Well-Being of Cities Initiative
Well-Being of Cities Initiative (WOCI)
"Nature Doesn't Have Problems, It Has Potential"... Donella Meadows
The Well-Being of Cities Initiative (WOCI) is JET Group’s regenerative transition program for whole cities and neighborhoods. This minimum 1-year program partners us with leadership, local business and interest groups, indigenous communities, and civil society in a series of workshops and kitchen table talks to unlock and identify the unique potential of place.
Through this integrated design and development approach, local working groups will innovate by facilitating cross sectorial transitions, creating the conditions for “whole of life” thriving. A city is a living organism, but we don’t manage cities like that – we manage in silos, leading to fragmentation and degeneration of assets, human cultural and social spirit, and ecology alike.
What would a thriving city that embodied well-being look like?
In order to achieve well-being, we apply a regenerative methodology – fully integrating social / cultural, ecological, and economic elements of a city.
We start the program from any entry point – whether it be:
At every entry point, the program quickly delivers value across all sectors. Each city sees powerful outcomes in less than one year. However, for a city to become self-sufficiently regenerative, the lifecycle normally takes between six to eight years of continuous regenerative capacity building across the city and its stakeholders.
During year one a city will:
- Progress significantly in understanding their unique potential of place
- Harmonize disparate groups
- Design and develop strategies, implementation plans, and high-level budgets to powerfully transition the whole city across all sectors, including but not limited to energy, agriculture & food security, ecological restoration, infrastructure, security, economic development, and new industry design including evolutive business models, homelessness, and affordable housing, to name a few
- Map out its carbon+ footprint
- Implement a citywide integrated Web 3.0 impact governance tool, ComUnityVerse creating visual qualitative and quantitative value while adding impacts of the regenerative work
Years two –eight are the full implementation and build of cross sectoral initiatives. All initiatives are facilitated regeneratively and designed as an expression of integrations between the culture, ecology and essence of the place enhancing quality of life.
Expected benefits include:
- Increased vitality across the city
- Increased investment into the city across asset classes and sectors
- Continued harmonisation of disparate groups
- Rapid advancement towards net-zero
- Significant reduction of climate risk
- Significant ecological restoration and return of lost species, improvement of air, soil and water quality and independence
- Systematic resolution of long standing intractable challenges faced by the city
- Continued mapping via the impact governance tool, ComUnityVerse or decreasing emissions and increasing value adding footprint across the city
- Continued mapping of the co-evolving nature of the city and it’s participating constituents – deepening undersigning of the patterns of place
- Metrics and reporting on improvement of wellbeing across the city scape including social / cultural, ecological and economic measures
Governance and Impact - ComUnityVerse
Part of all WOCI programs is the implementation of the first regenerative Web 3.0 governance and impact tool – ComUnityVerse. Creating a visualisation of the story of place, this product maps and tracks the vitality, viability, and co-evolving nature of the city across quick wins, mid and long-term goals. The tool’s proprietary impact model allows users to see their individual, neighbourhood and city’s impact as well as individual initiative impacts across the nested system of the city. The impact mapping is an integration of social, culture, ecological, and economic impacts.
Capabilities for dynamic governance modelling and understanding the intersections between risk, opportunity, and impact are essential for understanding and creating citywide resilience in the face of increasing market and climate uncertainty. Our proprietary model, Carbon+, is inbuilt into ComUnityVerse, which also maps changes to carbon output and capture across the city, ensuring that value creation is significantly higher than the extraction values.
The entire program serves to de-risk cities particularly from climate risk and improve quality of life – for everyone!
Benefits
- 3x faster transition than traditional sustainability approaches
- Re-livening of the city’s people and fostering of collective stewardship
- Job creation
- Innovation of new industries and economic development
- Restoration of lost and degenerated ecologies
- Solutions to some of the larger intractable challenges cities face including, but not limited to, affordable housing, homelessness, and security
- Attainment of Net Zero within 8 years
- Reconciliation of long-standing conflicts
- Value multiples across asset classes and sectors
- Transparency of impact data across the city for auditable reporting and compliance – more reliable and powerful than ESG
The Regenerative Transition Program
Specialised Well-Being of City Initiatives
Regenerating Liveability
WOCI’s Regenerating Liveability is specifically designed so mayors and governors can alleviate homelessness. In the US, for example, homelessness kills more people than cancer and the opioid crisis combined. A recent study of mayors in the US indicated only 5% feel confident in knowing how to tackle this complex issue
The reason why the homelessness challenge is often brushed aside is because we focus on structural challenges while ignoring the underlying patterns giving rise to these same structural challenges. WOCI applies a “living systems” approach to homelessness by working directly with their community and broader stakeholder sets, then dive deeply into the meta-level of the homeless communities.
We ask the hard questions:
By deepening our understanding of the meta patterns that give rise to homelessness, we then work with the community to build regenerative capabilities. This is an educational process. We then have the community create a shared and collective vocation which we co-design into initiatives that can elevate them out of homelessness
To work on the underlying culture, we need a process that enables stakeholders (neighbourhoods, residents, businesses, organisations, and leaders) to:
- Regard the issue of homelessness as being integral to the health and vibrancy of the community, and to see the range of possible solutions as ways to move the community towards a collective future with greater health and viability for *all* community members (i.e. not just for unhoused people)
- Create a customised local approach using solutions that are drawn from, reflect, and build upon the uniqueness of the community to strengthen the community’s own sense of identity
- Through developing the capacity of local actors—organisations, leaders, volunteers, and the community of homeless people themselves and the housed community members — to play new (or newly evolved) self-determining roles in the community
Mass Casualty Event Recovery, Rebuild and Resilience Program (RRR)
This part of WOCI is for cities who have experienced a mass casualty event whether it be a terrorist attack, a mass shooting, war, or catastrophic weather or climate event
Rebuilding is costly. Even more challenges are posed when citizens have experienced widespread trauma. Rather than rebuilding back to exactly as the city was before, this large-scale disruption is an opportunity to work with leaders, designers, financiers, businesses, and civil society differently, in a way that can heal trauma and engage the community in a shared sense of a future city anchored in place-based potential and healing
The RRR program provides an opportunity for survivors to find a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging. They’re encouraged to become active innovators and participants in redesigning their city in a way that will build greater resilience for future possible events. First responders are often forgotten in this process, yet they often carry trauma from event to event, becoming retraumatised time and time again. This contributes to higher suicide rates and homelessness in war veterans and first responders than the average person