The team consisted of myself, three other students, and two supervising professors, Dr. Stephen Bird, and Dr. Eric Backus.

Main Elements: 

• Literature Review

• Terminology Defining

• Technical Writing

• Data Analysis

Problem

Following the Adirondack Semester it was clear that LEED for Communities had significant gaps in its ability to accurately assess the sustainability and quality of life for rural isolated communities.

We conducted a Literature Review that had two main goals: 

1) examine the existing literature concerning “rural” sustainability and marginalization

2) examine the need for non-urban sustainable holistic planning systems (SHPS).

Research

The research process consisted of seeking and compiling an extensive body of scholarly works surrounding the topics of: smart growth, smart cities, sustainability, planning systems, rurality, and rural policy making in relation to smart planning. 

Search phrases included “smart growth,” “rural energy,” “smart frameworks,” etc. 

Key points from each article were extracted and compiled for analysis. After this initial search, the list of 24 articles was compiled and analyzed using a “word cloud” method. 

The articles were grouped by topics including sustainable practices, tourism, community engagement, planning, “ruralness,” and smart growth theory. 

This list of topics was turned into a basic narrative outline, utilizing the most relevant groupings and articles to create definitions and topics for discussion in our paper; additional tangential sources were added on an as-needed basis.

Findings

Our research showed a distinct lack of rural focused programs and research efforts designed to understand how sustainability efforts could be better implemented in rural contexts. 

SHPS offer communities guidance to long term sustainability, which can help to alleviate the challenges faced in non-urban regions. However, SHPS often fail to address the differences between urban and non-urban communities and therefore are either ill-fitting or ineffective.

Policy evaluation studies have also shown that the policy changes that urban-centric SHPS often expect or lead communities to make are inapplicable to rural communities and often exceed the scope of what non-urban communities are able to accomplish. However, non-urban SHPS could provide an essential pathway to sustainability in rural communities because of their ability to force decision makers to focus their goals and consider real data in the planning process. 

Solution

One solution is to create SHPS programs that are specifically tailored to the needs, goals, and structures of non-urban communities. 

However, in order to create and/or implement non-urban SHPS, more research needs to be conducted into the impact and potential efficacy of SHPS programs as a whole as well as specifically for non-urban communities.