About Our Approach: Circles of Sustainability
We are dedicated to enhancing the sustainability, vibrance, and resilience of urban areas through innovative and inclusive methods. Our core philosophy is grounded in the Circles of Sustainability principles, developed by Paul James. This comprehensive framework merges qualitative and quantitative indicators to offer a robust tool for analyzing and addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by urban communities, organizations, and cities at large.
What is Circles of Sustainability?
Circles of Sustainability is a conceptual and technologically supported framework designed to guide the investigation of problems within communities, emphasizing the importance of flexibility across different urban contexts. This approach is sensitive to the needs of local to global negotiation, setting it apart from conventional sustainability models, such as the Triple Bottom Line, which often segregate economic, social, and ecological domains.
Challenges to Conventional Approaches
Traditional sustainability frameworks tend to treat economics as separate from social life and ecology as an externality or merely a contextual resource. The Circles of Sustainability approach, however, carefully navigates these issues by avoiding terms like ‘externality,’ ‘ecosystem services,’ and ‘social capital,’ which can oversimplify complex interdependencies.
Evaluating the Value of Our Method
This method is optimized in the following domains:
- Practicality: Focused on understanding and acting within the context of social spheres, this approach uses the four domains of social life for empirical analysis, encouraging learning and insightful action.
- Analytical Coherence: We ensure that each domain is coherently related to others, promoting a comprehensive understanding of economic cultures, environmental impacts, and social foundations.
- Maximizing Simplicity and Maintaining Necessary Complexity : Our framework maintains simplicity without sacrificing complexity, enabling users to grasp the multifaceted nature of sustainability challenges.
- Meta-analysis: It provides a means to reflect on values and assumptions, addressing the relations of political power, cultural meaning, economic resourcing, and ecological engagement.
Key Features of the Circles Approach
- Accessible: Easy for non-experts to understand while providing depth for expert scrutiny. The use of graphics enhances this attribute.
- Adaptable: Able to apply across diverse cities and locales, in various physical, geographic, temporal, population, social, economic, and cultural contexts.
- Encourages Knowledge Exchange: Allows different urban administrations to learn from the experiences of one another
- Relational and Cross-domain: Focuses on critical issues and their interrelations, integrating culture into sustainability analysis.
- Participatory: Engages stakeholders and bridges qualitative/quantitative divides.
- Standards and Curriculum-oriented: Aligns with current standards and supports curriculum development for training purposes.
See the Urban Profile Process for more.
Conclusion
Our commitment to the Circles of Sustainability approach reflects our belief in a holistic, integrative method that is both principled and pragmatic. By addressing the interconnections between political, cultural, economic, and ecological domains, we aim to foster sustainable development that is genuinely inclusive and adaptable across various urban contexts. Through this framework, Cities Programme North strives to empower communities, guide policy-making, and promote sustainable practices that respect the complexity of urban life. Join us in our journey towards a more sustainable, vibrant, and resilient future for our cities.
