Imagining the Good Place: Public Services and Family Strategies in Rural Ecuador

Abstract

Recent scholarship seeks to lift up alternatives to neoliberalism that build community well‐being and a sense of place. This study follows three families in a rural highland Ecuadorean community and their investments in human capital, family businesses, and migration. It applies a human ecological model to show how complex ideologies around community well‐being, such as buen vivir (living well), are articulated at the macroscale and experienced at the meso‐ and microscales through investments in public services and their impact on rural families. Our collaborative ethnography elevates families’ voices to show how they both experience and envision community well‐being. We incorporate human capabilities and a community capitals framework to show how investments and ideologies flow across scales. We highlight the role of local social capital and regional territorial dynamics that support both economic growth and social inclusion. Our collaborative ethnography illustrates how rural residents imagine the good place (buen lugar), a resilient foundation from which they can build their family strategies. However, we find that lack of political and financial investment truncates active citizenship at the local scale, limiting the ability to achieve the full promise of buen vivir.

Healthy Places for Children: The Critical Role of Engagement, Common Vision, and Collaboration

“…Through engagement and trust, children and families can reach up from the micro layer to the meso system of service providers, and affect macro policies of planning, zoning, and service delivery. Such dynamic models of active citizenship have been shown to enhance family wellbeing in other international contexts [14,16]. Child-friendly zoning codes and services are differentiated by child socioeconomic conditions and geography (Research question 3).…”

“…Public health often uses a human ecology approach [5,10,11] to show the nested nature of individual health in family, community, and policy systems. This approach has been used to structure community level studies of public health as it relates to early childhood [6,12,13] and family wellbeing [14][15][16], and to design comprehensive models for community action and policy engagement [6,7,10,11]. A human ecological model of public health looks at multiple layers: the community built environment, community level services, public engagement, collaboration among health related agencies, and geographic differences across place [17].…”

Planning Communities for All Ages

“…This history of segregated land use, which isolated home and family, has its legacy in increased transportation burdens for women and greater isolation for children and seniors (Markovich and Hendler 2006;Rapino and Cooke 2011). Families with children and older adults need mobility, housing, and services, but their territorial range is often limited, making mixed use and broader mobility supports critical for their quality of life (Boarnet, Greenwald, and McMillan 2008;Pratt and Warner 2018;Rudner 2012). Today, a host of research recognizes the critical importance of access-to food, to park space, to medical services, and to spaces for civic engagement (Frank 2000;Lui et al 2009;Woolcock and Steele 2008).…”

Does the Equalization of Public Services Effect Regional Disparities in the Ratio of Investment to Consumption? Evidence From Provincial Level in China

“…This is higher than most provinces in the central, western, and northeastern regions and even a few provinces in the eastern region. These results suggest that the improvement of the level of public services depends not only on the level of regional economic development but also on effective local policies (Pratt & Warner, 2018).…”