Sustainable communities: what should our priorities be?

Abstract

Reports of the degeneration of Earth's natural life-support systems have focused the minds of those in the scientific, political and general communities on how to avert a collapse. For many health promotion practitioners the effective unit of social change is the community, the interconnected web of people and place that makes up a human living system. The challenge lies in determining just what makes up a sustainable community under 21st Century conditions. This paper reviews major national and international programs working towards sustainable communities, in order to arrive at strategies that establish the necessary interconnectedness and collective action within each individual community. Moving to a sustainable community under these conditions appears to meet the conditions of a 'wicked problem', that is, one that lies outside the present capacity of the society to resolve it. The move therefore calls for guided social change. The priorities for guiding the change to a sustainable community involve collective thinking and action as a mutual learning process among the affected individuals, communities, experts, and organisations, towards a holistic sustainability goal.