Designing the Compassionate City by Donovan Jenny;

Author:Donovan, Jenny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

5

Living in the Compassionate City

It’s about the realization of talent and potential, and the feeling that you are able to make the most of your abilities in life.

(Montgomery 2013)

This chapter looks to what it might be like to live somewhere where the messages that a person receives from their surroundings support the nurturing outcomes outlined in the previous chapter. I would like to suggest that living in such a place creates many metaphorical pathways that can help us develop our capacities and in doing so enjoy well-being rewards that help us get closer to fulfilling our potential in life. These well-being rewards are belonging, health, hope, empowerment and ultimately happiness.

Like Abraham Maslow I have expressed these steps to self-fulfilment as a progression, with each well-being reward a stepping stone that helps to create the circumstances where the next well-being reward can be enjoyed. However most of the time this relationship will be far more complex than this simple model suggests. In reality rather than this consistent linear sequence, each person’s pathway is in fact a modular system and the actual order that the well-being rewards are achieved will be different for different people in different circumstances. This supports Ed Diener’s and Louis Tay’s (2011) critique of Maslow’s hierarchy that

the needs tend be achieved in a certain order but that the order in which they are achieved does not strongly influence their effects on SWB (Subjective Well Being). Motivational prepotency does not mean that fulfilling needs ‘out of order’ is necessarily less fulfilling.

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