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A systems approach to livability and sustainability: Defining terms and mapping relationships to link desires with ecological opportunities and constraints
Author(s) -
Chazal Jacqueline de
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
systems research and behavioral science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1099-1743
pISSN - 1092-7026
DOI - 10.1002/sres.1058
Subject(s) - sustainability , flexibility (engineering) , consistency (knowledge bases) , vulnerability (computing) , computer science , protocol (science) , environmental resource management , stakeholder , set (abstract data type) , environmental economics , ecology , process management , business , management science , risk analysis (engineering) , economics , computer security , artificial intelligence , management , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology , biology , programming language
I offer a protocol for assessing the sustainability of livability. This protocol draws on a framework developed to assess vulnerability, and offers two key pertinent features. These are (a) a capacity to incorporate multiple and shifting stakeholder values and (b) a means of moving from expressions of livability to underlying ecological attributes that deliver or constrain system change. The applicability of these features to both assessing the sustainability of livability and a reappraisal given system change are illustrated using data from a study site in the French Alps. The central place of values intrudes into livability and sustainability so as to complicate the situation. Even so, the protocol presented here is able to ground the abstractions and equivocation in a transparent and explicit set of announcements. Laying the steps out in the open allows for consistency in comparison and replication without artificially removing the labile flexibility embedded in livability and sustainability. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.