Job-LIFE>axis {life quality}> work package [life]

Concept and objective:

We put forward better Life is apprehended to reduce tensions between economic, social, environmental and cultural sustainable development to achieve a harmonious combination of these objectives.

A balanced model involving all dimensions – economic, social, environmental – inevitably entails a spatial or geographic dimension. We must know which territories are relevant and which are the useful indicators for sustainable development. Indeed, an even territorial distribution of access to goods, culture, economic development, social benefits, healthcare, etc. is an essential aspect of social cohesiveness (Metris report, 2009).

In this context main objectives of the WPALQ are:

• To study de evolution from tensions to combination of the economic, social, environmental (and cultural) objectives of the sustainable development.
• To understand Europe in future world;
• To complete the sustainable development indicators on social and environmental sides, in order to feed a worldwide database and webmapping accessible at territorial level

Scientific and technical methodology and associate work plan.

The work will be separate into four tasks according with four general objectives:

<Combination> (animated by Philippe Woloszyn of ESO and Guillaume Faburel of Aménités)

"Towards an interaction evaluation between dimensions and objectives of sustainable development at territorial levels"

Wellbeing and life quality conditions will therefore be explored through new fields of environmental knowledge and emergent transactions. On the basis of territorial monitoring, we propose to evaluate the referent sustainability combination dimensions, in order to understand their generalization conditions. Culture and governance should therefore emerge as transverse dimensions, by focusing on the environmental needs for socio-ecological knowledge and expertise, from:

- Means for the decision-making support, such as indicators and assessment like territorial controversy objects, collaborative qualification for target combinations; to do this, aggregative spatial indicators will be developed into a dedicated information system;

- Environmental justice linked to local actions, and territorial compensation like a plausible articulation factor of action goals and means, particularly in strong environmental burdens contexts;

• « Eco-districts » and eco-landscape projects as new territorial prospective and governances in situ combinational examples.

Those tools and objects will enable the practical and pre-operational articulations updating between the main sustainable development objectives. This research work will aim at proposing cognitive and operational executives for, proactively, another sustainability-turned territorial expertise.

<Territories> (animated by Horacio Bozzano of University de la Plata)

This task considers three types of research in depth for the first stage 2011-2013, two of them have already been undertaken by Territoriesnet: ENTI and Territorios Posibles networks. (Girardot, 2008).

1. Interviews to important figures from diverse disciplines to establish their understanding of “territory” as a concept. This encompasses seven questions that are asked in the same manner all over the world (Bozzano, Signoret & Moine, 2009)
2. World territorial and territorial intelligence projects database: it encompasses research, classification and analysis of projects according to 21 predefined criteria. It already includes information from Europe: 420 projects (Mollo, 2008) and Latin America: 190 projects (Poujol&Gliemmo, 2009)
3. Social and ecological indicators for territorial scales below the national level: it encompasses research on existing indicators and a feasibility evaluation for their global implementation. (Taylor & Flint, 2002; Guimaraes, 2002)

   Between 2012 and 2015 research for activities 1, 2 and 3 will be conducted on:

4. The existence of isolated and/or combined sustainable development objectives in 1, 2 and 3(Knoepfel and Nahrath, 2002)
5. The coordination and implementation of a world web mapping of activities 2 and 3 (Bertin, 1988)
6. The coordination and integration of problem groups related to the combination of sustainable development objectives, quality of life and the creation and adaptation of employment (Hearn Morrow, 1999; Perona, 2001; Miedes, 2006)

The world territorialization at international scales of results from 4 and 6 (Bertin, 1988) Special emphasis will be placed on Europe and Latin America, as well as in North America and Africa. We plan to include Asia and Oceania in 2012.

<Indicators> (Animated by Serge Ormaux of Thema)

To ask the question of indicators constitutes one of the major stakes of topic « Future jobs – better life». We shall pose as hypothesis that information is more important than tools of treatment and that it constitutes an essential stage in the progression which drives from problems to tools.

We will remind that indicators are a means of access to knowledge and that they have to answer criteria of objectivity, reliability and pertinence, about the subject is of which it is a matter.

Concerning the contents of indicators, it is comparatively easy to find economic and demographic data, and it is a necessity for us here of involving the three pillars of lasting development, the economic, the social and the environmental, to which we could add the cultural. What information can we find in these different fields, and what indicators can we construct from this information?

The concept of socio-ecological transition implicates more precisely the combination of these different data to construct a new type of synthesis indicators. There the main challenge of this task stays; it is particularly difficult to take up because the state of art shows that often, the offered indicators are or very general or too category-specific.

We don’t forget however that all these indicators must be approachable to actors of different territorial levels through an interface of web mapping. Moreover, final objective is to lead to an integration of indicators, tools, protocols of analysis and forms of representation (cf Catalyse).

To start this task, we will of course take one’s inspiration from indicators offered by various

authorities: United Nations in 1995, European Union In 2006, reflexions led at national level in different countries (for example, in France; DIACT), jobs accomplished by some local Agenda 21.

We will also lean on researches led on indicators as part of the program CAENTI (project lead under the 6th Framework programme).

< Webmapping> (Animated by Krištof OŠTIR of ZRC SAZU)

This task is highly interdependent to other tasks of the work package {life quality}. Several inputs are needed from other tasks of WPALQ for successful completion of this task. The task <Webmapping> expects to get the following inputs from other tasks:

• definition of target countries and territories: task <Webmapping – indicators> should deliver this important design factor

• selection of indicators of sustainable development to be presented in the system: this is one of

the crucial results of the task <Webmapping – indicators> and will be strongly needed during the design phase

• end-user requirements: this have to be defined in the frame of several other tasks of the project

• geographic and contextual data: these data should be selected, obtained, homogenized and preprocessed in other task(s)

• metadata: metadata are data about the data (origin, date, validity, …) and are crucial factors for the quality of application as such; all gathered data (indicator data, geographic data and contextual data) are to be equipped with metadata, a set of required and optional metadata will be defined.

All given prerequisites have to be fulfilled to successfully design the webmapping application. The design will address mostly three fields: database management, webmapping server tools and end-user web application. During the design special emphasis will be put on data optimisation, data transfer speed, as well as simplicity of user-interface and user-tools.

An important challenge for the Job-LIFE webmapping portal will be multiscale approach – from global to local level. We will propose a structure that will be able to deal indicators at the whole World and continental level (Europe will be used as an example). In the frame of the project several sample cases will be addressed, from some areas in the Europan Union (France, Spain, Hungary etc.), but also from Argentina, Canada and Taiwan. However, local level is where indicators really are important and we will therefore focus to territories at local scale.

The design phase will be continued into the implementation phase. Implementation will end with extensive testing on many different scenarios. Final system will be well documented (design specifications, user manual), system usage will be presented to Job-LIFE team and other interested players.