Thriving Versus Successful
Excerpt # 6 from
Beyond The Numbers: Inadequacies of Creative Placemaking Criteria
After looking at a few examples of communities it is noticeable that thriving communities have certain identifiable characteristics. However, to more fully understand the characteristics it is important to return to definitions to note the difference of two words, thriving and successful. Thriving means to “grow or develop vigorously; or to prosper or flourish.” Successful means “the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors; the accomplishment of one’s goals.”
When speaking about communities it is often easy to interchange the words thriving and successful. However, one indicates a community that is healthy and one indicates a community that has accomplished something – met a goal. Very often a healthy community has accomplished something, or many things, and although the characteristics of the two may have some overlap, not all are based on the same indicators and therefore, for the purpose of this investigation it is vital to distinguish the two.
To say that a community is thriving implies a constantly moving state that has potential, like that of an ecosystem. Success implies that the community has reached some sort of pinnacle point, a point that has been defined by an individual or an organization to mean success. It implies that it has reached a goal.
Jeremy Nowak, the author of Creativity and Neighborhood Development a publication of The Reinvestment Fund in collaboration with the Social Impact of the Arts Project, offers a more solidified comparison of community to ecosystem. He states,
“A community is defined, in part, by its broader spatial and social ecology; it is never merely self-referential, it is constantly emerging, changing and reorganizing. Its emergent architecture can be organized through four domains: social capital and civic institutions; public assets and infrastructure; economic assets and market relationships; and the flows of information, capital and people between places.”
If the true nature of a community is to function as an ecosystem, then trying to determine its success puts limits on its potential for development. Determining if a community is thriving on the other hand, offers an open-ended range of indicator possibilities. Indicators can be determined not merely by reaching a certain stage of development but rather by the positive movement from one stage of development to another through the different ways in which that can be expressed.
Copyright 2013