Edmonton-Armed with cameras, a group of small-town Albertans has helped a University of Alberta researcher shape some ideas to strengthen all rural communities.

Twenty-five people in the east-central town of Viking were given disposable cameras and asked to photograph things they felt defined sustainability in the community. The exercise brought some surprising results, says Patricia Macklin, who initiated the research project to complete her master's degree in the Department of Rural Economy.

"The photos served as a jumping-off point for discussing what people felt was most important in sustaining the community," said Macklin, who later interviewed the residents about their pictures. "What emerged was a sense of community pride, a sense of place, which hasn't traditionally been included when it comes to planning for sustainability of rural communities."

While day-to-day factors like environmental concerns and business development play leading roles in such planning, "social capital" is just as important to keeping rural communities alive, said Macklin, a lifelong rural Albertan herself.

In her interviews with 27 residents, aspects of the community's lifestyle were mentioned just as often as economic development in defining sustainability.

"We have to take a more holistic approach to really address sustainability and we have to give it a wider definition," she said.

Macklin advises rural municipal councils to revisit their community development plans regularly and to make sure that residents' input is included. For their part, people need to volunteer and be actively involved in "ensuring that public spaces like libraries and arenas and events like golf tournaments don't disappear. They create that social capital that helps make a community sustainable."

Candid snapshots of the town's churches, schools, the hospital and seniors' centre represented indicators of community sustainability, particularly in view of surrounding communities that had lost those services and subsequently, their vitality.

Photos of Viking's restored train station and new arena reflected the satisfaction people felt in co-operating to build and keep such communal gathering places. The photos also spurred stories about building relationships, Macklin added.

A photo of the town's new arena, for instance, hints at the story of how, after the old arena burned down, Viking's residents had to travel back and forth for two years to the neighboring town of Killam to play hockey. "It brought the community together and expanded it to another one. Sustainability is about relationship-building and accepting the idea that neighbouring communities need to work together and work regionally, which will in turn, be important economically," Macklin said.

Another snapshot, of deer living outside town, symbolized a side-by-side relationship with a community other than their own, she noted. "The herd became the coffee-time discussion. People would stop to try to count them, check their condition, and they became a part of the family."

Interviewing youths, Macklin was surprised to find that most of them felt positive about living in a small community, and they also realized that sustainability isn't about services or availability of consumer goods, "but about the need to have people who care, like youth-group leaders. That says to me, if opportunities exist for people to have a style of life and access to a job, small towns don't have to be dinosaurs."

In conducting her interviews, Macklin also discovered homegrown ingenuity, which could be put to good use in research partnerships with universities and governments. For instance, one person voiced an idea for using waste heat from the Viking arena to power a greenhouse business. "If it works in one town, it would certainly work in any number of them.

"I would love to see more interaction between rural communities and government and academia," Macklin said. "Suddenly there's a job for someone and rural communities start keeping their human capital, which means more good ideas will be generated."