Thursday, December 25, 2008

Love Your Neighbourhoods. . .

A neighbourhood is a geographically localised community within a larger city, town or suburb. Neighbourhoods are often social communities with considerable face-to-face interaction among members. Are you satisfied with the neighbourhood where you live?Are u satisfied with the neighbourhood where u work??And do u really really LOVE ur neigbourhoods??to make "our place" better, we should work together with the government. Our street is our street and we as a neigbors should all band together to avoid bad things from occur.

Prove that you care about ur community so let's participate!take action to make ur neigbourhood a safer place - but remember to make the action within the law. Bussiness and neigbourhood groups should also work together for COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT. May everyone on earth have true freedom.

Love ur Neigbourhoods!! ^_^




Community. . .A Health Promotion Approach to Understanding Community


Five principles guide the community quality of life approach. The approach adheres to World Health Organization concepts of health and health promotion. It also emphasizes the social determinants of health and well-being and uses a quality of life model to consider the effects of these determinants. The approach calls for a strong respect for the community and its members. And, it calls for seeing the world through their eyes and reporting it in their words.

To understand a community through the eyes of its members, specific methods are used. In group discussions and individual interviews, community residents, service providers and elected representatives are asked to consider aspects of their neighbourhoods and communities that either enhance or diminish their quality of life. The community portrait that emerges identifies strengths to be protected and community needs that should be addressed.

In brief, the steps involved in carrying out a community quality of life project include focusing and planning, carrying out data collection and analysis, and reporting and communicating results.

Finally, a community quality of life project is concerned with acting on findings and contributing to community action. Carrying out a community quality of life project is only the first step in working to improve the quality of life of community members.

(Sources : Quality Of Life Project)

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Site Planning and Public Participation

Public participation is crucial to successful site planning. At the site planning level that and identifiable group of people can be expected to react with considered opinions about precisely defined spaces - the spaces which they or people like them will use.

The questionnaire is the most common means used by planners to try and find out what people want. There are, however, problems with all forms of questionnaire designed to involve the public in helping to plan or design a site.

Questionnaires can only deal with people's reactions to that with which they are already familiar. All of us can only respond to questions about facilities and environment within the limits of experience, whether these experiences are direct or indirect. Questionnaires are much less useful as a predictive planning tool. People can describe their reaction to what already exists, but are less good at describing what they would like in future.

With such strategic issues to be dealt with by the planning process, alongside the basic social and economic needs of a local population, it is perhaps not suprising that the less quantifiable aspects will influence the quality of human life.

An Intro . . .

Quality of life is the degree of well-being felt by an individual or group of people. It is the one of the most important issues facing the world today and is central to the development. It's also a discussion of some factors relating to the housing environment which influence people's perception of the quality of life. A good planner is persons who are think about what the "places" that they produced will be like to be in - how they will work as places in which to live, work, play and as places to move through.

community/social aspects :- income, job opportunities, agriculture and land use, transportation, public utilities, public schools, churches and religion, medical care and health services, welfare, county government, crime and law enforcement, physical environment and etc. this indicators employed can be used to access the objectives and subjective aspects of quality of life.

For this, I'll focus on Environment Planning which is considering the social aspects of planning. Environment Planning consist of site planning, public participation and activities. These are needed to make the places fit human purposes. this intention is to concentrate on the factors influencing the quality of life at the local place, looking at the question of what makes some sites more satisfactory settings for human life and activity than others.

Two things have to be understood : the nature of site, on the one hand, and how its users will act in it and value it, on the other - (Lynch and Hack, 1984).


"The role of the physical environment in human experience requires a fresh look" - (Kaplans 1982)