What makes a vital community?

What makes a vital community? Community vitality is all about whether or not a community is flourishing or merely functioning. A vital community is a community that has elements such as innovation, enthusiasm, flexibility, resiliency, adaptability, growth, and balance. People within the community feel happy, satisfied and connected to each other. Six main elements function as indicators of community vitality: accessibility, connectivity, diversity, social capital, dead space, and vital space.

Community accessibility means that people have access to nature, animals, companionship, affordable housing, culture, community, art, clean air, clean water, and healthy food among other things.

Connectivity goes hand in hand with accessibility. It is the ability of the community to facilitate connections between an individual and his or her community, nature, commerce, and food sources, to name a few. Connectivity could also apply to the structure of a city, and the connectedness between its streets, lanes, housing, public vital spaces, and services. For example, downtown Victoria may score high in terms of connectivity, as there is good connectivity between living spaces, amenities, recreational spaces, art, culture, food, and community. Whereas, a neighbourhood in Gordon Head may score low in terms of connectivity to these things, as housing is generally located in a suburban style sprawl, with many cul-de-sacs, and relatively long distances between housing and amenities, art, culture, food, and community.

Diversity is an important part of a vital community, because resiliency is directly related to diversity. Diversity applies to religions, cultural heritages, political beliefs, family sizes, and housing styles, among other things.

Social capital, as discussed in my previous post, is an incorporation of people, networks, and connectedness between individuals within a community. It includes facets such as bonding, bridging and vertical capital between individuals, organizations and governance bodies. It also includes shared sets of community norms, social networks, and nodes which facilitate the exchange of knowledge, and ideas. Studies have shown that as social capital increases, all aspects of human welfare increase, such as good healthcare, educational systems and employment.

Dead space is a negative indicator, in that the more dead space a community has, the less vital it will be. Dead spaces are places which do not encourage or support community, or the meeting of people with other people, nature, and commerce. Dead spaces often serve a single function, and are places where people do not like to be. An example is the back of a shopping mall. Often, the back of a shopping mall consists of a flat brick wall, with no windows or shop fronts. It may contain a door or receiving bay, but the public does not hang out there. It has a single function. It does not encourage the coming together of people. Nobody wants to spend time there. It is dead space.

Vital space is the polar opposite of dead space. It is space that encourages the coming together of people, nature, and commerce. It incorporates functionality with meeting places for people, and has places for people to connect with nature and reflect. Downtown Victoria has many examples of vital space. For example, the Inner Harbour Victoria functions as a dock for sail boats and other small vessels; is a scenic walking space; is a location to view wildlife, such as sea otters, harbour seals and seagulls; is within sight of several historical buildings, such as the Empress hotel, and the BC Parliament buildings; and is a popular venue for buskers, such as musicians, artists, crafters and performance artists. No matter how grey the day, there are always people milling about the Inner Harbour.

How do we measure community vitality? Measuring community vitality is not as simple as measuring one thing, but rather requires a holistic assessment of a community, incorporating all facets of the community in order to gain an overall picture. Therefore, many tools must be used to measure vitality. I have already used the walk-score calculator in a previous post, to determine how walkable my neighbourhood is. This could contribute to an assessment of community vitality, in that it shows how accessible and connected my community is, and may even help indicate the amount of vital space and dead space in my neighbourhood. Another tool I tried out was the Rate Your Community Vitality Tool, available through the Community Research Connections Sustainable Community Development website. If you want to check it out, it is available here: http://www.crcresearch.org/vitality/rate-your-community-0

This tool assesses your community’s vitality, using the six vitality indicators mentioned above, and uses your answers to rate how vital you believe your community to be. In this way it is very subjective, and the results are not quantitative. However, they are a good way to compare your community to Provincial averages, and therefore get a general idea of how well your community is doing. Although this program is in the beta testing stages, it looks to be a valuable tool when it gets all of the kinks ironed out. It uses a series of 21 questions to evaluate your view of your community’s vitality, ranked on a scale of six options from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

 When I assessed Victoria’s vitality (according to my perceptions), my community’s vitality was very high. It consistently ranked far higher than the BC regional averages, sometimes being 100X higher or more. I wonder about the accuracy of this style of tool; however, because it is based upon perception, and most of the questions are rather subjective. For example, number 19. “Many people in my community do volunteer work”, I ranked this as ‘Agree’ because I volunteer, my mother volunteers, and I have known several friends who also volunteer. If I was from a family or group of friends who never volunteered, my answer could perhaps be ‘Disagree’, because I might assume that others are like me. Because humans have the tendency to assume that others think and act in similar ways to themselves, many of these answers will be highly biased. In addition, words such as many, few, rarely, and often are all subject to different interpretations, unless they are specifically defined, which in this case they are not.

Other tools, such as the Happy Planet Index, and the Human Development Index use overall happiness, and access to services such as good healthcare and education in order to rank communities based on these aspects of community vitality.

Vitality is directly linked with sustainability. For example, a vital community has high connectivity, vital space, and accessibility. Connectivity could include the ability for people to walk, or ride a bicycle to vital spaces, and accessibility could relate to an individual to easily access the things that he or she needs. Therefore, a community based on vitality will incorporate many vital spaces: spaces which serve many functions and are attractive to people. A vital space may be a city square which includes a street front shops, restaurants, and grocers above which exist offices, studios and apartments, a park in the center square where people may rest, play, walk their dogs, and otherwise congregate. The space may also incorporate some community artwork and greenery. A space like this would be highly sustainable, as people living there would likely have smaller eco footprints, as they could work, live, shop, and play in one central location. It would be highly resilient in that it would have a high diversity of people, and if a strong community bond developed – as would be likely in this situation – social capital would be high and a shared community vision could be created.

Photo taken from http://www.toeuropewithkids.com/2010/11/smallest-one-was-madeline.html