotes the concept of 'social prescribing' and other ideas redefining, the Future of Medicine.

"We have to build circumstances to allow General Practitioner practices to engage with local community and support asset-based community development,” according to  Dr. Amir Hannan of the Haughten Thornley Medical Centres (another Cormac fan site) in Hyde, Cheshire, United Kingdom, and chairperson of the World Health Innovation Summit (WHIS).

This seems in keeping, from a lagging distance, with ideas raised in Using Deliberation and Systems Thinking to Address Healthcare Costs and Pathways to Healthy Communities, particularly, the concept of Communities Creating Health through the vision of the Creating Health Collaborative as a means of transforming our system of health in the Twenty-first Century, though it isn't quite ABCD based. 

Simply claiming, "Improving health? Start local" does not align with an ABCD framework and misappropriating the name does not change that. Fundamentally because Asset-Based Community Development is not an alternative to Services. The differences, beyond a tendency to want to ‘fix’ somebody, are though suspected to be more complex than I am appreciating not having enough specific knowledge of the issues under consideration being, 'Across the pond.' More importantly,  As Cormac's Black Swans White Swans and Ugly Ducklings article states, "Mapping people’s journey towards wellbeing in this way is deeply problematic, especially if we harbour aspirations towards deeper democracy. It obscures from view the capacities that exist within and around people that can be used to secure what is required for a good life in any and all climates."   

According to Cormac,"With ABCD efforts when you aim to scale; prepare to fail. Instead, try focusing on proliferation of deep practice and abandon fidelity to model,” because 'What Communities Build For Themselves, They Won't Destroy’. This may appear an antithesis to Systems Thinking (wiki-page), it is generally acknowledged that, "All models are wrong, some are useful". However, while acknowledged, part of the rationale for this post is that while often professed it is not as often followed. Taking a rather different perspective can assist in bring such models closer to the truth of the world.

Strong Towns and job creation - navigating between Scylla and Charybdis

So far this blog has featured two posts directly on the Strong Towns movement, Strong Towns: The making of Place as Economic and Social Engine, and Strong Towns a closer look, as well as mentioning it a couple of times in Placemaking for communities the canvas becomes the art and Creating New Community Paradigms by Building Better Blocks TEDxOU - Jason Roberts. So there is a basis in claiming to have a basic understanding of the Strong Towns principles and a willingness to include those principles as part of this blog and creating new community paradigms.

However, there are still some points that either need further clarification or deeper inquiry. What I said before is that what I admire about the Strong Towns movement is not that they have all the answers, rather it is that they are asking the right questions. In this post I want to look deeper into some of the answers.

One difference raised before between the new community paradigms approach and Strong Towns that needs some elaboration is that a new community paradigm would depend far more on community members and not the political leadership or professional government management in city hall.

Under a new community paradigm scenario an individual or small group starts first organizing and then through increased inclusion creates a larger and growing component within the community. Then through direct democratic processes begins to involve the entire community rather than depending on the established institutional city hall government. The purpose of this blog and related wiki is to provide ideas, resources and connections related to that effort.

This could be done in partnership with the established institutional city hall government, in support of that government or in opposition to that government depending upon how those working to create a new community paradigm see their current municipal government’s relationship with the community. It does not depend upon permission from that government. This has been discussed before through Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities, Governance through Community and Finding Resources and Connections to Create New Community Paradigms.

It should be hopefully obvious that this does not apply to all city governments and this new community paradigms perspective is being freshly created on these pages and continues to evolve with far more being needed to square the circle.

Strong Towns seems to put their money on existing municipal government leadership, and while in some cases that could be a good bet, it is all too often the institutional political leadership of a community that has led that community down a non-sustainable fiscal path. A new community paradigm approach does not depend upon a four year cycle for meaningful community involvement.

Another area requiring some deeper inquiry is the relationship of jobs to local economic development. There is not really a disagreement with the Strong Towns perspective. It is the Strong Towns position that "jobs and growth are the results of a productive system, not the proxy for one". A new community paradigm approach takes the same view. It is also the Strong Towns position that:

In nearly every American city, the balance sheet does not benefit from a new job.

If we spend $100,000 at the local level to create jobs, there is no basis to believe that this will ever result in $100,000 being returned to the city through new tax receipts.

This perspective, though admittedly not without some resistance, has been accepted. The issue being raised here is what I will call a Scylla and Charybdis problem. In the story of the Odyssey, Odysseus or Ulysses must face two dangers at the same time. Being successful in avoiding one does not mean you can ignore the other.

The Charybdis problem, which Strong Towns focuses on, is pursuing growth by development scaled to the automobile. The result has been communities falling all too often into the trap of a government fiscal Growth Ponzi Scheme. This situation arises when additional revenue generated from new growth has to be used to pay off unfunded liabilities created from past growth rather than maintaining or creating new services.

There is a great deal of truth to what has been often expressed as the Strong Towns perspective on too great of a dependency on government professionals, though this is most often true when enmeshed in a bureaucratic system. A sizable portion of the responsibility is laid at the feet of economic development and planning professionals. However, the professionals I worked with have been talking about anti-sprawl planning for over a decade and sustainable development in California for at just about as long.

In some cases a Donald Trump mini-me style management, anxious to bring in new development, tells the city council what it wants to hear or doesn’t tell them what they need to hear, often on the implicit instructions of the city council itself. The Ponzi scheme has a dysfunctional relationship maintaining its existence. An approach to community based fiscal sustainability has been discussed in Economic Growth and Equity within a Community - Benefiting the 100%, Budgeting for Community Prosperity requires a Clear View and Second look at Making Cities Work.

Our current development patterns based on the automobile within a suburban landscape fail to create enough revenue within subsequent life cycles to be sustainable. The unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance requires ever increasing rates of growth to sustain those long-term unfunded liabilities. We mortgage the future to pay for the past creating an ever growing hole pulling us down. Even if repented, the undoing of decades of mismanaged and misallocated development in a period of economic turmoil places communities in a fiscally precarious position.

The problem is that investment in basic infrastructure is not seen as generating a growing revenue stream or able to continue to add value to ROI or return on investment once built. The investment in five miles of road to a business at the outskirts of a community does not necessarily generate five times the revenue of a one mile road to a business in the community. The outside business may generate five times the municipal revenue through property or sales tax but the net benefit after the initial capital investment in the five mile road and obligation to maintain the road is often negative and not considered. Maintenance can also be easy to defer if a more politically popular use for funds can be found even if the funds were earmarked for infrastructure.

State and federal governments have also helped to enable this Ponzi scheme. Government transfer payments from the state or federal government have been used to build infrastructure but not to maintain it. Public money invested in transportation improvements—such as an increase in traffic lanes, construction of an overpass or bridge, installation of traffic signals, may have been intended to create a platform for enhanced local growth, but usually only for the initial capital investment and the community was left holding the long term maintenance obligation bag. In our current situation funding local improvements especially maintenance is unlikely to be a high priority going forward for either state or federal governments, more likely these programs will be cut for both financial and political reasons.

The ability of local governments to take on debt has been important in maintaining the Growth Ponzi Scheme, but the private sector’s ability to finance growth through leverage according to Strong Towns was even more important. In thinking about public debt, we have to question the purpose for that debt, whether to build bridges or fight wars. We also have to question the different types of private debt, whether investment in equipment or in subprime mortgages. Still, any hindsight view does not change the current financial reality.

Strong Towns advice to avoid this Charybdis is “Stop building to the scale of the automobile” and adopting as a means of adding value to the community landscape the concept of Economic Gardening that asserts that trying to capture growth from without is not as viable as building on growth from within. The Strong Towns perspective on viable community growth is also based on Placemaking Principles. This blog also supports Placemaking principles and agrees that the current propensity for automobile directed investment is not only a bad financial decision, it is also a bad Placemaking decision. Placemaking has been explored before in this blog in Placemaking, for communities the canvas becomes the art, Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms, and Bicycles Build Communities, as well as the posts on Strong Town.

The Scylla, because it can be inflicted from numerous separate directions destroying the body of the community, comes through the economic malaise of job loss. Even if new jobs don’t consistently generate net municipal revenue for city hall, members of that community may still be in need of jobs. If a one industry community lost that industry then it can be well imagined that tremendous efforts would be made to bring in a new business to replace the old. The types of jobs available to members of a community will dictate the level of income, the value of property owned for residential or business purposes and the ability to contribute through taxes to city services. If this declines, it can be difficult to bring it back.

The question is what responsibility and capability does the leadership of a community and its government have in addressing this? Approximately 150,000 jobs need to be created to account for population growth on top of those needed to lower our current national unemployment rate of 8.3% and 10.9% in California. Communities today need to be able to deal with an ever changing business landscape with entire businesses being disrupted out of existence, Kodak being the latest example.

Geography will play a substantial factor in determining the extent to which either Scylla or Charybdis plays a role in a community. In one past discussion of Strong Towns somebody mentioned that there was no other town for 10 miles in any direction while in California I could drive about 50 miles before not running into relatively contiguous populated communities.

The economic demographics as to the types of businesses in a community and their relationship to other businesses will also play a role. The current perspective is that small businesses are creating the majority of new jobs. This has recently been questioned in both the Wall Street Journal Do Small Businesses Deserve Their Reputation as Job Creators? and the New York Times Small Companies Create More Jobs? Maybe Not. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research says that it is not the size of the business but the age with young businesses being the primary job generators.

Regardless of the origination of jobs, each community needs to have at least indirect access to a diverse business environment depending not only on retail merchants or consumer services and business to business (or B2B) support but primary industries that create product or service.

According to the Wikipedia, article on the US Economy, the private sector employs 91% of the American workforce. Small businesses are the largest employer in the country representing 53% of US workers. Large businesses employ the second largest share at 38% of the US workforce.

One question that interests me is what is the percentage of employment created by small businesses that is in B2B support of larger businesses as opposed to small businesses that create product or services directly for consumers or are retail selling what others create. In this scenario, if the larger businesses say the automobile industry were to go out of existence then what is the impact of the smaller businesses located within the smaller communities that depended upon the larger car manufacturers?

Both the geographic and economic demographic factors also play an important role in the Brookings Institute’s report on Export Nation 2012: How U.S. Metropolitan Areas Are Driving National Growth. The report provides an interactive map to explore export trends in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas. Los Angeles County provides 540,700 jobs related to export making it number one for employment in that sector. On a national level, some consider the creation of a Jobs Engine to be essential in the coming global jobs war envisioned by Gallup Chairperson Jim Clifton.

This does not mean that because communities have to face the Scylla on their port side that they can ignore the Charybdis on their starboard side. The problem may be that communities are no longer the fundamental level of building economic growth and that both state and federal governments have placed an unfair and unsustainable burden on local communities. This only adds to the complexity of issues with which a community must deal raising issues of employment, fiscal policy and environment among others that have an impact on communities not only from a regional and state level but also at a national and global level. There are though some hopefully positive changes occurring at higher levels of government such as the HUD Sustainable Communities initiative.

It could be argued that Strong Town principles could form an effective basis for cooperation on a regional level because each community was more self-reliant locally. Locally self-reliant communities though still have to work together to create regionally sustainable economies. This blog will continue exploring how to do this from a bottoms up grassroots approach. I will leave the last word, for now, as how to do this to Chuck Marohn, Executive Director of Strong Towns to talk where he answers a question on community engagement. There is still far more to think about.

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.

Placemaking for communities the canvas becomes the art

So far new community paradigms have been loosely defined as the changes brought purposely about by communities to redefine themselves as being more "livable".  More livable was defined on the onset as offering healthy environments for the members of the community.  We also began discussions on the essential inclusion of economics into the equation and the challenge of complexity in addressing these paradigms.

All of this has to take "Place" somewhere. "Place", particularly when speaking of community, is a defining element of a livable city.  How we define "Place" is an important component of creating new paradigms for our communities.  We have available to us a number of resources that can assist us with this endeavor.  As way of introducing them I am going to introduce a page from the New Community Paradigms wiki that is being created in parallel with this blog. The Places wikipage will be a depository for community resources addressing ideas regarding "place" as a community asset. Right now there are two categories Community Places, which will be examined in this post. Soul of a Community will be dealt with in a future post. 

The first offering in New Community Paradigm Community Places is PPS Project for PUBLIC SPACES. The About page for PPS informs us that PPS was founded in 1975 to expand on the work of William (Holly) Whyte, the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.  As a resource for this effort, it is important to note that:

In addition to leading projects in our nine program areas, PPS also trains more than 10,000 people every year and reaches countless more through our websites and publications. PPS has become an internationally recognized center for resources, tools and inspiration about Placemaking.

The most important question maybe though,

What is Placemaking?

Categories: Articles, Creating Public Multi-use Destinations, Multi-Use, Placemaking 101

“’Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” -Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago

Placemaking, as PPS so aptly puts it comes From the Heart of a Community. 

Other work being done with Placemaking can be found on the PPS Facebook site. Facebook, because it is so popular, will be used as another avenue to promote community connections upon which to build new community paradigms. PPS was chosen to lead this particular perspective on new community paradigms because they see the community as a canvas on which to try new ideas, maybe clay would be a better analogy since the "Place" becomes an integral part of the community. 

Smart Growth America is an organization that advocates for people who want to live and work in great neighborhoods. We believe smart growth solutions support businesses and jobs, provide more options for how people get around and make it more affordable to live near work and the grocery store. Our coalition works with communities to fight sprawl and save money. We are making America’s neighborhoods great together.  

As creative as the ideas that can come from PPS and their like may be, they cannot be put into practice if there is not a strong movement to make them a reality.  Some communities may be able to create this movement on their own, but others will need some form of support. The creation of new community paradigms is not limited to within the boundaries of any community.  Smart Growth America is one organization that can offer support.  As with PPS, there is also a Smart Growth America Facebook page.  

One of the founding principles of this blog and of the accompanying wiki is that the economics of creating new community paradigms are of the utmost importance.  One Placemaking advocacy group that has this as a fundamental basis for their work is Strong Towns.  Here is the Strong Towns Facebook page.

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model for growth that allows America's towns to become financially strong and resilient. The American approach to growth is causing economic stagnation and decline along with land use practices that force a dependency on public subsidies. The inefficiencies of the current approach have left American towns financially insolvent, unable to pay even the maintenance costs of their basic infrastructure. A new approach that accounts for the full cost of growth is needed to make our towns strong again. 

It should be noted that this blog will not be agreeing with every view put out by the organizations that it features.  This is likely to be especially true of Strong Towns.  However, I do respect their basic approach to make communities economically sustainable as much as I respect those organizations that seek to make them environmentally sustainable.  The paradigm shift being sought is bringing those two concepts together into a viable whole.

I am going to leave this survey of Placemaking resources with another organization that is thinking outside of the box.  The Guggenheim is not a box in any sense of the word and their BMW Guggenheim Lab pushes the concept of Place and what it means to communities through onsite experimentation.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory that will travel to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is conceived to engage public discourse in cities around the world and through the BMW Guggenheim Lab website and online social communities.

While many communities will find it difficult and may not be willing to implement the ideas created during this ongoing placemaking experiment, the may also take inspiration in the creative endeavor to find new ways of making our communities more livable.  One readily available resource provided by the BMW Guggenheim Lab is Urbonology, an online survey to help determine the type of community one wants to build.

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.

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.