Steps Towards Sustainable Communities

Sustainable communities are achieved by considering the following characteristics.

Economic Security: How well does the idea, project, or program take the total economic well being of the community into account? A sustainable community possesses a healthy and diverse economy (variety of businesses, industries, and institutions which are environmentally sound) that adapts to change, provides long term material security to residents, and respects ecological limits by maximizing income generation while also maintaining or increasing the assortment of natural assets that yield benefits. Sustainable communities strive to price goods and services to reflect the full social and environmental costs of their provision and link area businesses, products and services, and resources and customers to increase the recycling of money and other resources that will remain in the community.

Ecological Integrity: How well does the idea, project, or program take ecological opportunities and limitations into account? Sustainable communities are inhabited by people with a sense of stewardship who maintain and enhance the environment and natural ecosystems both for their own essential functions, their beauty, their livability as a landscape, and their ability to provide sustainable supplies of natural resources and waste assimilation capacity for all human use, without undermining their function and longevity in the future. Communities use land prudently, preserving quality wild and productive lands and designing compact urban development that features pedestrian and transit oriented mixed use development with extensive access to green space.

Social Equity: Does the idea, project, or program promote greater equity within the community and with people outside the community, as well as between present and future generations? Social equity implies that diverse social and cultural systems are preserved and that tensions are able to be resolved by distributing costs and benefits equitably. A more sustainable community recognizes and supports people's evolving sense of well being. Sustainable communities consider intra generational equity (e.g., elimination of poverty, viable levels of welfare, protection of public health, provision of education) and inter generational equity (e.g. leaving the world in a better condition than we found it, protecting future generations' rights to opportunities of present generations).

Citizen Engagement and Responsibility: How well does an idea, project, or program contribute to a sense of community among neighbors and to key features that make a community strong -- its residents, businesses, government, and institutions? Engagement is a participatory approach to managing a region that blends concepts of good governance, consensus building, the assuming of civic responsibilities, and strategic planning. A more sustainable community enables people to feel empowered and to take responsibility based on a shared vision, equal opportunity, ability to access expertise and knowledge for their own needs, and a capacity to affect positively the outcome of decisions which influence them.

Cultural Vitality: How well does the idea, project, or program respect and use local people and their knowledge, as well as local energy and materials? A sustainable community is one that preserves cultural attributes developed over its history, while also being open to alternative traditions that reflect changing conditions. There is much to be learned from society keeping a constant eye on the history of past civilizations, the cultural attributes that have developed in different societies through time, and the way their ancestors went about living, playing, working, and growing. The measure of institutions and means communities implement to retain their cultural heritage, as well as benefit from the varied skills and perspectives of local peoples, are a significant part of indicating a community's sustainability.

Institutional Effectiveness: How well does an idea, project, or program encourage the participation of all affected people in decision making and support the civic values of trust and cooperation? Businesses, neighborhood and community groups, the media, and citizens, as well as governments and NGOs, influence governance through effective participation. Proponents of strong communities seek to make citizens' voices heard in governance and to achieve greater transparency in government decision making and programs. In sustainable communities institutions function effectively to satisfy the physical needs of their citizens while preserving the environment by providing citizens with the information and opportunities necessary to participate meaningfully.

Making Connections and Trade-offs: How well does the idea, project, or program consider the connections among issues, make balanced trade offs where necessary, and seek to understand impacts? Synergies and interconnections should be considered in a way that emphasize the inadvisability of addressing bits of the picture in isolation, not accounting for links among social, economic and environmental issues. Sustainable communities elicit support from businesses, local government, and citizen organizations and work with other communities in a larger context, in a spirit of connectivity. In lieu of reaching full consensus, the community makes reasoned and balanced trade offs, informed by the community's core values.

Resilience: How well does the idea, project, or program provide systemic ways of responding to changes which can safeguard the community from failure? Resilience can be characterized as the amount of disturbance in economies, relationships, and ecosystems that can be sustained by a community before a change in its structure may occur. Resilience in communities is dictated by the state of diversity and redundancy represented in different community characteristics, in the context of a "complex system." In this way, communities that are sustainable identify criteria having certain thresholds that should not be exceeded. A sustainable community also considers impacts on the community 175 years from now (the seven generation test).

Adaptive Management: How well does the idea, project, or program identify adaptive behaviors that can be enacted by learning from doing? Adaptive management is built upon the premise that people learn from their actions, as well as their mistakes. An adaptive, learning based approach to the practice of sustainability implies looking for ways to maintain flexibility by identifying feedback loops, making sure they give timely and relevant information, and then paying attention to them, being prepared to abandon unsuccessful strategies.