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sustainable communities
Why is sustainable developement important in diamond mining communities?

Because eventually you run out of diamonds or it becomes too difficult to mine them and then the whole town loses their jobs. To keep the town healthy you also have to farm or other sustainable industry.

This effect is similar to Flint, Michigan and the ghost towns of the old western America.

sustainable communities

Urban Community Development: a key to change urban setting

Meaning of Community Development

Community Development has been both an explicit and implicit goal of community people, aiming to achieve, through collective effort, a better life. In the 18th century, the work of the early socialist thinker Robert Owen (1771-1851) sought through Community Planning to create the perfect community. The term ‘Community Development’, often abbreviated as CD, and informally called community building, is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders and activists, thereby involving citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities. It also seeks to empower individuals and groups by providing them with the necessary skills to effect a change in their own communities. The government authorities in order to improve the economic, social and cultural conditions of communities, integrate them into the life of the nation and enable them to contribute fully to national progress (United Nations department of Economics and Social Affairs, 1960:1).This complex process comprises two essential elements, namely, participation of the people themselves in an effort to improve their standards of living with as much reliance as possible on their own initiative; and the provisions of technical and other services in ways that encourage initiative, self-help and mutual help.

Meaning of Urban Community Development

Community Development Exchange defines community development as “The process of developing active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect. It is about influencing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the issues that affect their lives.” Community Development includes both rural and urban development. But my area of concern is to discuss the ‘Urban Community Development’ (UCD) which has emerged as one of the strategies of intervention to solve some of the problems of the city in general and of the depressed areas in particular. UCD in India derives its origin from the rural community development programmes which commenced on 2nd October, 1952. In 1958, following the line of its commencement, the first pilot project under UCD begun in Delhi. This was followed by another project in Ahmedabad in 1960 and a third in Baroda in 1965.The first two were assisted by the Ford Foundation while the last was launched with the help of the American Friends Committee.

Key elements of UCD

The ingredients of an UCD programme are the people and their problems, the government and voluntary resources available to stimulate self-help, and urban community organisers to locate and develop indigenous leaders and to translate their problems in such a way that can be adequately interpreted by government and private agencies.

Community development assumes the existence of people’s initiative in one form or the other, which can be developed to alter the environment. The approach to the problems of the city slums through UCD involves the following elements:

a)      Strengthening of group interrelationships;

b)      Encouragement and stimulation of self-help through the initiative of the individuals in the community;

c)      Stimulation by outside agencies when self-help is lacking;

d)     Identification and development of local leadership;

e)      Development of civic consciousness and acceptance of civic responsibility;

f)       Use of professional and technical assistance to support the efforts of the people involved; and

g)      Coordination of city services to meet neighbourhood needs and problems.

Principle of UCD

Community participation is the underlying principle of community development. It means involving the community at all stages of the project including vital decision making right from the pre-planning and planning stages through all phases of implementation, monitoring, evaluation and post-project sustenance. The local community and the individual sections must have a major say in the community development programme. For this, potential indigenous leadership in local area needs to be identified and developed, which will initiate change and development among the people.

The nature of slum life makes it doubtful whether people can improve their patterns of life and their surrounding environment without the aid and stimulation of government and other agencies. As in rural community development, the urban citizen’s efforts require some financial help and technical assistance in areas like sanitation, public health, education and recreation.

In UCD, every functionary becomes a significant agent in the complex process of individual and group development. The community organizer has to work in a way to become a catalytic agent to move the community or its leaders into concrete action for the improvement of their environmental conditions and personal and social mode of life. The supervisor or the project officer plays a similar role both with regard to the community organizers and the community.

Urban Basic Services and its components

In 1981, the community development programmes were merged into a new service called Urban Basic Services (UBS). The principal aim of this programme is to improve and upgrade the quality of life of the most vulnerable sections of the population – the women and children who tend to get neglected in the urban setting. The UBS programme operates on the basis of six guiding principles: community participation, convergence, child and mother focus, cost effectiveness, coverage and continuity.

The major components of the UBS programme include primary health care services, early childhood learning facilities, women’s education, water supply, sanitation, etc. It provides for the preparation of plans at three levels: districts, towns and communities. The functionaries involved in the implementation of the programme are the coordinators at the district level, project officers at the town level and community organizers at the community level. Since the programme rests on the community participation, the help of community volunteers is envisaged at the grassroots level to facilitate the participatory process.

The National Commission on urbanisation, set up by the Government of India, recommended universalisation of UBS activities to cover the whole of urban India. About 600 projects are recommended to cover the entire population of urban poor. Although urban development is in the State List of the Constitution of India, there are organisations of the government that deal with the subject of urban planning and development. The approach to urban development has been piecemeal and desultory. Even schemes termed as ‘integrated’ were focused only on few towns and little attempt was made to integrate them with the overall development plan for the city or the region.

The major weakness of the system is the inadequacy of the citizen’s participation through organised voluntary efforts. UBS is a welcome step in this field of development based on the principle of people’s participation and self-help. This is seen as an effective instrument to reach out, to organise, to deliver services and finally to integrate low-income communities with the mainstream city life.

About the Author

Punyarupa Bhadury is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Women’s College, Calcutta.

How are communities supposed to be sustainable?

Forests clean the air and water and provide emotional calmness to the landscape.

In suburban communities, forests are being cleared for construction of malls, dealerships, and housing developments.

How is nature supposed to stay sustainable when all the forsent ecosystems are being disturbed and more pavement hits the ground? How much forestly is enough to keep it balanced?

mrwiz, how do you expect food to be grown, if everyone is living on that a 2 foot square area?? that doesn’t even make sense to present that in support of an argument suggesting their is still plenty of room!
do you realize how much space is required to raise just one cow for milk?
how about another for beef?
how about land for just one house?
if you figure that up realitisticlaly, you are looking at
at least 1 acre per dairy cow
at least 1 acre per beef cow
and at least 1 acre per home
that is already up to 3 acres per person, now figure that into your math problem.
after you do that, realize that isn’t even considering how much space is needed to grow fruit and veggies.
that doesn’t even figure in, the amount of acres of plants we need to consume the CO2, that is generated per human, for the products and services we consume that generate it.

to answer your question, it isn’t!
the oceans are dying off, and so are trees and other plants as a result of the imabalances we have caused.

Arcosanti Sustainable Community in Cordes Junction, AZ

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