Creating Sustainable Futures for Southwestern Cities: The ProtoCity Approach in the Ciudad Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas Metroplex - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 538

be organized to step in. Similarly, if the information flow is incorrect, media must
be leveraged to disseminate factual information or the energy flow may need
decentralization with incentives.
4. The importance of assessing the state of balance within infrastructure (i.e., air
balance, water balance, food balance, energy balance, and material balance).
5. The need to find and apply appropriate information regarding place . For example,
its climate, hydrology, soils, and ecology trends of improvement or decline.
6. Cultivation of influential and effective partners in the private, public, and non-
profit sectors is essential to facilitate the process.
7. The value of working within a national and international bio-metric network to
help keep us abreast of developments in other similar programs around the world.
8. The need to integrate an information dissemination network to reach practitioners
and the general public simultaneously.
Two conceptualization tools—one contextual and the other operational—have helped us
understand how Austin, or other city/regions, could learn from and build on lessons to
shape future programs.
• The contextual tool is the Development Ladder; it addresses the city/region's state
of development at varying stages of its evolution.
• The operational tool, ProtoScope, provides a systemic representation of how the
city could potentially function; it has evolved from our experiences with several
cultures throughout the world. This idealized, systemic view of the city/region
became what is now called a ProtoCity ™ , or an idealized place-based prototype
city of the future.
31.4 Development Ladder
The Development Ladder establishes the current status of a place and identifies effective
action steps. It is structured around four basic stages: surviving, maturing, anticipatory,
and worldly. The first step in effecting positive development at any scale is to determine the
city/region's position on the Development Ladder. To state that any of these stages are supe-
rior or inferior is not the point; indeed, one could cluster all within any stage and recognize
key attributes. The Development Ladder can apply to the city/region as a whole or can
assess a city/region's position in terms of specific issues such as public health, education,
governance, employment, environmental sustainability, or superstructure (Figure 31.4).
Four essential flows determine a city/region's position on and movement along the
Development Ladder:
1. Information : The most fluid and most useful as well as the most easily disrupted
of all the flows. We use it in several ways such as locating global partners with
success in similar issues in similar conditions. Embedding measurement and feed-
back mechanism is essential (progress in information flow means evolving to the
smart grid).