(Taken from Danial Wahl's, "Creating Regenerative Cultures", discussing of the work of Declan Kennedy and Margrit Kennedy)
What questions do we need to ask in order to design sustainable communities?
Q: How can we design ecological and sustainable settlements?
Q: How are we celebrating and nurturing human and natural diversity in our community?
Q: How can we focus our community around a human scale of personal interactions and collaboration between people so residents can form personal bonds with each other?
Q: How can we create a settlement of short distances and integrate important community functions at a walkable scale?
Q: How can we use as little space as possible for our human infrastructures and create high-density living spaces that integrate nature into the community fabric?
Q: How can we encourage community participation and inspire all community members to co-create the collaborative advantage of responsible participation?
Q: How can we use local and regional renewable energy resources, and energy-saving design, to create an energy-efficient settlement?
Q: How can we create a climaate-responsibel, emissions-free community?
Q: How can we create a quiet and beautiful settlement?
Q: How can we use integrated design to value water and help to regenerate local watersheds?
Q: How can we create effective patterns of circular resource use at a local and regional scale to make our settlements predominantly waste-free?
Q: How can we design healthy buildings for healthy communities?
Q: How can we integratge living space for native species and productive plants (horticulture, forest gardens, etc) into the fabric of our settlement?
Q: How can we nurture ecological and social literaacy in the community and establish effective processes of creative conflict mediation and resolution?
Q: How can we co-create a guiding community narrative of human values shared by all residents?
These questions (and Wahl is "all about" asking the proper questions) challenge us to design our communities as nature, to optimize the whole, rather than individual parts.