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“Every person has a claim to the essentials that support a thriving life, leaving nobody’s voice unheard, and no-one’s needs unmet. What ‘thriving’ means will vary from place to place, generation to generation - but every place must transform to make it possible for all.”
—Doughnut Economics Action Lab, *Doughnut Unrolled – Introducing the four lenses*, pg. 15
How can all the people of our neighbourhood thrive? This is the question that the local-social lens helps to unpack, inviting us to interact with the many determinants that define a ‘thriving life’. In this lens, we explore what ‘thriving’ means to the people of our neighbourhood from a social perspective, and assess the extent to which the neighbourhood’s aspiration meets its current performance, taking a data-driven approach to equip many people with the information behind the things that affect them, their families and loved ones, in practice and in their everyday, some of which will feel visible and known, and others which cannot be intuited.
This lens provides us with an opportunity to see our place more clearly, and surface the complex challenges facing our neighbourhoods, however, we wholeheartedly recognise where our Data Portrait falls short. It is not the purpose of this data alone to represent the full breadth, depth and richness of the histories, cultures, aspirations and experiences within the neighbourhood. As such, this lens must be considered alongside the incredible rich stories, lived experience, embodied and ancestral knowledge, and histories from within the neighbourhood that can be explored through the Community Portrait of Place and ongoing practice together.
We used the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a basis to define and explore what is meant by a ‘thriving life’, using each broad category as a starting point to build out a framework. Some criticisms and tensions surfaced in the use of this framework: firstly, ‘thriving’ is not necessarily defined by the the ability to result in and maintain ‘development’. In addition, the framework runs the risk of homogenising the experiences and values of many societies, as well as upholding a version of development that favours industrialisation, urbanisation and consumption as a means of furthering humanity’s progress.
Where these conflicts have emerged with how we would define a ‘thriving life’, we have interrogated this more deeply. We combine aspirations — in the form of official city policy — with reality — using available data on current performance across a number of determinants — to quantify the extent to which our neighbourhood is within or falling below the social foundation at present.
The Neighbourhood Doughnut local-social lens methodology is heavily rooted in Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL)’s Doughnut Unrolled Tools (2022), particularly the Data Portrait of Place tool. As a result of the close collaboration with the Leeds Doughnut researchers, we have leant on the city scale Doughnut work in Leeds, as well as testing, challenging and developing their methodology, and reflecting on its application at the neighbourhood scale. Throughout the development of our Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place, we have both critiqued and developed DEAL’s existing methodology, as discussed throughout.
The Local-Social methodology overview followed 5 key steps: