A diagonal and collaborative urban design framework for developing community wellbeing and resilience at the neighbourhood scale in Lively, Ontario

Abstract

Most individuals in our North American society are oblivious to the value and role that neighbourhoods play - or are meant to play - in our lives. Individuals are taught not to expect or require anything from our local environment; that we can be entirely self-sufficient, and that we have no role in creating our local place. What we don’t realize is that the neighbourhood ‘local place’ is meant to be the intermediary platform upon which individuals have access and agency to the world, however, if we do not first have access and agency in the design of our neighbourhood, this platform fails to make a connection between the individual and the region. The neighbourhood’s size, scale and structure are optimal for distributing collective security, mobilization of resources and social connections from the community to the individual. These factors combined make the neighbourhood the essential structure for community wellbeing, (local agency and access), and community resilience, (collective efficacy, shared resources and social capital). This thesis builds upon the argument that individuals should have choice in the design of their neighbourhood and proposes a collaborative framework for achieving this with an actual simulation of the proposed framework. This is tested in Greater Sudbury with the neighbourhood of Lively and documented in this thesis. A successful simulation of the framework will help to determine if neighbourhood-scale policy, developed in collaboration with the community, can develop community sense of place and civic identity.