This page discusses some of our tools for changing cities through the Circles of Sustainability method.
- Process Pathway (and associated software)
- Knowledge Profile Process
- Social Themes Process
- Urban Profile Process
- Peer Review Process
- Social Life Questionnaire
- Interview Process
- Intelligent City Simulator
- Scenarios Projection Process
- Issue Definition Process
Process Pathway
The Process Pathway, built as a tool around the Process Circles figure, is a guide to support practitioners and activists through the uncertain practice of making a significant impact upon a designated locale. Process Circles provide a broad management overview of a project or a set of projects. The Process Pathway is organized around an iterative path with seven stages of activity:
… → commit → engage → assess → define → implement → measure → communicate → commit → …
Urban Profile Process
The Urban Profile Process is primarily intended as a way of developing a comprehensive and interpretative description of the sustainability of an urban region and its immediate hinterland. There are many such tools for measuring sustainability, but most of those tools either depend upon developing hugely expensive banks of statistics or turning to one-off, narrow and limited surveys. The profile template can be used for a region of any size including a city, metropolis, town, municipality, or village. We have a developed a software tool for building a ‘Rapid Profile’. The software is free to use and open source. A demonstration can be found here.
Peer Review Process
The Peer Review Process is a method for bringing together local and global experts on a particular project. Rather than being the usual anonymous review, the Process depends upon the willingness of local practitioners to present both the strengths and weaknesses of a particular project to invited outsiders acting as expert peers and advisors.
Social Life Questionnaire
The Social Life Questionnaire provides way of assessing the nature of social life in a particular region, city or place, mapped against the domain themes and social themes of the Circles approach. In other words, the questions in the survey are mapped against the four domains of the Circles of Social Life figure. The questions are written in such a way as to allow for comparative analysis across the different places of research. (See Chapter 8 of Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice (3MB) for an extended treatment of this tool).