Background
The Florida House Institute (FHI) has been developing a set of tools and processes to support sustainable community development as a comprehensive process of continuous improvement. Every day we ask, how can each new project in our neighborhood or region incrementally improve the performance of our natural, built, economic, and social environments and deliver the future we want for our children and future generations?
We use this framework or community taxonomy to help build a comprehensive whole systems orientation to projects and the community development process. It is useful in identifying the unique assets of the community and the people who represent them.
New Tools for community design and decision support
For the last several years FHI has been engaged with a new community of practice evolving around vision centered, place-based planning and comprehensive community development. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, the U. S. Department of Energy and other partners, FHI has been developing a Sustainable Development Tool Kit based on our experience with facilitating collaborative processes to support sustainable community development.
What is the Toolkit?
The Sustainable Development Tool Kit is a set of collaborative processes to support vision centered planning and community development that have resulted from our work in communities. They work in conjunction with GIS and place-based planning and decision support tools to aid communities in developing and implementing consensus-driven sustainable development.
The FHI Tool Kit is based on the philosophy that the opportunity to get the future we want depends on understanding of whole systems and developing the capacity of the community to translate vision into concrete action plans.
The Florida House Toolkit:
inclusive, comprehensive and proactive process
collaborative, interdisciplinary, design-based strategies
an on-going dialogue about a community?s shared vision for the future
cultivates civic values
provides continuity to the public process
generates new capacity to deal with complex local and regional issues
The tools fall into three basic categories:
Getting Started
Creating a Comprehensive Stakeholder Group
Doing an Inventory of the Present State - Natural, Built, Economic and Social
Creating the Vision
Developing Indicators
Building Capacity and Creating the Workplace
Creating Centers for Civic Learning and Community Design
Using GIS and Place-Based Planning and Decision Support Tools
Implementing Over the Long Term
Discovery and Design Charrettes
Sustainable Design Elements for Real Estate Development
Sustainable Urban-Rural Enterprise
This work is not problem centered. It focuses on developing clarity about the future a community would like to have, how that would work, and implementing that future through the private sector. It provides a blueprint for linking civic, government and business interests around common objectives.�