What makes a sustainable community?

Can we use a mix of  indicators to show which of our communities are sustainable?

That’s the question the Observatory is aiming to answer as we continue our State of the Region dialogue on sustainable communities.

We published What makes a community sustainable? (pdf, 457kb) in October 2009. This report built on a workshop held in April 2009.

In the report we took the starting point that a successful West Midlands must be made up of communities where people want to live and work, now and in the future. The work then tried to understand the factors which make communities sustainable in this way.

The next stage of the work is to look at how we can identify which of our current communities are sustainable and which need action to help them to change.

The Observatory is now working with the Population and Society Group to put our methodology through its first test.

Will the mechanisms we’ve proposed actually make any sense in practice?

Once we have the answer we’ll hold a workshop to bring together those people that are interested in having the kind of information that helps them work out which communities are sustainable and what interventions are required to make other communities more sustainable.

Photo by Matt Bradley