| Prior
to planning Healthy City initiatives and at several stages throughout
their
implementation, to aid relevance and sustained effectiveness and
efficiencies,
it is helpful to consider a range of mutually supportive testing
questions.
The twelve
questions that
will be discussed (listed below) were designed to broaden
considerations
by including concerns in the personal, social and environmental
domains.
This
social ecology approach (Hill 1999) acknowledges the complex
interrelated
nature of the processes involved in both the fostering of health
(Williamson
& Pearse 1980) and of sustainability and change.
The idea of
using testing questions grew out of their successful use by Holistic
Resource
Management practitioners to improve landscape, community and enterprise
health in agriculture (Savory & Butterfield 1999).
1.
Does it support: empowerment, awareness, creative visioning, values
clarification,
acquisition of essential literacies and competencies, responsibility
wellbeing
and health maintenance, vitality and spontaneity (building
personal
capital personal sustainability)?
2.
Does it support: caring, loving, responsible, mutualistic, negentropic
relationships with diverse others (valuing equity and social
justice),
other species, and place and planet (home and ecosystem maintenance)?
3.
Does it support: positive total life-cycle personal development
and change?
4.
Does it support: accessible, collaborative, responsible, creative,
celebrational, life-
promoting communitystructures and functions (building and
maintaining
social capital cultural [including economic] sustainability)?
5.
Does it support: the valuing of functional high cultural diversity and
mutualistic relationships?
6.
Does it support: positive cultural development and
co-evolutionary
change?
7.
Does it support: effective ecosystems functioning (building and
maintaining natural capital - ecological sustainability)?
8.
Does it support: functional high biodiversity, and
prioritised
use
and conservation of resources?
9.
Does it support: positive ecosystem development and
co-evolutionary
change?
10.
Does it support: proactive (vs reactive), design/redesign
(vs efficiency and substitution) and small meaningful collaborativeinitiatives
that together you can guarantee to carry through to completion (vs
heroic, Olympic-scale, exclusive, high risk ones) and their public
celebration at
each stage - to facilitate contagion - thereby making wellbeing and
health
contagious?
11.
Does it focus on: key opportunities and windows for change (pre-existing
change moments)?
12.
Does it explain: how it will effectively monitor and evaluate its
progress
(broad, long-term, as well as specific and short-term) by identifying
and
using integrator indicatorsand by being attentive to all feedback
and outcomes (and redesigning future actions and initiatives
accordingly)?
Hill,
S. B. 1999. Social ecology as future stories. Social Ecology Journal,
1:
197-208.
Savory,
A. & J. Butterfield 1999. Holistic Management: A New Framework for
Decision Making (2nd edn.). Island Pr., Washington DC.
Williamson,
G. S. & I.H. Pearse 1980. Science, Synthesis and Sanity. Scottish
Academic
Pr., Edinburgh
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