Your team has been given a community to use as a case study. We want you to do some background research into the community to begin to get a sense for its overall social, economic, technological, and environmental conditions (research questions below). We are also going to ask you to map the community’s assets and vulnerabilities in relation to the community's sustainability challenges. From that you will create two slides that utilize what you have learned to assess your community in relation to the doughnut model (more below).

Broad things you need to know:

Population density
Education levels
Major industries (potential polluters)
Economic health
Overall climate (hot, cool, rainy, desert, etc)
Environmental issues (climate change related problems, pollution, etc,)
Political structures (access to political processes, etc)
Technological access and capabilities

We want you to create a portrait of your place that includes as much as you can find in relation to the above as possible. You can draw some of your basic data from the CIA World Factbook and wikipedia pages for your place (if one exists). Your place is also a WPI IQP site and so you can search the library IQP archives for some further info for some of this as well and also the IQP site webpage for your place. You should also find and annotate at least one source beyond those in this list per student that will help you learn more about your place.

If, in your research, you find a smaller community or neighborhood in your larger community with good information and want to focus on that for the rest of the project feel free to do that.

Community Asset Mapping

Based on what you learned, identify and map your community’s assets. You can use this site again to make your map: bubbl.us

Address these questions:

Culture: Consider the community you read about: ethnic background, cultural background, religious background, livelihoods/jobs. Do they have any specific cultural practices relevant to sustainability?
History: What is the community’s history and how might it either increase their resilience or leave them more vulnerable to sustainability challenges? Have they always lived in this region? Have they been impacted by war or politics? Are they a majority or minority ethnic/religious/cultural group?
Economics/social structure: What is their current social and economic standing in the region? Meaning, are they lower-income? Higher-income? Developed, developing? A group who has or lacks power in their region?
Resources: What is the primary way that they get their food, water, and energy? (grown/generated nearby or imported?
Land/ Land Use: What geographic features exist in or around the community? What are the prevalent land use practices in and around the community?
Ecology: What types of ecosystems are prevalent and providing services to the community? Does it have high or low levels of biodiversity in/near the community?

Example Community Asset Map

CAM

Community Vulnerabilities

Now, think about and map your community’s vulnerabilities in relation to both the planetary boundaries and the social foundations in the doughnut model.

What risks do they face based on what you have learned about environmental and social causes of unsustainability?

Final Website and Presentation

After this, we want you to create two slides for your community that look like the maps on Pages 14-15 (social and local) and 20-21 (local and environmental) from the Creating City Portraits Reading detailing both assets and vulnerabilities (so your maps will look similar to the examples in the text, but instead of talking about snapshots and targets you’ll talk just about snapshots in relation to assets and vulnerabilities). You will put these on the section of the website created for your community case study along with a short background about your community drawn from your research that details those aspects of your community that you think are important to understand in relation to their sustainability challenges and such.

Website should include:

Background information about the community (results of answering the research questions)
assets and vulnerability maps
2 slides assessing the assets and vulnerabilities of your community (One slide is a social local assessment and the other is a local environmental assessment similar to the examples in the readings but using the assets and vulnerabilities)

Project Teams and Communities:

Group 1: Costa Rica (Monteverde)

Group 2: South Africa - Cape Town

Group 3: Denmark - Copenhagen

Group 4: India - Mandi

Group 5: New Zealand - Wellington

Group 6: Greece - Thessaloniki

Group 7: Namibia - Windhoek

Group 8: Thailand - Bangkok

Group 9: USA - Nantucket

Group 10: Iceland - Reykjavik