A selfie of a healthy city: Doughnut Economics launches its exciting new methodology, “Creating City Portraits”

A city “selfie” from the Doughnut model, from p.39 of report

For those who follow the work of Kate Raworth and her Doughnut Economics (as we have done from the start of A/UK), it’s a momentous day. This is the launch of what Kate’s laboratory is calling a “methodology” for applying the social and planetary boundaries of her model - but “downscaled” from the national level, to that of cities like Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Portland.

Creating City Portraits (blog here, PDF here) provides what many activists and change-makers have been asking for from the Doughnut model. It’s a very effective way of measuring the macro-level performance of a nation - see our A/UK blogs here and here illustrating this - but how can it become tools to shape places and areas that are closer to where people exist and thrive? Places that they feel they can shape, civically, practically and democratically (usually not the case with their national governments)?

The most immediately useful tool that the City Portraits presents are four clear lenses on a city’s development of its doughnut zone - that safe space between thriving human societies, and hard climatic planetary boundaries. Derived from a matrix stretched across axes of local<->global, social<->ecological, the four lenses are captured below:

From report, page 7

Here’s some material from the report that explains these titles further below:

What would it mean for the people of this city to thrive?

• Healthy - with nutritious food, clean water, good health, and decent housing

• Connected - by Internet connectivity, urban mobility, a sense of community, and access to culture

• Enabled - with good education, decent work, sufficient income, and access to affordable energy

• Empowered - with political voice, social equity, equality in diversity (including gender and racial equality), and peace and justice.

What would it mean for the city to thrive within its natural habitat?

[From report]: Nature’s ecosystems are generous, delivering a stream of measurable benefits and services that create conditions conducive to all life. Cities benefit enormously from the healthy and resilient urban conditions that these ‘ecosystem services’ create, as they continually purify the air, cleanse the water, moderate the climate, build the soil, store carbon, calm floodwaters, house diverse species, and much more.

The Local–Ecological lens asks: what if a city generated these ecosystem services just as its healthy surrounding habitat does? What if its buildings, greenways, and infrastructure worked together to purify as much air, filter as much water, store as much carbon, and house as much biodiversity as local high-performing ecosystems? In other words, how can the city become as generous as the wildland next door?

This question invites a paradigm shift in the way that cities are designed, and it arises out of the innovative practice of biomimicry, which offers a city a vision of itself as part of the larger ecosystem in which it is embedded, and provides an abundance of design strategies – informed by nature – that help to create resilient and regenerative urban communities.

Penultimate page of the report

What would it mean for the city to respect the health of the whole planet?

[From report] The Global–Ecological Lens asks whether the resources embodied in products and services consumed by the people in your city could be extended to everyone on the planet without degrading Earth’s critical life-supporting systems, such as a stable climate and healthy oceans.

Essentially, this lens compares your city’s consumption of resources to your city’s fair share of a globally sustainable level of resource use. (This lens is relatively technical compared to others in the City Portrait because it combines two evolving fields of knowledge, namely approaches to ‘downscaling’ planetary boundaries to places, and ‘environmental footprint’ accounting).

What would it mean for the city to respect the wellbeing of people worldwide?

[From report] Every city has a unique pattern of connections with other parts of the world, which is shaped by its location, history, commerce, and culture.

The Global–Social lens of the City Portrait asks how these patterns and interconnections flowing through a city generate direct and indirect impacts – both positive and negative – for the wellbeing of people worldwide. Many
of these impacts, and the global issues that they touch upon, have typically been beyond the scope of city targets. The City Portrait seeks to bring them into view, as part of a holistic recognition of the global implications of city life.

The current design of this lens was created specifically for high-consuming cities in the global North, but it can be adapted to focus more on the context and interests of cities in the global South, and we welcome suggestions for doing this.

There are fascinating action maps to help you apply these lenses, by visualising them on very clear two-page grids. But the most interesting part of the report suggests the way that each of these lenses might interact with each other, pointing to integrated solutions and policies - see below.

What an interesting target for a city or town - that it might commit to being a “slow-fashion” environment? And in terms of “car culture” below, we can immediately point to those municipalities that have taken the opportunity presented by COVID to pedestrianise/bike-ify/remove car-lanes from their city centres (see this post).

From report, page 37

The Doughnuteers are always impeccably open to participation and development ideas from the surrounding community - see Kate’s blog for links to sign up to their forums.

We have also happily noted the way that arts and culture have come into the Doughnut picture of “thriving” human communities, at least at the level of cities. It was always oddly absent from the “social foundation” indicators of the original Doughnut model (see p.6 of the City Portraits report).

We suggest this might be a further area for development. What are the experiences, narratives, spectacles, particpations, convivialities, memes and comms that can help our somewhat battered urban communities “turn on” to the Doughnut model? How can achieving these new goals, and living these new fusions and alignments of the systems people live in, feel amazing (see our own “Create the Feel” lens)?

But it’s a thrill, in any case, to be seeing visionary models like this turn into tools and techniques for local leaders and citizens. Power on Kate & Co!