Design for Social Sustainability – a framework for creating thriving communities

Our starting point is that although there is widespread understanding of the physical and environmental challenges involved in creating new settlements, there is still much to be learnt about what makes some communities succeed and others fail.

In this paper we argue that building new communities that can flourish and become socially successful and sustainable is as important as designing places that are physically, economically and environmentally sustainable.  Social sustainability is an issue of public value as well as the wellbeing, quality of life and satisfaction of future residents. It demands a new approach to planning, design and development that we call social design, which needs to be integrated into policy and professional practice across all the disciplines involved in the creation of new communities – much like the way standards of environmental sustainability have become widely adopted in recent years.

This paper sets out how to plan, design and develop successful and socially sustainable new communities. The ideas and examples are drawn from a large scale review of evidence about what makes communities flourish, with practical examples and approaches from new settlements around the world.

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Lessons of design learned from nature

Michael Pawlyn is a British architect with an affinity for the natural world. So he is passionate about biomimicry—a discipline that looks at nature’s best ideas to inspire solutions to human problems. The Eden Project in Cornwall (pictured bottom), where Mr Pawlyn worked as a lead architect, is probably the best-known example of this approach. The pillowy and interlocking design of these biomes was influenced by dragonfly wings.

Since leaving Grimshaw, a British architecture firm, in 2007, Mr Pawlyn has concentrated exclusively on environmentally sustainable projects that are influenced by nature. One of his goals is to turn linear consumption models into cycles, whereby waste is used to fuel something else, much like the interdependency of ecosystems.

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Read also: Biomimicry in Architecture

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Global Village Construction Set

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set - a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.

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Podemos vivir sin capitalismo

Parte 2 – Parte 3 – Parte 4 – Parte 5 – Parte 6

El Manzano en transicion hacia un futuro sustentable

Ecoescuela El Manzano, centro de una comunidad de aprendizaje en Chile, ha sido aceptado por Territorio Chile como un proyecto de desarrollo comunitario de punta, con completo apoyo para desarrollar nuestra visión de Universidad Viva, granja demostrativa y comunidad. Ahora estamos trabajando con una limitada cantidad de fondos provenientes de un FPA (Fondo de Protección Ambiental) y el apoyo muy positivo de Territorio Chile, para preparar completamente las fundaciones de nuestro proyecto y hacer realidad todas sus implicancias. Nosotros intentamos que Ecoescuela el Manzano pueda ser un proyecto catalítico para ser replicado en muchas comunidades a lo largo de Chile mientras desarrollamos nuestras capacidades para apoyar a otras comunidades a iniciar el proceso de transición.

¿Cómo crear grandes lugares?

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Hace algunas semanas atrás revisábamos las necesidades que tiene un determinado sector de la ciudad para convertirse en un gran lugar, me preguntaba concretamente ¿Qué hace de un barrio un gran lugar? A partir de esto PPS plantea “El poder de los 10”, que siguiere que; cualquier gran lugar debe ofrecer por lo menos 10 razones para estar allí.

Para continuar con la búsqueda y la realización de espacios públicos exitosos y barrios integrales e integrados a la comunidad, PPS vuelve a darnos algunos principios básicos para continuar en la creación de grandes lugares. Es evidente que no existe una receta mágica, así como estas directrices no son rígidas, ni aplicacables en un 100% a todos los barrios, porque sabemos que gran parte de la actitud de cada comunidad dependerá de su cultura y de factores históricos, sin embargo nos pueden servir como una buena guía a la hora de seguir construyendo un mejor lugar para vivir.

Green Home Building and Sustainable Architecture: Tulou Chinese Architecture

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I had never seen anything quite like them, so I queried him further about how they were made and used. He replied, “The foundation was built with rocks, 2 feet high all around. The juice of glutinous rice and some lime is mixed into the earth for strength, and then sliced bamboo, reeds, and sometimes pieces of wood are also used.”

I did some further internet research and found out more about these interesting structures. Tulou are traditional communal residences in the Fujian province of Southern China, often of a circular configuration surrounding a central shrine. Some of these vernacular structures were constructed of cut granite or had substantial walls of fired brick. The end result is a well lit, well-ventilated, windproof, earthquake resistant building that is warm in winter and cool in summer.

Local Future

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Local Future helps communities develop compassionate, resilient, sustainable, local systems to provide food, energy, transportation, jobs and essential services.

Local Future Network members develop these systems by helping their communities to transition from dependent units of a global economy; into independent cultures of compassionate, sustainable, local economy.

Sustainable Fisheries Are Community-Led

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The collapse of fisheries worldwide endangers the livelihoods and food security of tens of millions of people. These fisheries are often small and ill-suited to top-down regulatory intervention. In many cases, a “tragedy of the commons” scenario—in which each individual fisherman seeks only to maximize his own catch—leads to overfishing and collapse. But a recent article in Nature describes a different, far more promising trend. It analyzes the surprisingly successful preservation of small fisheries through devolved systems of comanagement. As Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington and one of the article’s coauthors puts it, the report’s findings “[illustrate] the world’s growing ability to manage fisheries sustainably … in small-scale fisheries or countries without strong central governments.”

Sustainable Shrinkage: Envisioning a Smaller, Stronger Economy

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In 1987 when the United Nations’ Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, appeared to worldwide fanfare, its slogan of “sustainable development” reassured environmentalists, who focused on the term “sustainable,” while pleasing business interests, who understood “development” to mean continued material growth. It seemed we could have it all. But many thoughtful observers then and since have pointed out that “sustainable development” is an oxymoron. On a finite planet, we can’t have both sustainability and continued material growth. More than two decades after the Brundtland Report, it’s past time to abandon this linguistic sleight of hand and rally around a new, shocking but this time realistic slogan: sustainable shrinkage! Within this new perspective, we can get on with saving species, restoring wastelands, improving efficiency, putting our life-support systems on sustainable bases—in short, finding solutions.