Pathways to New Community Paradigms

UNC School of Government [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:32:00 PST

The Small Towns, Big Ideas project began in mid-2006, when the UNC School of Government partnered with the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center to identify and document fifty small towns that were implementing successful or innovative approaches to community economic development.

About Motivate Cape Town - Motivate Cape Town [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:10:39 PST

The Motivate Cape Town Challenge: Make Cape Town a Fantastic Place to Live, Work and Play! The Plan: CHALLENGE 2012! Empower communities to turn their innovative ideas into sustainable projects. 'Communities' are any gatherings of positive and passionate Capetonians. 'Innovative ideas' are the common wisdom and ability to create the solutions we need.'Sustainable' means lasting, positive change for all the people of Cape Town. 'Projects' are any projects that contribute to positive change.

UCLA Center for Civil Society [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:29:55 PST

The Center coordinates teaching on nonprofit organizations and aspects of civil society

Center for Civil Society | Research and teaching on civil society and nonprofit leadership focused on Los Angeles and Southern California [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:25:25 PST

The Center for Civil Society in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA was established in 2002 as a research center focused on civil society, nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and social enterprise. Situated across the School’s three academic departments of Public Policy, Urban Planning, and Social Welfare, the Center has, over the past decade, developed graduate curricula, served as a convening center for scholars, practitioners, and students, and has produced an array of studies and publications, including an annual State of the Los Angeles Nonprofit Sector report and survey that has become a trusted source of data and analysis for the regional nonprofit community.

Sourcing Crowds for Out of the Box Ideas | Innovation Management [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:56:30 PST

What interests me is how the lessons found in the article could be applied to real world community governance in relation to the public sector. Such communities are already in existence so cannot be created outside of the box to start with, however many of the other observations can be applied especially with the use of the Internet and application of direct democratic dialogue. It should be possible to create some new disruptive innovations which such an approach and resources to create some new community paradigms.

Partnership for Sustainable Communities [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:02:53 PST

Sustainable communities are places that have a variety of housing and transportation choices, with destinations close to home. As a result, they tend to have lower transportation costs, reduce air pollution and stormwater runoff, decrease infrastructure costs, preserve historic properties and sensitive lands, save people time in traffic, be more economically resilient and meet market demand for different types of housing at different prices points. Rural, suburban, and urban communities can all use sustainable communities strategies and techniques to invest in healthy, safe and walkable neighborhoods, but these strategies will look different in each place depending on the community’s character, context, and needs.

Smart Growth | US EPA [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:52:20 PST

EPA helps communities grow in ways that expand economic opportunity, protect public health and the environment, and create and enhance the places that people love. Through research, tools, partnerships, case studies, grants, and technical assistance, EPA is helping America's communities turn their visions of the future into reality.

About | HUD USER [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:49:32 PST

The mission of the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities is to create strong, sustainable communities by helping communities connect housing to jobs, foster local innovation, and build a clean energy economy. Through its work and in partnership with other federal agencies, local communities and regions, the Office of Sustainable Communities is supporting cutting edge research, innovative and inclusive planning practices, and new strategies for improving energy efficiency in new and existing housing. Underlying this work is an emphasis on leveraging federal investments to create jobs, achieve multiple tax payer benefits for each dollar invested, and support local ingenuity, innovation and partnership.

No Labels Facebook Page [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:49:29 PST

No Labels is a large and rapidly growing citizen-led organization mobilizing frustrated Republicans, Democrats and Independents - the majority of Americans - into a new political force to break the paralysis of hyper-partisanship and dysfunction in Washington. The goal is to make government work again by fighting for bipartisan, common sense solutions to our nation's biggest problems and reforms to our political system.

Make Congress Work! | No Labels [del.icio.us]

briandrpm — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:47:59 PST

Washington is broken. Congress has failed to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. Gridlock over the debt ceiling led to the first-ever downgrade of the nation’s credit rating in August, the Super Committee failed to reach a compromise securing America’s long-term economic future in November and the American people are fed up -- only 9 percent still approve of Congress.

Strong Towns a closer look

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:54:00 +0000

The Strong Towns movement was featured in a recent blog post, Making of Place as Economic and Social Engine and wiki page, Place as Social and Economic Engine, which provided a general summary of the organization. The basic position of Strong Towns is that getting a higher return on our public investments requires an understanding of what it takes to build great towns and neighborhoods.

The decision to make Strong Towns an integral part of the Pathways to New Community Paradigms blog with its inclusion on the right hand column makes it important to provide a more in depth look and to be more specific as to where this effort to create new community paradigms fits in with the Strong Towns movement and were it differs. There are so far, no real points of strong disagreement, only some differences in emphasis. A few observations will be made along the way and any points of particular concern will be left for a future post.

To ensure a better and fuller understanding of what Strong Towns is all about this article was posted and tested on the Strong Towns site before being posted on the Pathways to New Community Paradigms site. I received some kind words from the primary voice for Strong Towns, Charles Marohn.

This is a very good summary of the Strong Towns philosophy. It is quite refreshing to see the ideas analyzed and put out there in this way. Thank you for sharing this.

This give me confidence that my thinking is going in the right direction. He went on to say.

I also appreciated how you disagreed intellectually with some of the approach. I certainly don't have all the answers and would enjoy delving into some of those places where we need to in order to make what we're doing better. A different thread, perhaps...

As I said above, while there are no real points of substantial difference, I appreciate this as an invitation to explore the issues even more. What I admire about the Strong Towns movement is not that they have all the answer, rather it is that they are asking the right questions.

This post is based upon content of the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf, a supplement to the Curbside Chats done live at community meetings across the country. This is not meant to be a substitute for reading the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf. or the live Curbside Chats themselves, it is only a synopsis. It is highly recommended that the Curbside Chat booklet be read in its entirety.

The basic strategic economic development advice that communities can take from the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf. is, “Stop building to the scale of the automobile”. There is a great deal behind this direct and perhaps not immediately obvious advice that is based on our economic history, current financial situation and a pragmatic recognition as how we can possibly move forward.

While the United States has sustained economic prosperity for two generations, today the economy is stalled. A housing bubble is in the process of correcting along with a corresponding bubble in commercial real estate. The traditional ways we have stimulated the economy in down times—low interest rates and public works spending—have failed to create sustained growth. More drastic measures, such as the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, have also proven ineffective.

It is time to ask whether this experiment is really working.

Creating or chasing new growth has been the primary means of increasing the local tax base and enhancing tax revenues for communities. The theory has been and continues to be that new growth creates a new tax base which in turn adds new revenue for the local government. The argument is that the overall economic system of a community is large enough that when all factors are fully taken into account including the creation of private sector jobs and tax revenue, the revenue generated more than offsets the community’s investment.

The reality is that cities take on a long term maintenance obligation for a near term (and short lived) cash advantage. It is this very new growth that is created that generates the long term liabilities. The deeper message, the rationale behind “Stop building to the scale of the automobile” is that pursuing growth by means of development scaled to the automobile inevitably means having to assume a long term liability for maintaining the cost for new infrastructure that is greater than the revenue generated.

The current propensity for automobile directed investment also often means that municipal investment is directed to the edge of a community or along highways focusing on automobiles instead of the community’s civic downtown center and its people. It is not only a bad financial decision, it is also a bad placemaking decision.

The problem is that long term maintenance obligations are not counted on public balance sheets. An unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance means that ever increasing rates of growth are required to cover those long-term liabilities. Things go south when the investment cost exceeds the revenues generated by growth. The question is who is left holding the bag.

Infrastructure financing goes through three Life Cycles for the road or other infrastructure being financed to cover its initial and continuing costs, first pay as you go, second debt because funds have not been put aside in anticipation and the funds must be borrowed and third, if nothing is done, bankruptcy because the ability to directly fund or borrow at a sufficient level becomes unfeasible. The negative affects of these trade offs start to be realized after one life cycle. The result is that many suburban cities are now seeing cash outflows for infrastructure maintenance.

We can no longer afford to maintain all of the underutilized roads, streets, sewer systems, water systems and sidewalks we have built. This is the financial reality we must now confront.

One point of strong agreement is that this problem is not a lack of growth but unproductive growth through the creation of an illusion of wealth. We have ignored the inherent financial productivity of our places. We need to rethink how we reinvest in our communities instead of chasing new growth from the outside based on the illusion that it is a never ending resource.

We need to break that illusion and to do that we need to understand how the illusion arises. To help in explaining and getting off of this hamster’s wheel, the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf. provides three major concepts and the reasons behind them.

The Big Concepts of the Curbside Chat program are:

1. The current path cities are pursuing is not financially stable. Cities and other local governments are, for the most part, financially insolvent, despite decades of robust growth in the past.

2. The future for most cities will not resemble the recent past. The financial complexities and challenges of our time will change the way communities address issues relating to growth and development.

3. The main determinant of future prosperity for cities will be local leaders’ ability to transform their communities. The ability of local leaders’ to shepherd their communities through this difficult transition will be the key to future prosperity. I am not quite on the same page with Strong Towns here, but will deal with this further down.

Basically, communities have been on the wrong path, they are still on the wrong path and only they (community paradigms view), or more specifically their leaders (the Strong Towns view) can get them on the right path.

The Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf. also puts forward four mechanisms that have previously been used to promote this now unsustainable growth in the United States since the end of World War II. It can be demonstrated that these cannot continue in the future providing then the ammunition why we are still on the wrong path. These mechanisms have run their course and will have a diminished influence on the growth of cities and towns in the future.

1. Government transfer payments: money from the state or federal government used to build infrastructure and invest in local growth. Funding local improvements especially maintenance is unlikely to be a high priority going forward, more likely these programs will be cut not only for financial reasons but also political reasons.

However, it could be argued that programs such as HUD Sustainable Cities could be an exception if it can survive in Congress. Big if and how communities collaborate and use the program will be a determining factor in how effective the program can be. The Strong Town principles could form an effective basis for cooperation on a regional level because each community was more self-reliant locally.

2. Transportation spending: public money invested in transportation improvements—such as an increase in traffic lanes, construction of an overpass or bridge, installation of a traffic signal, etc.—that create a platform for enhanced local growth.

This raises questions whether it is possible to fund highways even if based on wise investments on a user fee funded through a gas tax as opposed to a road use tax or other means? There is also the issue of state and federal elect officials diverting transportation funds and other infrastructure funds, especially in California. Tying transportation funding to community growth gave state and federal politicians a means of leveraging community support for their reelection efforts. These concerns though are related to transportation funding and not revenue growth for communities.

3. Public and private debt: the ability of local governments to take on debt has been important to sustain growth, but the private sector’s ability to Finance growth through leverage has been even more important.

Concerning public debt we have to question the reason for that debt, whether to build bridges or fight wars. Also have to question the types of private debt, investment in equipment or in subprime mortgages, still this does not change the current financial reality.

Finally, the municipal Rube Goldberg-like mechanism getting the most focus and which was featured in the previous blog post on Strong Towns is:

4. The Growth Ponzi Scheme which is the form of financing that takes place when the additional revenue generated from new growth is used to pay off unfunded liabilities created from past growth.

This takes us back to the unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance which required an ever increasing rates of growth to sustain those long-term unfunded liabilities. Unless the revenues are growing at a greater rate, either through continually adding more new outside growth or an internal rate of return, than the cost of the liabilities, it is a Ponzi scheme.

Using revenues from new entrants to pay for the past maintenance obligations of previous developers has all the attributes of a Ponzi scheme. Current development patterns based on the automobile within a suburban landscape fail to create enough revenue within subsequent life cycles to be sustainable, so the Ponzi scheme has to collapse. State and federal governments are also contributing to this Ponzi scheme by their own need to lower costs and raise funds for themselves.

Historical Background

The Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf provides the historical survey how we have ended up where we are. This is only a summary and you are again strongly encouraged to read the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf in its entirety to get the full extent and impact of these arguments.

Housing Foreclosures are at record highs.
Housing starts are at record lows.
The bottom of the housing market has not been reached yet
Commercial real estate is also going through corrections and is a more immediate problem.

Although it could be argued that these concerns have started to turn around, they still point to the disturbing implications of another Spatial Shift in our economy.

The Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf takes lessons taught by history from the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s on the fragility and volatility of our economy. The conclusion is that America’s current economic condition is not cyclical but one demanding another correction, what Strong Towns calls a spatial shift, changing the pattern of development from mass suburbanization to one with a higher public return on investment. I term it a paradigm shift for our communities but see it as the same thing.

The Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf points to the continuing fragility and volatility of our financial systems through Black Swan events.

There are two factors that I would add, one of which is implied but not made explicit and that is that we can never get back to the level of hyper-consumerism through debt that we had before the Great Recession The other is the concept of Disruptive Innovation as put forward by Clayton Christensen. I am of the view that this will become a greater part of the reality for municipal governments feeding into the creation of Black Swan events.

Future Considerations: Job Creation and Growth

Looking at job creation as an economic development measure is according to the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf a red herring. Communities often pursue job creation strategies based on attracting a single, new business that will provide a high number of jobs or often in California’s case a stream of revenue, usually sales tax.

The problem according to the Strong Towns approach is that we confuse building infrastructure that is productive with building infrastructure to create jobs. The truth is that we must do both.

Jobs and growth are the results of a productive system, not the proxy for one.

Solutions No, Strategies Yes

There are no real solutions to these problems according to the Strong Town philosophy, 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.

Definitely in agreement with this and believe that we are lagging further and further behind the private sector in terms of technology and application as resources. This does not mean the public sector should be a clone of the private sector, it does though have lessons to learn.

Local leaders need to position their communities for change if they want to be prosperous in the coming decades.

As mentioned above, I am not optimistic about depending upon local government leaders to get us out of this mess. It will be great if they can contribute to the effort but I suspect that even those fully capable of doing it on their own, and many are not, will not be willing to do so taking instead short term political gain through short term financing over any long term community benefit. Those leaders in municipal governments that are capable of doing this and are also willing are likely already doing it. Also have little hope in this changing to the level it needs to by having elections every four years.

When the public is taking on long-term obligations, local officials need to demand that a pattern of development that pays for itself. The indirect public subsidy of unproductive growth needs to end.

The level of investment including long term maintenance of infrastructure and the potential future replacement of that infrastructure must equal the level of return. I am still working out whether this necessarily has to be direct though. While the overall economic pie for a community does have limitations it does not preclude using gain from one part of the economy to cover shortfalls in another for overall community benefit, the devil is in the details. This will be considered further in future posts.

There are concrete steps that communities should take to implement these strategies.

Communities should develop a real Capital Improvement Plan transparently showing the real infrastructure and maintenance needs of the community, not merely a wish list.

Communities should adopt strategies that increase the public return on investment. The return on investment or ROI for the public realm is a function of public cost and tax revenue. To achieve maximization of ROI on a specific block for maintaining infrastructure, the public costs need to be decreased and value of public sector investment (which is what generates tax revenue) needs to be increased. Economic development efforts have to actually add to the community wealth.

There are two means available to local municipal governments to achieve this. One is to implement a Form based code that emphasizes the form and pattern of development in contrast to the more prevalent standard zoning code which emphasizes the separation of uses. The other is to adopt New Road and Street Standards that cease focusing on the automobile and start creating value by enhancing neighborhoods. This means we need to stop worrying about how fast we get somewhere.

This in turn allows for High Amenity Investment that can create a proportional increase in private sector value and an avoidance of investment in low amenity areas that will not.

High Amenity Investment encourages communities to prioritize walking and biking where it makes sense, an approach this blog has already support by way of Bicycles Build Communities.

It also encourages focusing on Placemaking, by coordinating investments in parks and public buildings within a resilient, I would say sustainable, economic development strategy focused on the creation of value for communities and the reason to create community paradigms.

To help achieve this Strong Towns and the new communities paradigm effort both support the concept of Economic Gardening (the concept of economic development that originated in Littleton, Colorado) that asserts that trying to capture growth from without is not as viable as building on growth from within.

Finally, both Strong Towns and the new communities paradigms approach agree that this effort will require the engagement of community neighbors both online and on the ground. For the new communities paradigm approach this means Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities.

Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole.

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:02:00 +0000

So far we have begun to delve into three broad areas, those being the basic physical livability of communities [Livable Communities wiki page], the community-based governance of those communities [Governance wiki page] and creating economic viability from communities [Economics wiki page]. We will be going more in depth into each and exploring how each supports the other two. We will also be developing additional resources at the New Community Paradigms wiki.

It is still important though to be reminded that this experiment in creating a whole new paradigm for the governance of communities will not be easy. It is an experiment because it has never been tried on a large scale. It needs to be recognized that this effort is starting from a very small beginning and is attempting to leverage rather extensive resources. Providing resources is one stage of this process, showing how they can work together is another, but we still need a process by which to implement these in the real world when the reality is that there will be many challenges in doing so.

One significant potential challenge is dealing with the complications of City Hall politics while at the same time dealing with the complexities of the issues with which need to be faced. This is not to say that all City Halls will be obstructionist or do not fully represent the policy desires of their constituents but the current system of spectator participation in municipal elections every for years instead of real, authentic community participation in establishing policies is falling short of our society's true needs. This is particularly true at the local level.

While there is an intention as part of this effort to find the means of flanking the complications of dealing with a City Hall laying behind a stonewall, there is still a need to face the complexities inherent within any system of governance and the challenges it must face.

There is an organic complexity found within the communities with which we are dealing. Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is given credit for having recognized this organized complexity.

This issue has been touched on before with the post Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK but actually trying to put this all together even if just on "paper" is certain to bring up even greater complexities.

The goal of new community paradigms is to find ways of recognizing these complexities and finding the means of communicating and addressing them in a manner so that the public at large is not put off or overwhelmed and can deal with them in a meaningful way. This defines a new role for professionals in the field of being communicators and facilitators to a far greater extent.

Della Rucker of Wise Economy Workshop recently did a post on Jane Jacobs’ organized complexity, and why we keep failing to deal with it well from an economic development perspective on what had been a more planning oriented perspective taken in an article by Michael Mehaffy that ran in Planetizen.

Both defend Jacobs against recent critics but also make apparent one of the possible pitfalls to applying complex concepts in addressing complex challenges. There are not only multiple possible solutions to any problem, some workable in reality, some not, there are also multiple perspectives of those solutions making implementation all the more complicated.

One of the greatest problems in understanding the influence of Jacobs on cities and planning is that she became a victim of her own success. Her complex ideas have been simplified to the point of slogans and urban legends, and she has too often been venerated uncritically.

That attitude is changing and Mehaffy gives Jacobs critics, such as planner Thomas Campanella, economist Ed Glaeser, sociologist Sharon Zukin and Mechaffy's own friend Anthony Flint who suggested that Jacobs was a libertarian with a mixed legacy of NIMBYism a platform for their views.

He then goes on to defend Jacobs.

What I find remarkable about these accounts – speaking as an instructor who regularly uses her texts - is that in almost all cases these were things that Jacobs herself simply never said. She was clearly not against planning, but against failed planning; not against government, but against government badly organized; and not against new buildings, but against rushing monocultures of the new. She was for a deeper tactical understanding of how the "inherent regenerative force" of "self-diversification," as she termed it, can be put to work to provide more diversity of income and opportunity, as clearly has happened in cities throughout history.

Della Rucker of Wise Economy Workshop also appreciates Jacobs insights into organized complexity.

It’s an understanding of “organized complexity,” as she 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.

This does not mean that there will be a smooth path in bringing all of this together and delivering on the promise of new community paradigms. This effort requires not only a very substantial change in the way in which economic development is done to benefit the community but also a very substantial way in how the community relates to community governance and local economic development. This second factor may be the most idealistic part of this endeavor as its objective is to change the way people think about their role in the community but it is still worth the attempt if only to better understand the process.

The point is not to get everyone in any particular community thinking about community governance or economic development 24/7. It is to open up the perspective of the traditional institution of City Hall and get more members of a community involved in actively creating the type of community they want through direct democratic means. This involves emphasizing the importance of understanding economic development in relation to the long term sustainability of the community.

There is also not an assumption that everyone in every community will be interested. The good people of Parochialville may be quite happy with the way things are in their community and the good people of Innovatatown would likely already have such a system in place.

It is further recognized that even if there is a strong movement to start a new community paradigm process within a community it is, besides being potentially complicated because of political reasons, also a very complex process.

This needs to be broken down and made accessible to a "general" public audience. The quotes around "general" is to make the point that there is no such thing as a community made up of general type people and that there are hidden resources within the public audience that are often left undiscovered under the traditional system of institutional government.

The best way of dealing with complexity is head on in a authentic and transparent way. One advantage in being a web-based effort is that resources are available from around the world. Gluu is a digital agency out of Denmark with a focus on engaging members of a business, group and arguably a community in delivering ongoing organizational improvement. They recently wrote an article 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.

The article points out what happens all too often within City Hall these days. As Gluu points out, the different department functions become siloed and getting anything done becomes more and more complicated, not complex which has the potential for inherent solutions within the complexity, but complicated as the hinderances that are part of the system are often created by the system for its own survival and not the benefit of those it was designed to serve.

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.

Strong Towns: The making of Place as Economic and Social Engine

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

Addressing issues of economic growth by a community for the benefit of all members of that community through equitable community budgeting must take in consideration one additional factor and that is financial sustainability. This can take two different approaches, one which can be defined as a relatively more top down urban planning approach, as opposed to what is defined here as a more bottom up community planning approach.

These terms are often used interchangeably but I want to emphasize the community in community planning to a far greater degree than the more professionally oriented sense that urban planning conveys. Professional involvement is essential regardless of the approach taken but community planning aligns with the concept of new community paradigms.

Budgets, I asserted in the last post are not a function of communities, they are a function of institutions such as City Hall. It is important for the community to understand the budget but the budget is the map not the territory. It is more imperative to recognize the importance of Place as Economic and Social Engine (wiki page).

Dan Gilmartin, Executive Director and CEO of the Michigan Municipal League makes the case for the Economics of Place for his and all communities quoting Fred Kent at the Project for Public Spaces, “Turning a place from one that you can’t wait to get through into one that you never want to leave.”

What is Place? | Economics of Place

Experts from around the world—in academic, business, and public sectors alike—have shown that strategically investing in communities is a critical element to long-term economic development and quality of life in the 21st century...

To be successful communities must effectively develop and leverage their key human, natural, cultural and structural assets and nurture them through enacting effective public policy.

One organization working to promote this approach is featured in the Place as Economic and Social Engine (wiki page) is Strong Towns.

Home - Strong Towns

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 is the position of Strong Towns that to get a higher return on our public investments requires an understanding of what it takes to build great towns and neighborhoods. We have explored the concept of Placemaking before with the blog posts Placemaking, for communities the canvas becomes the art, Bicycles Build Communities, and Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms for which the perspective was more of Placemaking being the result of good community planning.

Strong Towns in contrast establishes Placemaking as a basis for good economic planning by a community. The principles of Placemakingas put forward by Strong Towns can be found here Placemaking Principles - Strong Towns.

The Executive Director of Strong Towns is Charles aks Chuck L. Marohn Jr., Professional Engineer with an AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) designation but more relevant to this effort he is a Confessed Recovering Engineer and the primary voice behind Strong Towns.

If you spend time on the Strong Towns blog you will soon find out that Chuck has a big problem with communities being so dependent that they cannot achieve financial sustainability. Chuck does not want to see communities addicted to dependency on automobiles, on cheap energy, on transfer payments between governments or on debt. He sees the entire ongoing pattern of American suburban development since the end of World War II as an immense Growth Ponzi Scheme as a runaway experiment and nobody seems able to stop flipping the third big switch of the generator (Igor: Not the third switch!)

Taking 30 plus years of established economic policy and saying that it doesn’t work fits in well with an effort calling for new community paradigms. He has a complete series on the topic that can be read by following these links which are from the original Growth Ponzi Scheme post.

Day 1: The Mechanisms of Growth - Trading near-term cash for long-term obligations.

Day 2: Case studies that show how our places do not create, but destroy, our wealth.

Day 3: The Ponzi scheme revealed - How new development is used to pay for old development.

Day 4: How we've sustained the unsustainable by going "all in" on the suburban pattern of development.

Day 5: Responses that are rational and responses that are irrational.

Chuck also has a problem with people not appreciating the difference between streets and roads. I will let Chuck explain the difference himself through the TEDx video below.

One of the online resources that will be featured more fully in the future on these pages is Complete Streets which has its own perspective on an ideal complete streets policy. We have been concentrating so far on the communities themselves. In the future we will be considering the connections between communities in terms of cooperation, collaboration and competition. It is enough here to say that Chuck has his own perspective on Complete Streets as an organization and as a policy goal.

For Chuck, to use his own words, (t)he idea of a Complete Street is compelling in almost every way, but when the engineering profession begins to adopt it wholesale, we need to pause and look at the outcomes. Remember the Confessed Recovering Engineer perspective, so Chuck's tactic involves the Co-opting of Complete Streets, an approach with which this effort is very comfortable as the need to overcome an intractable incumbent power base is sure to arise in some circumstances.

Chuck is more than willing to hold a Strong Towns Curbside Chat with any community that is willing to listen and plans on being out in Southern California around April of 2012. In the meantime you can read up on the Curbside Chat Book-LO.pdf.

Other ways of connecting with the Strong Towns movement is on Facebook which provides anyone interested access to an education and advocacy organization committed to creating durable, fiscally sustainable and desirable communities. The Strong Towns Network provides a forum to those who want to participate and contribute at a more involved level, basically the difference between groupies versus adherents. There is a link to the Strong Towns Network at the right hand column of this blog.

Hopefully, this post provides a good introduction of the Strong Towns approach. We will be returning both to Strong Towns and to the Place as Economic and Social Engine wiki page to explore some of the other resources available more in depth.

Economic Growth and Equity within a Community - Benefiting the 100%

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:39:00 +0000

In the last post, we talked about Budgeting For Community Prosperity (wiki page), putting forward the idea that budgeting for community prosperity requires transparency as one means of addressing the upcoming period of austerity in which most communities will find themselves. Important though as budgetary transparency is, just as important is understanding where the dollars come from, where they are going and how they are used.

Within the creation of a community, beyond the individual accumulation of wealth by individuals, families, organizations or businesses there is also an emergent community wealth.

This is not a socialistic notion that is being put forward as it is not owned or directed by or derived from or generated by government. It is the community working together through the efforts of individuals, families, organizations and businesses that creates a community's wealth. Local government can take steps to encourage its development and taps into it for municipal revenue.

More will be said of this concept in a future post but the benefits of a community's wealth should be made to benefit to the greatest extent possible all members of that community.

We are now speaking of the impacts of Economic Growth and Equity (wiki page) by a community and within a community. This is not a 1% versus 99% issue. The 1% does not live in the same communities as the 99%. People can choose their own brand of politics and economics for their families which in aggregate will define the community but within any community that one calls home it should be the 100% that is considered when making decisions for the community as a whole.

Under the post Governance through Community we spoke of factions within a community potentially being marginalized. The budget process is one way by which this can happen. A new community paradigm approach to public policy at the local level would hopefully be able to overcome this practice put forward by an incumbent political processes.

There are two levels were this could happen. First, at the level of broad policy based issues of employment, fiscal policy or environment among others that impact communities not only at a regional and state level but also at the national and global level. This adds to the complexity of issues with which a community must deal.

One relevant resource for these types of discussions is The Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution.

The Hamilton Project seeks to advance America’s promise of opportunity, prosperity, and growth. The Project’s economic strategy reflects a judgment that long-term prosperity is best achieved by fostering economic growth and broad participation in that growth, by enhancing individual economic security, and by embracing a role for effective government in making needed public investments. We believe that today’s increasingly competitive global economy requires public policy ideas commensurate with the challenges of the 21st Century.

Another institution concerned with Economic Growth and Equality is the Center for American Progress.

The Center for American Progress held a forum on economic growth and equality. After opening remarks from Vanessa Cárdenas and Angela Glover Blackwell, members of the first panel talked about the link between economic growth and equality. Economist Emmanuel Saez in his presentation used graphs to show the relationship between equitable distribution of wealth and economic growth.

There are, to be fair, other organizations out there with the same focus but a different political perspective. These organizations though take a more community based approach in line with the thinking of this blog.

An organization with a focused on-the-ground concern regarding the question of community benefit for all members through Equity In Public Funds is the Advancement Project California. This approach works more directly with the concept of community paradigms.

Our goal is to provide public finance data, tools and training to local community-based organizations to strengthen their public interest and organizing campaigns. Equity in Public Funds partners with and increases the ability of community-based organizations to produce analyses of City and County fiscal inequities and advocate for reform.

This is the same organization behind Healthy City (wiki page). The Advancement Project offers Following the Money EPF.pdf as a tool to address concerns of budgetary transparency raised here and the last post by providing information on:

How to read a city budget,
Where to ﬁnd other key information that is not included in the budget, and
When and how to inﬂuence the city budget.

While the document deals specifically with the City of Los Angeles budget there are still lessons that can be learned.

Budgeting for Community Prosperity requires a Clear View

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:11:00 +0000

The word austere has been thrown around in two recent posts, Governance through Community and Second look at Making Cities Work but there has been little discussion so far as to money or budgets.

Although budgets are important and in truth an essential evil, they are a function of institutions and not of communities. Budgets are not evil in themselves but they often turn into the master of planning instead of a guide to planning. They do serve an important function, particularly when developed and implemented with a philosophy of transparency as their basis.

One of the complexities facing communities today is that they not only have to worry about their own community's budget but the budgets of state and federal governments as well. They also have to worry about the regional impacts of budgetary decisions which falls between the local and state levels. There are reasons to justify this worry. Not only do communities receive a good deal of funding from or through state and federal agencies, the budget decisions regarding intra-communities infrastructure and other expenditures made by state and federal agencies also impacts communities. This is a two-edged sword and communities need to be careful in how they use these resources. Some have not been and are paying the price.

All of this presumes though that the members of a particular community have decided to take the lead in self-governance which is at the heart of the new community paradigms movement. This is more likely in Innovatown than it is in Parochialville but even in Parochialville there could be a desire for greater transparency and insight into the budgets that have an impact on their community. The New Community Paradigms wiki page Budgeting For Community Prosperity offers some resources, though so far resources directly related to community budgeting have not been included.

What can be found are resources offered by California Budget Project or CBP which engages in independent fiscal and policy analysis and public education with the goal of improving public policies affecting the economic and social well-being of low- and middle-income Californians. This organization could serve as a template for local communities developing protocols for greater public inclusion.

The CBP believes that information can help give voice to those who often go unheard in budget and policy debates. “Knowledge,” as the saying goes, “is power.” Since 1995, the CBP has worked to make the budget more understandable and to shed light on how budget and related policy decisions can affect the lives of low- and middle-income Californians.

The California Budget Project is also on Facebook. The CBP has served as a resource for policymakers, advocates, community leaders, interested citizens, and the media since 1995.

Another organization working to bring greater transparency to California's government and budgetary processes is California Common Sense, a Stanford-based nonprofit using Silicon Valley technologies to open government finances to the public, engage citizens in data-driven discourse, and catalyze a grassroots movement for more effective and efficient governance.

As with many of the resources provided through the New Community Paradigms wiki California Common Sense or CACS is also on Facebook.

CACS is the first organization in history to mine California's vast records and successfully construct an organizational mapping of the several thousand agencies, departments, councils, committees, branches, sections, divisions, and subdivisions—many of them redundant—within California's executive branch. This research base and user-friendly online map will enable CACS to create the clearest case for establishing better governance.

California Common Sense created a Transparency Beta for the City of San Francisco based on its Theory of Change.

Imagine a world in which ordinary citizens are invested in their governments and take ownership of them by virtue of actually knowing a) how government works and b) how their tax dollars are used for public services. We at CACS see that world vividly and are guided by the vision that solutions to major local and state problems will stem from the marriage of transparency and engagement. The innovative technologies we use open up government, expose its excesses, draw its shareholders-particularly young people-into the political process, and improve the efficacy of services on which citizens rely.

Perhaps some organization such as Code for America will create an app that will make it possible for smaller communities to set up Transparency Betas for their own budgets. However, as important as budgetary transparency and appreciation of where the dollars are going may be, it is not has important as an understanding of where the dollars come from and how they get to where they need to be. That will be the subject for the next post.

Governance through Community

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

In the last post we took a look at Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities. The underlying rationale being there has to be an on-the-ground community organization to bring about new community paradigms and not just a virtual group on the World Wide Web. The specific online communities were chosen by Finding Resources and Connections to Create New Community Paradigms through the New Communities Paradigm Wiki.

This came about when we took a Second look at Making Cities Work. One fairly obvious conclusion arrived at is that communities are going to have to cope with far more austere circumstances. Another conclusion is that communities will have to depend to a great extent upon the sweat-equity of their community members. The effort to create new community paradigms cannot work without this regardless of other circumstances such as whether or not City Hall is supporting or opposing the effort.

The more typical scenario is to have one part of a community organize and use resources to oppose other groups competing for the same resources. This has usually been done by getting someone from a particular group elected to City Council or a similar legislative body. The problem has been that in many cases policy shifts back and forth never getting fully implemented because different factions win and lose over time or some factions within the community are often marginalized.

While encouraging greater direct democracy based on resources that can now be found online is seen as an important step to bring about the type of paradigm change desired for a community, it needs to be done within an environment of open Community Governance.

Community Governance is a term that can be thought of as both a process and as a vehicle for the process. People can approach governance through community interaction as in town hall meetings. This means that Community Governance does not have to replace a community's current form of municipal government, it can supplement it. City leaders can feel more confident that they are hearing the voice of the community rather than a few but vocal advocates of special interests. People can also approach governance by community using it to directly seek input from all members of the community perhaps even diminishing the role of elected officials. Either way, what is being sought is a means of deliberative decision making. One organization providing resources on deliberative decision making is the Kettering Foundation, which asks the important question, What Does It Take for Democracy to Work as It Should?

The Kettering Foundation recognizes that as members of a community, We Have to Choose.pdf but does not see deliberative decision making as a means of usurping control from the majority of a community.

Democracy based on public deliberation is not direct democracy or an alternative to representative democracy. Choosing representatives requires the sound judgment that deliberation promotes.

The Kettering Foundation also recognizes that one of the biggest challenges facing communities is developing the capacity of Working thru Difficult Decisions.pdf

The Kettering Foundation has found that sound decisions are more likely to be made when people weigh—carefully and fairly—all of their options for acting on problems against what they consider most valuable for their collective well-being. This is deliberative decision making. It not only takes into consideration facts but also recognizes the less tangible things that people value, such as their safety and their freedom to act.

One suggested approach is Naming Framing Difficult Issues for Sound Decisions.pdf

The obvious question is, what would motivate citizens to invest their limited time and other resources in grappling with problems brimming with conflict-laden, emotionally charged disagreements? Generally speaking, people avoid conflict, and they don’t usually invest their energy unless they see that something deeply important to them, their families, and their neighbors is at stake. And they won’t get involved unless they believe there is something they, themselves, must do.

These differences don’t necessarily become divisive, however, especially when people recognize that although they don’t share the same circumstances, they share the same basic concerns. In deliberative decision making, people can see that they both agree and disagree. This encourages them to agree to disagree and lessens the likelihood of polarization.

This is likely the most significant step provided so far that can be taken in creating new community paradigms. People implementing it are fundamentally changing their and their community's approach to these issues. This can make some fearful of attempting this because, as said in Working thru Difficult Decisions.pdf, "Deliberation seems like neurosurgery or something only an outsider can do".

Fortunately, the same article makes the case that this is not true and there are organizations out there to help. This help comes at three different levels. The first is a community platform for working together with other members of your community.

The World Cafe Community - Hosting Conversations about Questions that Matter

World Cafe provides a space where practitioners and supporters can share their experiences and learn from each other, a place for those new to the World Cafe to ask questions, and a place for us all to experience deep and meaningful conversations about those things that really matter. The World Cafe cafetogo.pdf provides the Seven Principles of the Cafe that are also explained in the video. The World Café is on Facebook

The second is a coalition of professionals and practitioners in the field of dialogue and deliberations that could be appealed to for further assistance. The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), which can be found on the web at NCDD.org, actively promotes learning and collaboration among practitioners, public leaders, scholars and organizations involved in dialogue, deliberation, and other innovative group processes that help people tackle their most challenging problems. A useful resource provided by the NCDD is the NCDD 2010 Resource Guide. The NCDD is also on Facebook.

The third are professional organizations that set up these types of venues for specific communities. One such organization is AmericaSpeaks, a non-profit that through innovative deliberative tools such as 21st Century Town Meeting®, provides a platform helping people across the country and around the world have an impact on their communities. By giving the right tools to citizens, it provides an opportunity to have a strong voice in public decision-making within the increasingly short timeframes required of decision-makers. As a result, citizens can have an impact on decisions and those in leadership positions can make more informed, lasting decisions. AmericaSpeaks also has a page on Facebook.

Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:03:00 +0000

One of the greatest challenges facing anybody attempting to implement a new community paradigm within their own community will be how to organize venues that allow for decisions through direct democracy on behalf of the group or organization or even entire community. Usually this is left to the traditional political body but this effort would not be seen as necessary by the community if that was already happening to the full extent to which it needed to happen.

In this post, we are introducing other resources available through the New Community Paradigms Wiki related to Governance, particularly the Community Governance and People’s Governance wikipages.

People’s Governance wikipage offers some direct and indirect resources for direct democratic participation. One of the issues with Direct Democracy which means having community members having direct impact on policy issues is logistically coordinating a large number of people and obtaining the votes. There are tools and resources to address this challenge. With very large numbers, it may work better to use other methods of ascertaining the wishes of the community as long as the members of the community are comfortable with doing that.

The Center for Deliberative Democracy which is housed in the Department of Communication at Stanford University does research on democracy and public opinion and developed the concept of Deliberative Polling® which makes possible what can be called Deliberative Democracy.

This concept was applied in the What's Next California? Deliberative Poll | NextCA.org that took place last year. The project was a first state-wide deliberative poll in California and the 30 proposals presented were deliberated by a statewide scientific sample of 412 participants.

What's Next California is an unprecedented attempt to bring the people into the process in a new way—one that is representative and thoughtful. A scientific random sample of the entire state will be transported to a single place for a weekend of face-to-face discussions, in small groups and in dialogue with competing experts. In California's first statewide “Deliberative Poll,” the people will be supported by factual information and will consider the critical arguments on both sides of issues, then will articulate their priorities for fixing the state.

More can be learned from watching CDD: California State of Mind: PBS Special which features excerpts from the PBS documentary on the What's Next California Deliberative Poll® on governance reform which aired last year. What's Next California is also on Facebook.

More recently on November 1, 2011 the PBS Newshour did an in-depth report about California and featured "What's Next California's Deliberative Poll" and some of its results in the story California Voters Fed-Up With Gridlock as Budget Crunch Lingers | PBS NewsHour.

Jim Fishkin of Stanford University, who originated the concept of Deliberative Polling®, wrote about 100 years of California ballot measures, highlighting findings from the What's Next California Deliberative Poll that could be applied to the challenge of how to Fix California’s Democracy Crisis

SPUR or San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association will be holding a panel discussion on January 3, 2012 by three key organizers of the project — James Fishkin of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, Zabrae Valentine of California Forward and Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Company to discuss the project process and findings regarding the originally considered four basic areas: the initiative process, the Legislature, state/local relations and tax/fiscal issues.

MATT MISZEWSKI'S GLOBAL OPEN GOVERNMENT BLOG FIXING POTHOLES back in 2010 looked at the possible ties between Deliberative Polling and crowdsourcing.

The question I have is whether our newer social computing technologies and platforms can move this effort into a better set of outcomes. What if we utilized social media to crowdsource our deliberative polling efforts. The technology, and actually its constraints, can help policymakers better understand the effect of viral messaging within a population, a population that has self-selected interest in a particular topic via their profiles, tagging or other indicators built into new platforms. As a result the Social Deliberative Polling (should I trademark that ) would also be much quicker and provide much needed clarity within a much faster policy ecosystem.

This could allow a community to create a system that kept an eye on the community's vision on a fairly continual basis without being bogged down by endless meetings. It is also possible though to have public input by all voting community members on very important issues in large American cities. NYC Gives Citizens a Say in the Budget

"Participatory budgeting allows for citizens to get past that bureaucracy barrier and feel empowered about ideas and about making a difference in the community."

There is still though a need for Everyday Democracy and the organization of the same name, along with other organizations, works with both its website and the Everyday Democracy Facebook page toward the ultimate vision of local communities creating and sustaining a public dialogue for community problem solving believing that such strong local democracies can form the cornerstone of a vibrant national democracy.

Check out this TEDx video about civic empowerment beyond civic education. How do we reach untapped "domestic reserves of energy" - people who don't vote, don't volunteer, or don't talk with neighbors. It starts with participation, respect, and working together toward a common goal.

Completing “we” strongerdemocracy.org

There is no attempt to judge whether any particular community should want to use these resources to push for substantial change in their community. The political body traditionally assigned the basic responsibilities of community building may be fulfilling this function so well that the issue never comes up. The political body may partner or help with the effort because it sees the potential benefit and realizes that it can no longer do it on its own or it may become more entrenched and oppose the effort to protect its squandered power. This blog discusses only two communities, Parochialville and Innovattown and neither one of them actually exists.

This is not an effort that can be fully implemented by any individual alone. Individuals would have to gather as groups, groups would have to coalesce into a community-based organization and that community based organization would need to become integrated into the larger community of which they were all members by means of direct democracy, raising again other challenges. Each level though can still be a catalyst to forming the next level of organization if the need is truly there. What would also be needed is an environment conducive to dialogue and deliberation that would allow for Community Governance and that will be examined more closely in the next post.

Finding Resources and Connections to Create New Community Paradigms

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:07:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bicycles Build Communities

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:05:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Cambridge Massachusett - Safety Benefits of Bike Lanes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:44:00 +0000

In the last post, Placemaking - for communities the canvas becomes the art, we began exploring the concept of Place and Placemaking from the perspective of Project for Public Spaces or PPS and similar organizations.

Placemaking, was defined by PPS as both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. The linked to site went on to say of Placemaking:

Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.

The New Community Paradigm Places wikipage which will serve as a depository for community resources on Place was also introduced. Community Places, was examined in the last post. This post will deal with what has been described as the Soul of a Community.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup joined forces and following an approach similar to PPS studied cities across the country to determine what attaches people to their communities by launching the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008. Three years and close to 43,000 interviews later with people in 26 communities, the study found three main qualities responsible for attaching people to place:

Social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet,
Openness (how welcoming a place is) and
Area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces)

The same three answers apply to cities across the country as shown by the Vimeo video below An Explanation of Community Attachment - Soul of the Community Project.

What is even more interesting is that these three aspects which provide for Residential or Community Attachment also have a strong correlation with economic prosperity. By studying the 26 individual cities that participated in the study, it is possible to determine what steps can be taken to replicate the same results. The study showed both good and opportunities for improvement in each city. Each city had a its own story to tell. The stories were of place and, more importantly, the stories were of people and how they interacted with the place they called their community.

From the Aberdeen post:

Despite its high ratings of resident caring, social offerings remains a challenge area for Aberdeen, specifically in the areas of local night life and arts and cultural events. This must be addressed as these areas are particularly important to young people. Over the past three years of the study, Aberdeen has made significant gains in attaching young people 18-34 years old to the community. Imagine what could be possible with more attention to these aspects of social offerings.

From the Corpus Christi post:

The comments I had read in the article announcing the presentation flooded my mind as I stood facing what seemed to be a completely different crowd that night. And I worried about deflating that crowd with my honest response. But I said, “It seems to me that some of you, and I’m not sure if you’re in this room, but some of you are stuck in place.”

The Soul of the Community study helps identify new approaches to help create transformational change and new possibilities for continued progress, in other words it helps in creating new community paradigms. A community can use the study’s findings to help optimize the strengths of their community and address the challenge of improving of areas community attachment thereby potentially increasing local economic growth.

This effort' to create new community paradigms began by looking at economic development in working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics. The relationship of community attachment to economic development in the Soul of the Community Study provides particular relevance for this effort by going beyond the recent economic crisis as the study's findings can help leaders include new ideas into the existing economic rebuilding and development conversation.

Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up the all of that community's wealth. This was demonstrated in the one Southern California city included in Knight Soul of the Community Study - Long Beach, California..

Ratings of the local economy increased in 2010; however, the economy is still not a key factor emotionally connecting residents to their communities. Perception of local leadership is rated lower in 2010, but it is not a key driver in attaching residents to Long Beach.

To increase its community wealth, Long Beach added to its own natural assets of good weather and relaxed Southern California attitude by investing in high-quality bicycle infrastructure and encouraging bike-related businesses.

Long Beach according to PPS offers charisma according to their online article How Charismatic Is Your City? showing that there is more to a community than just the city budget and that investments into the livability of the community can have a long term return on that investment. Charlie Gandy, mobility coordinator of the city of Long Beach, California talks about his city and what they have done to enhance their charisma for the members of the community and others in this TEDx. video.

Placemaking for communities the canvas becomes the art

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:32:00 +0000

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.

Visiting Innovatatown and Parochialville

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:54:00 +0000

This blog is directed toward the individual citizen of a community who has decided they want to see some fundamental changes in their community and is seeking resources to bring that about. It is being designed for someone who sees themselves as being a producer of democratic governance and the tangible public policies that come from that and not merely a consumer of those policies.

There is admittedly a good deal of idealism inherent in this idea at a number of levels. Some is a basic idealism that we all hold about the best that we expect from our democracy, though we all too often find ourselves disappointed. Part of that disappointment though arises from the socially ingrained expectation we have for what we could do. The other part of the idealism is the endeavor to reach a utopian future. Again, it is a goal that will in truth never be reached but that is not sufficient reason not to make it a goal. To the contrary, the very fact that it is beyond ourselves is what makes it possible to be a transformational pathways to a set of new community paradigms.

In exploring the relationship of the individual citizen to the idealistic future state of local government compared to the grittier, practical reality of today, we have to be careful how we characterize that relationship. In most cases, when speaking of a potentially improved future or some example of bureaucratic wrongdoing, we are speaking in abstract terms. This is by necessity because we want to find principles that we can apply to the degree we see appropriate across a broad range of circumstances.

So that means that we are dealing with two abstract communities. One in the future that I will start to call Innovatatown and another which is stuck in the past that I will call Parochialville. Nobody actually lives in either of these communities, but everyone can likely say that some aspect of their community is closer to one than the other. In most cases, I will be speaking favorably of Innovatatown but on occasion I will make a case for caution when adopting a technological approach to community building.

I have already taken such a stand with the previous blog post. This blog will continue on a similar vein. Technology on its own will not allow governance by community members rather that it has the potential to facilitate governance by community members. This concept and the relationship of the individual to the local City Hall will be explored further in a future blog post.

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

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:22:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:15:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborating to Create a Healthy Cities

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:09:00 +0000

This is 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 finding 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 influencer will remain an important source in 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 evermore 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 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 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 need 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 a 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 at http://healthyurbanplanning.blogspot.com/

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 of 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 (www.healthyelmonte.org).

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 is 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.

Healthy Cities make for Livable Communities

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:09:00 +0000

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 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 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

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:08:00 +0000

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 to these, such as ensuring a healthy environment in which to live in, especially in terms of access to maternal care, and 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 measurement.

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 which would be the opposite of oxymoron which is two words 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.

For the professionals in the field this approach may seem naively simplistic, even paternalistic but this is not geared toward them. This is geared toward someone without experience and only minimal knowledge who is just getting the notion that they could make make a better and more fully livable community and wants to start taking the 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 basic minimum things we all want in life and what we need to get them. Clearly, creating something like this is not something anyone can do by themselves. There will 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 other people also willing to be educated and work for 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 aspect to them. Despite my last statement concerning professionals and the word no, I will be emphasizing the economics component of my economic development 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 realities 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 explains 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 closer 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.

Liveable cities | BUSINESS RESEARCH
Liveable cities: Challenges and opportunities for policymakers is the first of two Economist Intelligence Unit reports, commissioned by Philips, which examine the issue of liveable cities. This first report addresses what city residents want from their cities, and how city leaders can deliver on citizens' requirements. The second report examines the role of business within cities.

Liveanomics - Urban liveability and economic growth
It is important to look at liveability—a misunderstood and often misused term—but equally important to understand that for citizens and companies, there is a clear hierarchy of needs. What is clear from our research is that what business primarily wants from city leadership is policy that helps to stimulate job creation, followed by basic liveability factors such as good infrastructure, schools and so on.

Making cities work: Delivering results in a downturnA 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.

Defining a new direction hoping to create new paradigms

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:08:00 +0000

This was the beginning of the Pathways to New Community Paradigms. Because I lost all of the posts so far I am republishing them.

I have been slowly putting this blog together in my free time. It is about time that I defined what I intend to try and do here. The remainder of this post will become a permanent feature below the masthead defining its mission. This blog is intended to help others in a quest to define what is being called here "new community paradigms" for themselves and others with whom they live.

Paradigms, according to the first definition of the Free Merriam-Webster are patterns, especially outstandingly clear ones. Patterns, however, are usually thought of as static and this blog is seeking a dynamic definition. The word community means that these paradigms will not start out clear. Their definition will be created through multiple sources and voices.

A University of Arizona course on methods and approaches for studying the future sees paradigms from the following perspective.

"Paradigms can be thought of as the framework that has unwritten rules but directs actions. There are several definitions below and some links to varying perspectives or applications of paradigms. When one paradigm looses influence and another takes over, there is a paradigm shift. Knowing in advance how a paradigm shift might occur gives you an advantage over others."

This site will seek to help write the rules so that the new paradigm can be chosen rather than imposed. It will also try to help keep others from taking advantage. Finally it will endeavor to help in defining a new and hopefully better future.

Ambiguous Collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:04:00 +0000

Still working on republishing the pre-posts to Pathways to New Community Paradigms which were lost.

Part of the motivation to start to blog again is to explore means of collaboration in public arenas, not only within specific focused public arenas but also across different public arenas and more importantly incorporating a policy of expanded inclusiveness while maintaining project or program effectiveness.

This interest arose from online discussions regarding John Kotter, change management guru and author of Leading Change, idea that 70% of change initiatives in organizations and businesses fail.

A 30% success rate sounds reasonable to me considering all the pieces that need to come together in a dynamic fashion to make any large scale endeavor a success. I am of the view that most transformations, e.g. evolution, our own aging, are taken for granted because we have seen them before. How an apple seed become an apple tree or a caterpillar becomes a butterfly would not seem possible otherwise, especially if we were made responsible for the task. When you are the caterpillar change might seem not only unlikely, it may also seem dangerous.

Lately I have had this concept bouncing around in my head of "ambiguous collaboration". A quick Googling of the term indicates that combining these two words is usually seen in a negative light, at least when viewing events in hindsight. I believe though that it could be a useful concept in creating collaboration networks. I am thinking along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's Weak Ties and how to make it an intended component of designing what may in reality be an ad hoc organizational system.

Originally I was thinking of separate organizations with different missions but having loose connections to the same potential resources, clientele (though different relations) and information but still having trouble working together on common missions because of internal demands.

The same though could be said of internal components of an organization that has become too silo'ed . Until the collaboration coalesces deep change is unlikely to occur. The relationship network is not only individual to individual requiring trust and expectation of return on investment and commitment from others but also with individuals and the collaborative process itself. There are is also the relationship with the old organization and the new organization - two different things if the change is meaningful. It is the devil you haven't met versus the devil you have been living with for so long.

Has social media made us lazy or more importantly ineffectual?

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:03:00 +0000

This is a another pre-post to the actual creation of the Pathways to New Community Paradigms. Because of a mishap all the posts were lost so I am republishing again.

Patrick Fiorenza posted back on July 19, a blog post on the GovLoop - Social Network, "Has social media made us lazy? " This is a particularly relevant question since I am about to get back into blogging. This time I will be focusing on local government policies and how they can be impacted by communities in which they operate. My previous blogging endeavors included a more personal version of this blog and Milestones for a New Millennium which focused on the Millennium Development Goals. This time, I am going for a GovLoop meets Coffee Party approach.

The question was first raised by Dean Obeidallah, who posted the original article on CNN, Are Social Media Creating the Laziest Generation?, This question has been around for a while with Evgeny Morozov being the most vocal regarding what has been called Slactivist argument. I personally have a fondness for Slacktivists and count myself among them.

On the other side of the question has been Clay Shirky, who has been featured at TED Talks looking at how the end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics via Iranian protesters streaming news to the world, showing how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news by bypassing censors (if all too briefly).

The question raised by both Dean Obeidallah and Patrick Fiorenza is however more personal in nature, challenging how we use social media as Change-agents, both on a community level and on a personal level. There are important differences between how we approach each level.

I will submit that there are different levels of slacktivists or on the community level different levels of engagement.

“creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
“critics” who post comments,
“joiners” who sign up for online communities,
“spectators” who read and watch, and finally
the unengaged “inactives”

I took this idea directly from GROUNDSWELL by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff. It is not practical though to expect that everyone is going to be a creator nor does everyone need to be to bring about social change. Organizations can move their agenda by communicating to the group they are endeavoring to influence without necessarily moving the majority of members past the Joiners level.

The question becomes harder on a more personal level. We can ask is even being a creator enough? We need to move people to action not merely comments. Truthfully it may never be enough, we could always do more. We can only use this to judge ourselves, we cannot know what others do beyond their online presence. Some may work with their churches or donate through the United Way.

Social media can still be an effective tool for individuals addressing issues such as that raised recently by Transportation For America » Prosecuting the victim, absolving the perpetrators which can in turn be shared across the web by organizations such as Change.org or Care2. It is not an issue for which I will likely have a chance to vote on or become significantly more involved with, but I can still share my voice with others. Do I decide not to sign the petitions simply because I can't get to Georgia?

GovLoop recently provided an online training on training "How Stunning Storytelling Can Advance Your Government Career" featuring OPM Human Resources Specialist and University of Louisville professor Dr. Bill Brantley. It can also help to make important issues more human, hopefully moving the inactives further up the levels of engagement to reach a groundswell needed to bring about policy changes such as a national transportation systems and planning which has been ignored for too long. This is something that a few individuals in each state will decide is important enough to advocate and from the base there may be a change in public policy.

From my perspective, social media will remain an essential tool for Change-agents at all levels, whether or not it makes us or other lazy will depend upon how inspiring we can be in advocating change.

Starting on another Roadmap to a Life that Matters

noreply@blogger.com (BrianDRPM) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:01:00 +0000

Because of a mishap all my blog posts related to Pathways to New Community Paradigms were lost so I am publishing again. This was one of the pre-posts in creating Pathways to New Community Paradigms.

[http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/07/a_roadmap_to_a_life_that.html]
In preparation to final start blogging again, this morning was spent continuing to reformat this blog and redefine its purpose, including giving it a new url and feed. Now I have to wait for the feed to be "registered" on the web so it can be found by some of the other online tools that I use.

This afternoon will be spent watching the the Harry Potter Deathly Hollows part 1 on video. This brings a usable segue into a recent article by Umair Haque.

The roadmap you need to follow is deeply, resonantly, profoundly, and irrevocably your own — the one that calls to you in every dreary meeting, every missed birthday, and every misplaced-but-not-quite-forgotten dream. It's the one that leads you to your better self. It says: "Follow my lead. Let's go somewhere that matters — not just somewhere that glitters." A Roadmap to a Life that Matters - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Once I get the mechanics straightened out, I can start addressing the issues with which this blog has determined to be concerned.