Sustainable community development, networks and resilience.(Report)

Abstract

In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, communities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify. This is particularly difficult for communities that are marginalized, dealing with poverty, homelessness, and addiction. However, social capital can be harnessed to create the community agency needed to foster sustainable development. This paper focuses on the ability of community networks to build social capital critical to the creation of the resilience needed to sustain communities. It draws on a case study of a community-driven initiative taking place on the East Side of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, a community with very low levels of economic capital.

Dans un monde imprevisible et en constante evolution, le developpement durable des collectivites est davantage un processus dynamique de travail avec les ressources et l'information disponibles qu'un but en soi. Afin de soutenir un tel processus dynamique interactif, les collectivites doivent prevoir cette dynamique et y reagir, tout en cultivant leur resilience afin d'innover et de se diversifier. Cela est particulierement difficile pour les collectivites qui sont marginalisees et qui doivent composer avec la pauvrete, le sans-abrisme et la toxicomanie. II est neanmoins possible de mobiliser l'organisme communautaire necessaire pour favoriser le developpement durable. Dans cet article, les auteurs evaluent la capacite des reseaux communautaires a former le capital social essentiel a la resilience necessaire pour soutenir les collectivites, en se fondant sur l'etude du cas d'une initiative communautaire ayant lieu dans le quartier Downtown East Side de Vancouver, en Colombie Britannique, ou vit une collectivite dont le capital economique est tres faible.

Keywords

Sustainable development, social capital, resilience, community, adaptive management, diversity

Introduction

The concept of sustainable development is growing in popularity as it is embraced by governments, businesses, and communities faced with environmental, social, and economic uncertainties. Although the concept certainly has its critics, such as the assertion by Luke (2005) that sustainable development merely endorses a different kind of consumerist development, there is a growing movement to consider the ecological and social impacts of economic initiatives.

As many community groups in Canada are initiating projects to increase the sustainability of their communities, our research group became interested in whether such initiatives are producing long term changes. We were particularly interested in the application of the "three pillar" definition of sustainable development; that of sustainable development involving the reconciliation of three imperatives. These are the ecological imperative to live within global biophysical carrying capacity and maintain biodiversity, the social imperative to ensure the development of a healthy and functional society, and the economic imperative to ensure that basic needs are met worldwide (Dale 2001; Robinson and Tinker 1997). This is a general enough definition to allow for sustainable development to be interpreted differently in specific socio-geographic situations and to remain meaningful in the face of the dominant element of our societies: the element of change.

The concept of a "sustainable community" is difficult to define. They are communities that meet the needs of current and future residents while respecting the environment and quality of life. Although ecological and economic aspects of sustainability have been addressed by several writers--Kunstler (1993) for example, addresses these issues in relation to urban form--the social aspect of a sustainable community has received less attention. It has been said that the social dimension is the weakest "pillar" of sustainable development (Lehtonen 2004); we have focused our research on social aspects of sustainable development in order to study how social structure informs economic and ecological sustainability.

Community level sustainable development takes place at a critical level of response between the national and individual level. These community responses tend to be self-organizing and based upon response to specific issues of critical concern to their community. However, communities with few economic resources can find it difficult to effectively create change within their neighbourhoods. In previous research we found that for such action to occur communities needed to have networks of social capital in place that could create the agency for change (Newman and Dale 2005).

Social capital has been defined in several ways; Coleman (1990) and Portes (1998) explicitly conceptualized social capital as an asset held by individuals, whereas …