Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 1 - 5 of 33 for the month of September, 2012.
Here is the video of the event on the opening evening of Degrowth 2012 in Venezia (which I have blogged about extensively in previous posts), when I shared the stage with Serge Latouche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomas among others. My talk starts at 1:48:20:
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar (my notes from which can be found here). He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
One of my highlights of the 2012 Transition Network conference was Dave Chapman’s presentation on the new powers that the recent Localism Act and the changes to the planning system in England and Wales potentially give to Transition initiatives. I mentioned it in my conference round-up, but Dave has since sent me his slides, so you can download them (Locality No Nonsense Guide to Localism) and listen to the audio below, which Dave has re-recorded since the conference to get the most up-to-date version possible. If you live outside England and Wales this probably won’t be that interesting, but if you do, this is pretty much essential listening. My thanks to Dave for his slides.
Beautiful ancient carved doors on the Battistero in Parma.
The next day began with a walk around the city of Ferrara. The core of the city is medieval, and contains some beautiful architecture. One of the things that is initially most striking about Ferrara is the number of bicycles, and the diversity of the people riding bicycles. Ferrara is famous for the levels of cycling. This is aided by the fact that it is a very flat city, but as Pierre told me, also by the fact that cyclists are treated, as he put it, “like sacred cows are in India”, that is, drivers expect them to go anywhere, and do anything, at any time, and so afford them to necessary space on the road. There are no formal cycle lanes so far as I could see, but somehow it all works.
Sunday began early, going to meet around 25 members of Transition Italia and of different Italian groups on the harbourside on the outskirts of Venice. There we got on a boat that they had booked to take us all to Ferrara. The boat was called ‘Nena’, an original Venezian ‘vaporetto’, the boats particular to Venice that are used to ferry passengers and goods around the smaller waterways. It was owned by a family who had lovingly restored it and it was a beautiful boat, and they were our hosts for the day. It was to turn out to be one of the most beautiful Transition-related days I have ever had the fortune to experience.
