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Context

04 | Can Our Neighbourhood Get In The Doughnut?

Introduction to Data Portrait of Place

Our Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place has been created with the neighbourhood of Ladywood, Birmingham UK in focus. It is the first doughnut portrait to be shared that interacts with this neighbourhood scale. In practice, as part of this process, it was decided that the data for the local lenses would be based on the neighbourhood scale, while the global lenses connects to the city scale for Birmingham. There were a number of reasons for this decision, including:

• a limited availability for data at neighbourhood scale, which we would love to expand with neighbourhood science activities and development of further tools, as outlined in many of the local dimensions
• downscaling national data to a specific region involves making many assumptions and forms of standardisation, which becomes increasingly inaccurate as the scale becomes smaller
• people living in a neighbourhood may not necessarily work, shop, and be recreational within the same neighbourhood, and are more likely to have movements contained within a city

Through the Data Portrait of Place approach it is possible to explore how our neighbourhood is achieving ambitions and responsibilities, and serves as a “snapshot” of where the neighbourhood is currently positioned with the Doughnut Economics framework. Upon understanding the status of our current reality across multiple interconnected dimensions, this study can be utilised as a framework and compass for where investment, infrastructure and mobilisation may be necessary in order to transition into the socially just and ecologically safe space, as well as an opportunity to celebrate what is thriving in balance and where shifts in the right direction have been achieved together over the years to come.

Much of the methodology that has been used to create the Data Portrait of Place has come from developments and learnings from the immense Doughnut Economics community across the globe held through the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). The notable efforts of those at the Cornwall Doughnut, Amsterdam Doughnut, Devon Doughnut, Curaçao Doughnut, Brussels Doughnut, Melbourne Doughnut, Leeds Doughnut and many more, with whom each iteration has grown the capacity of this work and incorporated more coherence, creating space for further iteration and sensemaking. As some of the researchers involved in this exercise had previously worked on the Leeds City Doughnut, there has been some continuation in methodology, with some variations and learnings incorporated in this Neighbourhood Doughnut iteration. We give our particular thanks to Catriona Rawsthorne, Irena Bauman and Jenni Brooks for their extensive work.

Although each lens has a different enquiry question and varied dimensions it explores, each lens explores a few things consistently, though the structure of the lenses are not limited to these.

These are:

• what targets or ambitions a place has set in regard to the dimension
• an indicator used to demonstrate how that target can be monitored
• defining a threshold