Sustainability assessment of a community open space vision

Abstract

Urban sustainability visions must address diverse challenges spanning social and ecological issues yet urban visions are often weak in sustainability, demonstrating a need for a strong and holistic assessment of visioning processes, their outputs, and outcomes. Through a case study of a community visioning process for an urban neighborhood-scale open space in South Carolina, United States, this paper presents key insights from a novel approach for assessing the sustainability of visioning projects, framed around a program evaluation logic model. It describes a mixed-methods assessment of the case including: (1) a qualitative analysis of the visioning process that inspects the quality of the participatory process that generated the vision; (2) a content analysis of the vision report—the process output—that analyzes the sustainability content of the stakeholders' ideas; and (3) a quantitative natural capital assessment that compares the vision against alternative plausible scenarios proposed by stakeholders to the visioning process' outcomes and evaluates the ecological integrity of the vision. The research finds that the vision was crafted through a fair participatory process that created stakeholder satisfaction, that the vision emphasizes social capital and equity and justice over other sustainability ends, and that the neighborhood vision may generate stronger ecosystem services than other proposed options suggesting opportunity for positive feedbacks. Despite a positive assessment, the assessment used here showed there was room to co-create a stronger vision of a sustainable future that strives to achieve multiple sustainability principles across human and natural systems. Contributing to the literature on urban sustainability assessment, this paper demonstrates a novel and holistic approach to assessing sustainability of local urban planning processes and their outcomes and concludes with recommendations for streamlining such assessments to better inform policy decisions before they are made.

from Energy Ecology Environment Ambio via Terpsi Hori on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2D9uTvD