Onto the last part of our series on Sustainable Cities.
The last two principles we will cover are:
- Enhanced Economic Performance
- Sustainable Community Engagement and Public Education
1.Enhanced Economic Performance
A city won't be a city without any economic activity, a sustainable city wouldn't be sustianble if it's not able to provide some form of employment to it's citizens, how do sustainable cities do it?
Home Employment
In a sense Steemit has provided the opportunity to thousands if not millions to work and earn from same, similarly sustainable cities are able to do the same, provide opportunities to citizens to be able to work from home and a great enable of work from home programmes is high speed internet.
Through home employment, citizens are able to travel less thus reduce emissions.This also creates a market for local services such as banking, printing, warehousing and accounting.
Local Workshops
Local maker spaces are becoming a norm all over the world (Fablabs). They are light manufacturing and assembly workshops where residents are able to specialize on a specific technology or skill helping create employment and keep income within the neighbourhood.This builds local community relations, and strengthens local economic resilience and vitality.
Local Training
A vital part in economic development of local economies is the training of the unemployed and underemployed. It is a way of stimulating local economic success in the community by using local instructors and facilities to train local residents.
Life Cycle and Cost-Benefit Analysis
Most often than not manufacturing, operation, maintenance or salvage costs are not factored in when doing capital/first cost planning which leads to inaccurate conclusions and unsustainable choices and it's citizens who suffer through lay-offs and retrenchments.
LCA(Life cycle analysis) is a procedure for calculating the cost, value and environmental cost of buildings and infrastructure over a long period of time, where capital costs are compared to O&M. depreciation and environmental costs. This allows to factor in inflation rates as well as bank interest rates more realistically enabling cities to make better capital decisions that will preserve value and reduce operation cost and environmental cost.
2.Sustainable Community Engagement and Public Education
The high and mighty have a habit of ignoring the people down there, they have a big plans of building a metrapolis, they get the plans done, finance is already available but the people who will live, work in this metrapolis are not involved at any stage of the plan.
Citizen buy-in is critical to any community project, it can make or break the project. So how can citizens be involved?
Community engagement includes developing the vision through full community dialogue, by involving people they understand it properly, take ownership of it and become better stewards of the ideas over time. Community engagement enables each party to understand the other's role through dialogue, creating a single solution which is solving multiple problems simultaneously.
Conclusion
We have looked briefly at the six principles of sustainable communities, if you have not gone through the other posts in the series here they are:
- Sustainable Cities
- Sustainable Cities - Six Basic Planning Principles Part 1
- Sustainable Cities - Six Basic Planning Principles Part 2
The principles apply to all, but the solutions are very different, in future topics we will be expounding on some of the issues discussed over the series of posts.
As always i choose to remain SteemedOn!
References
AEC Daily
Image Sources
Sustainable City, Work from home, Fablab, Life Cycle Analysis, Community
