Community Visioning: A Clear-eyed Approach to Planning The Joslyn Castle Institute uses community visioning to bring as many stakeholders as possible into the planning process. It allows an entire community, and not just one individual or group, to envision a mutually desired future and take the steps necessary to achieve its goals. All too often there is a tendency in society to expect others to solve a community's problems, others being those who have wealth, influence or specialized skills. But without full participation from a broad spectrum of residents, property owners or others who inhabit a community, no amount of wealth or skill alone will make it a better place to live. More alternatives and issues are discovered through community meetings and forums that use visioning rather than a hierarchical decision-making process. Visioning generates strong opinions among alternatives, so the act of choosing becomes a powerful communal event. It also insists upon everyone at the table having specific input, which helps a community to better understand the values of its citizens and identify various forces and trends. Visioning offers an alternative to verbal or textual decision-making practices, which can be manipulated by skillful practitioners through the use of legal or technical jargon. In visioning, ideas are also expressed through models, photographs, drawings or symbols, and are more accessible to a wider group of participants. When ideas are expressed visually, interests are pared down. Participants are able to make decisions that are based not on the recommendations of one individual or committee, but on a mutually derived set of ideas and themes. The Joslyn Castle Institute has used principles of visioning in its work in Saunders County, where growth pressures from metropolitan Omaha are being experienced in eco-sensitive regions near the Platte River. Visual reference materials were used to stimulate interaction and discussion among various stakeholders in the region. Rather than merely responding to development pressures, Saunders County residents participated in forums that created an alternative vision of their future. The resulting planning process is now moving toward that vision. In Saunders County and in other communities, visioning creates an environment of positive thinking where stakeholders focus their energy on what can happen rather than on what can't happen. Residents know that the city will continue to expand, but through visioning they are now better able to imagine themselves in a variety of future scenarios. Ultimately, visioning fosters a new ethos in which citizens demonstrate a renewed pride of ownership in their community, and a deeper sense of responsibility for its future. Broader citizen participation ensures that communities retain the characteristics that make them unique and give them a meaningful sense of place. Visioning leads to healthy communities, which are always characterized by active participation from citizens from all walks of life. The Five Domains: A Paradigm for Urban Management If we are to have a reasonable chance of managing the growth of the urban habitat, and at the same time  achieve a balance of economic development with the conservation of the earth’s natural systems, we  must expand our definition of the principles of sustainability, and, we must see the problem in a systems  context. Since the beginning of the concepts and the language (i.e., the Bruntland Commission of the United  Nations, 1987) sustainable development has consistently been represented as having three domains  –  the  environment,  economics,  and  the  socio-cultural  context  –  and,  that  they  must  be  treated  interdependently for a sustainable balance to occur.  Many business and governmental leaders have  been skeptical about placing any domain on a par with economics.  Even those who, sooner or later,  will adopt the values of living in balance with nature often find the tools within these three domains to be  limited.   The limitations in achieving real sustainability exist whether the scale of the development is at the micro  level (such as an individual building or neighborhood), or at the macro scale of habitat (such as a city or  a region of urban habitats). The designer, the planner, the developer, the civic official, or the NGO leader  who is genuinely interested in facilitating a sustainable solution in the urban context will not find all the networks or ingredients, or all the information, or all the tools and alternatives for solutions within only  these three domains. Consider, for example, a proposed new development which has all the finance necessary, a good  environmental plan which protects and restores critical natural ecosystems, and it enhances and  improves scores of lives of prospective occupants; but, it provides no dependable means of affordable  transportation to places of employment for the residents.  The three domains of economics, environment  and socio-cultural criteria have been provided, but a fourth domain – the technology of transportation – is  missing. In another hypothetical scenario, consider the same development successfully constructed, with  adequate transportation technology and successfully inhabited and operated for some years; suddenly,  a polluting industrial development is authorized for construction on an adjacent site, resulting in health  hazards to the residents of the development.  In this case, the fifth missing domain is public policy, or, the  regulatory context of the habitat that would have prohibited the conflicting land use. Within these two additional domains – technologies and policy – there are numerous examples of human  invention and/or intervention that can be noted to have either facilitated, or retarded community progress  toward sustainability. Two extreme, and debatable, examples are the automobile (technology) and the  consequences of its use resulting in threats to the natural systems, and, the principle of humans “owning”  land (policy) and the consequential effect of economic speculation on the earth’s natural systems.  Whether we individually value these conditions, or not, is not the key consideration. A fact of modern life  is that technologies exist, that they are influential, and that they will continue to accelerate through human  ingenuity. So, too, will the rules and regulations for relations among us, and our access to the bounties  of the earth.  Both domains are pervasive, affective, and the cause and effect relationships to the other  three domains are inseparable from them. Thus, the recommended Five Domains of Sustainability are Environment, Social/Culture, Technology,  Economics, and Public Policy. Further, these domains should be the organizing principles for urban  administration,  urban  design  and  planning, urban growth  management, and regional and urban sustainable development. These questions are relevant to every community on the globe – north, south, developed, or developing - small, large, mega, or intermediate in size.  We are leaving the era when the international argument has  been over “poverty”, or “rich” versus “poor”.  This language is from the industrial revolution, “economics above-all-else” thinking, which symbolizes only one measure among the five domains.  The “rich” may  have significant economic wealth, but may be “poor” in environmental resources, or socio-cultural  attributes;  the “poor” may have less economic stature, but may be “wealthy” in cultural history and basic  quality of life. (This scenario, however, is not intended to deny the fact that there are extremes in the  imbalances, nor that history has recorded numerous cultures and communities that could not sustain  themselves due to the extreme imbalances.) The desired balance can only come from a system of values which seeks to balance and represent  each of the five domains in all endeavors – be they problem identification and assessment, problem  solving, design, planning, management, or administrative.  Bundling of the five domains together, in  both language and principles of organization, will guide these endeavors into a consistent, and constant  awareness of whole-systems strategies.  In the past, our institutions, our organizational structures, and our science and technologies have been approached largely through incremental, often independent,  and task-centered descriptions.  Frequently, such regimes of management have led to unintended,  unanticipated consequences, inefficiencies, bureaucratic duplication, and very often to irreparable  damages to the surrounding natural systems. Most cities of the world have organized government around the separated increments of tasks, such as  education, health, justice, taxation, housing, tourism, agriculture, etc., and coordination of any of the taskdefined agencies is extremely difficult.  The success in coordinated actions for sustainable development  very much depends upon the skill, style, and values of individual leaders in the governmental offices.  More often than not, the outcomes of planning and administration which have any similarity to truly  sustainable, balanced conditions will be more accidental, and less permanent, than pre-planned and  long-term. Continuity in coordination and sustainable conditions under these circumstances is extremely  difficult to achieve. Assume, for the sake of discussion, that city government could be organized, not around the idea of  the performance of critical tasks, but around the outcomes expectation of balanced sustainability. This  expectation would be pervasive, shared by all leaders, managers, civic officials, and most importantly  of all, by the public and principle stakeholders of the city. Coordination and team engagement would  replace independence, specialization, duplication, and competition. Long-range planning would replace  expedience, trials and errors, and indecisiveness. Imagine a Sustainable Development governance model  which defined a council of administrators of each of the five domains of sustainability – environment,  socio-cultural, technologies, economics, public policies – plus, a division of administrative services to  supply the professional and special human talents required to implement and maintain the development  patterns. The Sustainable Development Council leaders would have the knowledge, the values commitment, the  political will, the human and fiscal resources, and the support of the local stakeholders. These attributes  and resources will be necessary to implement and coordinate new visions for future development,  maintenance of existing valued infrastructure, and growth management for a sustainable city, or, for a  collection of sustainable neighborhoods and places. Perhaps most significant of all, it would give future  generations a workable framework for development, rather than a wasted inheritance. Obviously, the already identified tasks must be accomplished. Education, for instance, is essential, but  within a sustainability paradigm should not education be framed through the coordinated, interdependent,  framework of the five domains?  If the outcome of the city efforts in education were expected to be a)  life-long in duration, b) inclusive for all citizens, c) guided by the goal of public participation in the goals of  a sustainable society (or, some other broad, coordinated goals established by a S-D Council), I suspect  that not only the education experiences and administration would be different, so too would the city. It is  conceivable that every task-oriented agency, or department, currently defined for a city’s administration  could be defined for realignment to one of the six units (five domains, plus administrative services) of a sustainable development council.