What is it about?
What is a sustainable community and how can you measure it? This paper tackles the ambiguities of sustainability, resilience, community and weak and strong definitions of sustainable development, leading to a defining framework, the “Sustainable Community Design”. This framework is used in an innovative approach to measure the sustainability of three rural communities in Scotland.
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Why is it important?
This paper brings together and clarifies the meanings of different definitions, which is useful for researchers and practitioners. The Sustainable Community Design measurement approach is something that can be replicated, enabling holistic measurement of rural communities and a tool for assessing and targeting community development. In Scotland, this is especially important for teasing out the nuances of community development when the country is engaging in change in community services, empowerment, land ownership and democracy.
Perspectives
I continue to find the clarity of different definitions and the holistic portrayal of a sustainable community (in the Sustainable Community Design, SCD) useful in my research and practice. I have used the SCD repeatedly in practice, as a reference in community consultations, reports and discussions. The SCD is particularly useful for teasing out nuances in development and (in)justice, which I have been able to promote in policy discussions and for targeting community interventions.
Dr Anne M Winther
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Community sustainability: a holistic approach to measuring the sustainability of rural communities in Scotland, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, September 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13504509.2016.1224987.
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