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Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Emily the director from Urban Reforestation was lucky enough to visit Rob Hopkins office yesterday to research the Transition Towns Movement. Thank you very much to Transition Towns Network and in particular Francis for being such a wonderful host.
There is a movement for sustainable living going on and it is grounded in place. This means there is tangible ways for communities and individuals to be active citizens in making a difference towards sustainability together under an exciting movement called Transition Towns. For more information visit the Transition Network website: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
Why Transition Towns?
According to Rob Hopkins new book Transition Companion this is why:
“Because it feels way more fun than not doing it”
“Because of Peak Oil”
“Because of wanting a fairer world”
“Because it means they can do the project that they have always been dreaming of”
“Because of Climate Change”
“Because of Fear”
“Because of the economic crisis”
“Because it feels like the most appropriate thing to be doing”
“Because it gives me hope”
What is a Transition Town?
It’s a place where there’s a community-led process that helps that town/village/city/neighbourhood become stronger and happier.
It’s happening in well over a thousand highly diverse communities across the world – from towns in Australia to neighbourhoods in Portugal, from cities in Brazil to rural communities in Slovenia, from urban locations in Britain to islands off the coast of Canada. Many of these initiatives are registered on the Transition Network website.
These communities have started up projects in areas of food, transport, energy, education, housing, waste, arts etc. as small-scale local responses to the global challenges of climate change, economic hardship and shrinking supplies of cheap energy. Together, these small-scale responses make up something much bigger, and help show the way forward for governments, business and the rest of us.
Really, it’s the opposite of us sitting in our armchairs complaining about what’s wrong, and instead, it’s about getting up and doing something constructive about it alongside our neighbours and fellow townsfolk. And people tell us that as a result of being involved in their local “transition initiative”, they’re happier, their community feels more robust and they have made a lot of new friends.
The video above is a brief introduction to Transition from Rob Hopkins, author of the Transition Handbook, co-founder of Transition Network and Transition Town Totnes.
What are we “transitioning” away from?
All industrialised countries appear to operate on the assumption that our high levels of energy consumption, our high carbon emissions and our massive environmental impact can go on indefinitely.
And most developing countries appear to aspire to these ways of living too. However, any rational examination of our energy supplies, our economic inequalities, our diminishing levels of well-being, our ecological crises and the climate chaos that is already hitting millions of people tells us this can’t go on much longer.
We’re saying that the best place to start transitioning away from this unviable way of living is right within our own communities, and the best time is right now.
What are we “transitioning” towards?
Whether we like it or not, over the next decade or two, we’ll be transitioning to a lower energy future – essential because of climate change and inevitable because of diminishing supplies of fossil fuels (particularly oil).
There are a variety of possible outcomes depending on whether we stick our heads in the sand or whether we start working for a future that we want.
Transition Initiatives, community by community, are actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that’ll accompany our economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos. And here’s how they’re doing it…
Here’s how it all appears to be evolving
It begins when a small group comes together with a shared concern about shrinking supplies of cheap energy (peak oil), climate change and increasingly, economic downturn. This group recognises that:
- Climate change and peak oil require urgent action.
Life with less energy is inevitable. It is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.- Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks.
- We have to act together, now.
- Infinite growth within a finite system (such as planet Earth) is impossible.
We demonstrated great ingenuity and intelligence as we raced up the energy curve over the last 150 years. There’s no reason why we can’t use those qualities, and more, as we negotiate our way up from the depths back towards the sun and air.- If we plan and act early enough, and use our creativity and cooperation to unleash the genius within our local communities, we can build a future far more fulfilling and enriching, more connected to and more gentle on the Earth, than the life we have today.
This small initiating group starts learning more about the Transition Model, adapting it to their own local circumstances in order to engage a significant proportion of the people in their community. Some may attend training courses, others buy books, some watch the movie ”In Transition 1.0″, many search this website for information on how Transition works, or for otherpeople / initiatives / projects near them.
They then:
- start awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a fair and just community-led process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon emissions
- connect with existing groups, including local government
- hold focused events that help groups to form to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, psychology of change, economics & livelihoods, etc)
Each of these groups then starts up practical projects such as community supported agriculture, shared transport, local currencies, seed swaps, tool libraries, energy saving clubs, urban orchards, reskilling classes, draught-busting teams. As they do this work, they draw other people in.
As the initiative becomes more experienced, they often engage in a community-wide visioning processthat recognises how crucial is it for us to a) cut fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions urgently and b) proactively figure out the kind of future that works for ALL of us rather than waiting for someone else to create a future that works for just a FEW of us.
These groups are beginning to create formal Energy Descent plansand to rebuild their local economies by starting up, for example, local energy companies, social enterprises and cooperative food businesses.
This co-ordinated local response strives to rebuild the resilience we’ve lost as a result of cheap oil, to address issues of inequality in terms of access to key resources and also to drastically reduce the community’s carbon emissions.
And incidentally, in general these initiatives are not asking for permission to start this work – they’re just getting on with it, sharing their successes and failures, their hopes and fears.
Where it goes from there is a path as yet untrod…
What about local and national governments and businesses?
When we emphasise the vital impact that communities can make in this process, we’re not saying that national governments are irrelevant or that institutions like businesses aren’t important – we know they’re all vital. What we are saying is that for most people, their own local community is where they can have the quickest and greatest impact. Our hunch is that when the governments see what communities can do in terms of this transition, it’ll be easier for them to make decisions that support this work.
The different shapes of Transition
The Transition model evolved in the UK, quickly moving to other English-speaking countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the US. We often wondered whether the model would be flexible enough for other cultures that face different challenges. It seems, from a couple of recent notes from Brazil, that it might be:
“In Brazil, climate change and peak oil aren’t issues with the same public appeal of that in Europe. Other Brazilians working with TT probably will also have other subjects of main concern, such as assuring education and health for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing authonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local communities.”
… and another:
“Just a brief message to say that we have enriching Transition processes going on in Brazil right now. Some examples: in Sao Paulo, transition is happening in Granja Viana, Vila Mariana & Brasilandia; there is a strong group in Joao Pessoa and emerging initiatives in Salvador and Recife; Santa Teresa, Grajau in Rio. Petropolis; in your region there is also a small town Andrelandia starting the process. Most recently, after the big land slides, Teresopolis decided to use the principles in their reconstruction process. In two weeks time I’ll be running a Transition Training in Vicosa, organised by the Federal University, for which we have opened places for a group from Teresopolis.
We debate peak oil in the context of presal [Brazilian off-shore oil deposits] and as you know Brazil has also been hit by climate change.”
We’re working hard to ensure that the very broad range of groups experimenting with the Transition model across the world are able to share successes and failures, adding strength and momentum to the whole movement.
So far, initiatives have started up in over 35 countries around the world. It’s a start, and there’s a long way to go.
Cheerful disclaimer!
Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact.
We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.
What we are convinced of is this:
• if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late
• if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little
• but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.
Everything that you read on this site is the result of real work undertaken in the real world with community engagement at its heart. There’s not an ivory tower in sight, no professors in musty oak-panelled studies churning out incomprehensible papers, no inflexible plans that MUST be adhered to.
This website, just like the Transition model, is brought to you by people who are actively engaged in transition in their own community. People who are learning by doing – and learning all the time. People who understand that we can’t sit back and wait for someone else to do the work. People like you, perhaps…
Tags: Transition Towns, Urban Reforestation, Urban Reforestation Melbourne
Posted in CLIMATE CHANGE, CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, TRANSITION TOWNS, Urban Reforestation, URBAN SUSTAINABILITY | No Comments »
Ezio Manzini on the Economics of Design for Social Innovation
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Ezio Manzini on the Economics of Design for Social Innovation
Q: Are there issues surrounging design for social innovation you feel are important to examine, yet are currently ignored? And how do you suggest we address them?
A: In my view, one of the most challenging issues related to design for social innovation is the quality of its results.
In fact, when we discuss traditional products, in general, we have a language and the needed sensibility to discuss their qualities. Vice versa, when we talk about design for social innovation, things are quite different and we still don’t know how to do it.
Let’s consider, for instance, a solution based on the sharing of places or products. Given the title of your magazine, Shareable magazine, I suppose that you think that to share is good. And I agree. But, what are the qualities you consider to give this positive evaluation? How do you discuss them? As a matter of fact you can share something in many different ways. We should be able to judge how much effective and economically viable each one of these different solutions could be. But also, and in my view, here is the major designers’ specific responsibility, we should have the criteria and the words to discuss different ways of sharing, endowed with different sets of soft qualities. As you can imagine, this is today a particularly challenging issue.
Image via loucaspapa
Q: Who are the people you look to for inspiration?
A: I’m doing what I am doing because during research I was engaged in five years ago, I met groups of people who opened a window of new possibilities. I was supposed to search for emerging users’ demands, and I found creative communities. I discovered that they were much more than users – they were the social heroes who where changing the world. Those people became very important to me.
Only some years after that discovery I (finally!) recognized that they were an expression (a fantastic expression, indeed!) of a larger ongoing phenomenon: social innovation.
Beyond that, of course there are also some thinkers who have been very important to me. I like to quote Amartya Sen. He’s a Nobel Prize winning economist who introduced me to the notion of “capabilities”. His main work deals with social equity. His approach focuses on positive freedom, a person’s actual ability to be who they want to be and do what they want to do. It’s the idea of empowering the capabilities of people. In my view this is a very strong idea for design. In some way, when you design, you search for problems to be solved. If you take the capability approach, you search for capabilities to support. This is a paradigmatic change in the way that we think. This is connected to social innovation. You don’t ask what you can do to make people behave differently.
You ask what you can do to recognize people’s capabilities and help people use those to solve the problems they face.
Q: What projects are you working on currently?
A: Before answering this question I must say that I am a design researcher working in a team. In the last period my team has been the DIS-Unit of Research at the Politecnico di Milano. Here, the projects we have been involved in have been mostly related to what we call collaborative housing (forms of living where people share some spaces and services) and new food networks (improved and de-mediated relationships between the city and the countryside). Beyond these kinds of projects, we have been (and still are) very busy also in promoting and coordinating an international network on design for social innovation towards sustainability (DESIS). It is a network of design labs, based in design schools and design-oriented universities, actively involved in promoting and supporting sustainable changes. I have to say that majority of my time now is absorbed by this kind of work (and I like it a lot!).
Q: Can you describe your community-supported agriculture project in some more detail?
A: At present, the most relevant project we have in this field is Nutrire Milano (Feeding Milan). It is an initiative promoted and developed in Milano by Slow Food, Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà di Scienze Gastronomiche and several other local partners. This project aims at regenerating the Milanese peri-urban agriculture (that is the agriculture near the city) and, at the same time, at offering organic and local food opportunities to the citizens. To do that implies to promote radically new relationships between the countryside and the city. That is, to create brand-new networks of farmers and citizens based on direct relationships and mutual support.
The project’s first step had been recognizing the existing (social, cultural and economic) resources and best practices. Moving from here, a strategy has been developed considering the emerging trends towards a new possible synergy between cities and their countryside (as the ones towards zero-mile food and proximity tourism). On this basis, a shared and socially recognized vision has been built: the vision of a rural-urban area where agriculture flourishes, feeding the city and, at the same time, offering citizens opportunities for a multiplicity of farming and nature related activities.
To enhance this vision, the program is articulated in local projects (which are several self-standing projects, each on of them supporting, in different ways, a farmer’s activity) and framework actions (including context analysis, scenario co-creation and communication, promotion and coordination of the different individual local projects).
It is remarkable that, in a large project like this (a five-year project involving a very wide regional area), thanks to its adaptability and scalability, a first concrete result (a very successful Farmers’ Market) has been obtained in less than one year since starting-up, that two other initiatives will be realized in the next years and that several others are underway and will be implemented in the near future (keeping in account the very concrete experiences of the first three ones).
Q: If there was an idea you’d like to see catch on, what would it be?
A: To find the way to combine, in a positive, sustainable way, the small and local with the global and connected. In fact, humans live in a locality and have the possibility to control a relatively small amount of variables. Therefore, the quality of their experiences and sense of control on their lives are higher if they are rooted in a place and have the real possibility to control some relevant elements of their daily life. If this is true, and this is what I strongly believe, to have a place to refer to and to have the possibility to participate to the definition of your everyday life context are, in my view, two main pillars in the building of a sustainable quality of life. And therefore the sustainable society as a whole.
But, at the same time, we have to recognize that to promote the small and local perspective can also be very dangerous. In fact, it can bring people to jail themselves in closed communities. To isolate themselves. And moving from here, to create a fake identity of who is inside his/hers “gated community”, against all the others. That is what, unfortunately, today is happening in many places in the world.
Vice versa, what we have to search for is to be local and open, at the same time. To create permeable interfaces between communities and places. To cultivate diversity to permit, at the same time, the free flow of people and ideas.
All this, of curse, is very difficult: to blend the local and the open could appear to be a quasi-oxymoron.
But maybe, it is exactly from dealing with this kind of oxymoron that a sustainable society will find the ground to emerge. A society that is based on a multiplicity of interconnected communities and places will appear as a large ecology of people, animals, plants, places and products.
Photo of Manzini by overlobe on Flickr.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to include in this conversation?
A: Yes, there is another important and very concrete point I would like to add to our conversation: until now we have spoken about social innovation (and therefore a collaborative and sharing attitude) assuming the points of view of active people, creative communities and designers. But it has to be said and underlined that this same issue has a very important business side too. If what we have discussed here is true (even only partly true), new forms of organization are appearing and new products and services will be required to fit them. In other words, looking to social innovation companies can focalize the businesses of the future.
In parallel to that and, in my view, even more important and urgent, something similar has to be said about considering the impact of this kind of social innovation on the public sector. In fact, the services traditionally delivered by the public sector consider their users to be passive recipients. What happens if we imagine a new generation of public services attuned to active and collaborative citizens?
Not only: typically, the design and development of public services has been based on top-down processes. What happens if a new generation of services emerges from a collaborative, largely bottom-up, design process?
We cannot deal with what could be the answers to these questions in this interview. But I can anticipate that they will be the core of a program that will be launched in few months. Maybe, we could continue the discussion on this point in the next future, when this program will be officially presented.
Posted in CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, EZIO MANZINI, SOCIAL DESIGN, SOCIAL INNOVATION, SUSTAINABILITY, SUSTAINABLE DESIGN, SUSTAINABLE EVERYDAY DESIGN, URBAN FARMING, Urban Reforestation, URBAN SUSTAINABILITY | No Comments »
Urban Reforestation’s Urban Forest, Melbourne Opinion
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Urban Reforestation Melbourne would like to know your implementation plan? Who will be engaging the community in ‘re-foresting’ Melbourne?
Urban Reforestation Melbourne is an organisation which is equipped to assist the City of Melbourne to achieve their objectives (similar to Green Thumb in New York). Is there a way to partner with social business likes ours in your community to ensure it is not just going to be a ‘top down’ strategy in the implementation. There needs to be capacity building from the ‘bottom up’ for a strategy like “Urban Forest” to come to life.
A world leading Sustainable Designer Ezio Manzini that has inspired a lot of Urban Reforestation’s work says: “services traditionally delivered by the public sector consider their users to be passive recipients. What happens if we imagine a new generation of public services attuned to active and collaborative citizens? Typically, the design and development of public services has been based on top-down processes. What happens if a new generation of services emerges from a collaborative, largely bottom-up, design process?”
How does Urban Forest propose to design an authentic bottom-up design process when implementing their “Urban Forest” strategy? The Urban Forest strategy will only be wholly effective if you engage citizens to participate through planting in public spaces and their own balconies and back gardens.
If you are interested to be in touch with us and our projects and how enquire how Urban Reforestation can assist you with Urban Forest around Melbourne please email emily.b.brodie@urbanreforestation.com and visit our website: www.urbanreforestation.com
Tags: Ezio Manzini, urban farming, Urban Forest, Urban Reforestation
Posted in CLIMATE CHANGE, CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, EZIO MANZINI, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, PLACEMAKING, SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES, URBAN FOREST, Urban Reforestation | No Comments »
Urban Forest in Melbourne
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Urban Reforestation is pleased to annouce there is an Urban Forest Strategy for Melbourne. For more information please see the City of Melbourne’s link below.
The City strategy aims to:
- adapt our city to climate change
- mitigate the urban heat island effect by bringing our inner city temperatures down
- create healthier ecosystems
- become a water sensitive city
- engage and involving the community.
The City will achieve this by:
- Increasing canopy cover from 22 per cent to 40 per cent by 2040.
- Increasing forest diversity with no more than five per cent of one tree species, no more than ten per cent of one genus and no more than 20 per cent of any one family.
- Improving vegetation health
- Improving soil moisture
- Improving biodiversity
- Informing and consulting with the community.
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Environment/UrbanForest/Pages/About.aspx
Tags: Biodiversity, Community Consultation, Urban Forest, Urban Reforestation
Posted in CELEBRATE THE DOCKLANDS GARDEN, CLIMATE CHANGE, CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, SUSTAINABILITY, SUSTAINABLE DESIGN, URBAN FOREST, Urban Reforestation, URBAN SUSTAINABILITY | No Comments »
