A City Portrait Canvas for Workshops
A workshop tool to evaluate strategies through the City Portrait’s ‘4 lenses’
NOTE FROM DEAL (April 2022): We have substantively updated this methodological handbook and incorporated it into a wider set of 'Doughnut Unrolled' tools for applying the ideas of Doughnut Economics to your place.
DEAL is keeping this legacy tool available on our platform for archiving but it will not be updated.
For DEAL's latest guidance on selecting targets and indicators, please use the Doughnut Unrolled: Exploring a Topic tool (available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese).
Version 1.1 (March 2021)
* 下面也提供葡萄牙语(PDF) *
* Também disponível em português abaixo (PDF) *
Overview
The City Portrait Canvas is a workshop tool created by the Thriving Cities Initiative – a partnership between Doughnut Economics Action Lab, C40 Cities and Circle Economy. Changemakers can use this tool to foster big-picture thinking on how a particular city strategy may impact the world in which it is embedded, both socially and ecologically, locally and globally.
The Canvas is designed for strategic policy development and analysis in workshop settings. It applies the City Portrait’s ‘4 Lenses’ conceptual framework as a basis for participants to consider the many complex interconnections between a city’s local aspirations – to be thriving people in a thriving place – and its global responsibilities – to respect the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet.
Why use it?
This is an easy-to-use and engaging workshop tool that is well-suited for small groups or breakout sessions (2–8 people per group) aiming to enhance the design of city strategies, policies and initiatives to meet 21st century challenges.
The tool is an integrated and ready-to-use set of resources (available as PDF in both A3 and A4 paper sizes) that includes:
- A blank ‘Canvas’ template of the 4 Lenses
- Step-by-step instructions
- Additional information and worksheets
Watch this 10-minute video for an illustrative example of how to use the City Portrait Canvas to create city strategies in a holistic way:
Acknowledgements
The City Portrait Canvas was created by Max Russell, Ilektra Kouloumpi, Vera Charniak, and Nicolas Raspail from Circle Economy, with contributions from Julia Lipton from C40, Kate Raworth and Andrew Fanning from DEAL.
Attachments
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Youngsters downscaling the Doughnut in the Hague
Using arts and the doughnut economy model youngsters become agents of change.
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ACT! as a Doughnut Project in Frankfurt
An innovate, non-formal education programme with Doughnut economics at the heart. These are it's outcomes in Germany!
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The City Portrait tool presented to Greek Academia
The Doughnut Economics Greece Network presented at the 8th Conference of the Adult Education the City Portrait tool
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Donut for Cities Workshop: Brazil´s context
A Workshop to explore the 4 Lenses tools for Building Prosperous and Resilient Cities in Times of Climate Emergency
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THE DOUGHNUT HERITAGE of the era of coal and steel
Couple words about "ACT! as a Doughnut" project pilot implementation in city of Zabrze in Poland
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Greater Melbourne City Portrait
Celebrating Global Doughnut Day by launching the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne!
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Lincoln DEAL event
In June 2023, as part of Great Big Green Week, Lincoln held an inclusive event to start an open Doughnut discussion.
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WS the 4 Doughnut Lenses in Complexo da Penha, RJ
Experience Report of the Doughnut Workshop conducted in Penha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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Member
Alice Oliveira
Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil
Oi!☻I am a multidisciplinary designer with over ten years of professional and academic research experience focused on innovation and sustainability. Born and raised in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I've recently graduated in a Master Program in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College, UK.
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Member
ANDERSON MACHADO
Lages, Santa Catarina, Brasil
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Member
Jenny Lundberg Fröjd
Gävle, Gävleborgs län, Sverige
Student at Midsweden University, halfway to a Bachelor in Environmental science and sustainable development.
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Member
Neil Burston
Swindon, England, United Kingdom
Business Analyst by Day, Late in Life Climate & Ecological Activist by Night Specialist Generalist Primary focus is on tackling Wicked Problems, designing optimising pathways, improving journeys, towards desired outcomes.
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Member
Helen Hill
Dili, East Timor
I am an Australian, retired from Victoria University (Melbourne) where I introduced a BA in International Community Development after working on the Commonwealth Youth Program's Fiji Centre on the Diploma Course in Youth and Development. I am currently working on municipal plans for Five municipalities in Timor-Leste with a Portuguese consultancy group GERTIL and trying to apply principles of the Doughnut economy.
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Member
Jan Lamme
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Nederland
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Member
Stéphanie Gauthier
Les Houches, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
Teacher in economics and management, I am committed to resilience in the Mont Blanc valley
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Member
Donna Nelham
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Founder of Unstitution and an inspiration strategist, I hold the inherent tensions of hard science and messy humanness. Embracing a partial witnessing orientation, I share 30+ years of integrative transdisciplinary transcontextual experience. Engaging and researching widely to nourish what's unfolding, I bring ideas and concepts to ground in ways that might relate, resonate and inspire meaningfully. Unstitution is patterned as a collaborative commons, supporting living-learning lab initiatives, addressing entangled systemic meta-poly-perma realities. Together, through deep ongoing inquiry, we're uncovering life-affirming ways of working and living, reframing most everything: 💥 Diagnosing recursive life-diminishing patterns 💥 Co-cultivating enabling contexts and field conditions 💥 Unblocking portals that might allow transformative phase shift birth Working from the interstitial space between sectors, disciplines, networks, cultures, generations, genders - all the artificial divides - we're illuminating deep-rooted domination-oppression patterns and barriers that insidiously persist despite good intentions. Life diminishing patterns, spanning hundreds of years and accelerated through industrialized modernity have become hard-wired. Deep subject! Working and co-learning with people anywhere in the world, we're re-patterning as we live into an unknowable future, guided by some hard red lines. Uncomfortable questions routinely bypassed for all kinds of reasons keep us on transitional treadmills that prevent real transformation and block expression and life-affirming regenerative functions. Living in the world as it is and wading between wor(l)ds, letting go of the degenerative, dysfunctional ways we've been imprinted, Inviting us all to unstitutionalize what fails to serve life, asking: 💥 What is ours to STOP DOING? 💥 What is ours to DO VERY DIFFERENTLY? 💥 What is NOT OURS to drive, (en)force and grip? Honouring gifts differing, we bring and let go of experience, skills, framing/scaffolding, methodologies and tools - attuning to contexts and cultures. We cherish what has always been, trampled by dominator patterns and buried and invisibilized under layers, that became normalized - the way it is. We were never separate, yet the experience and harms of separateness are very real! Wading through deep shi(f)t, this work is reflective, retrospective, present-centred, facing one another and forward-facing - humbling ongoing (un)learning for all. Our regularly updated Unstitution articles published on Medium are fractal-like glimpses into the unstitutional ethos. Co-catalytic springboards, they invite deeper excavation, integrative learning and meta-relational attunement. They reflect a sample of the ways we’re co-adapting and contributing.
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