Monthly archive for March 2015
Showing results 1 - 5 of 9 for the month of March, 2015.
31 Mar 2015
Book review: How to save our town centres: a radical agenda for the future of high streets by Julian Dobson. Policy Press (available here).
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Indeed, I wish I had written it. It is, in effect, the Transition Guide to Reclaiming Local Economies. It is quite brilliant. My already well-thumbed copy is full of underlinings, exclamation marks, asterisks. They pick out nuggets like:
- “real hope involves getting your hands dirty”
- “… people want to support the towns they live in; they just need to feel their efforts will be welcomed and worthwhile”
- “We need to turn leaky buckets into magnets: tools that attract and retain money rather than letting it flow out”
‘How to save our town centres’ is an unfailingly positive book. It takes on the challenges, the problems, the issues staring town centres up and down the country in the face, but is always thinking about what we might do about them, presenting the shift we need as “the transition from ‘me town’ to ‘we town'”. It is bold and ambitious in its solutions, yet it all makes sense.
When I give talks these days, I talk about how those building resilient local economies are the cutting edge of the economy. Rather than being somehow on the margins, they are the vanguard, the pioneers of where we are inevitably headed. Dobson puts it a bit better than that:
“In the context of the ‘old economy’ of concentrated ownership, standardised products and places that look increasingly alike, these new producers and consumers may be swimming against the tide. But against all the odds, they are making headway. It’s time to raise a glass to the new economy, because it’s the best hope for our high streets”.
He looks at the challenge from a number of different angles. He sets about demolishing the myth that what he calls “the flatulent promise of retail-led development” is the only way to bring town centres back to life. Looking at the Liverpool One shopping complex he writes “projects like Liverpool One don’t create wealth so much as concentrate it”, adding “the story of retail-led regeneration is one of concentration , polarisation and anonymisation”, adding:
“The notion that every town and city can prosper in competition with neighbours pursuing the self-same strategy of debt-fuelled development and the accumulation of bigger and brighter retail space defies credulity; there will always be losers, and some will lose spectacularly”.
He challenges the way in which town centres are developed, land ownership, and how most development serves distant investors and imagination-bereft and economically extractive developers rather than local people and what they need from a place.
[Here is a recent talk by Julian…]
He doesn’t pull his punches:
“…the only positive future that governments, retail and real estate experts and financial gurus appear able to envisage for our towns is one where the wheels of the gravy train are re-greased and the whole shambolic jalopy is set in motion once again, with the same predictable consequences”.
Among the tools he recommends that would make a difference is a “much more radical extension of the right to reclaim land”, which would kick in if a site or property is left unused for over a year, as well as a ‘Right to Try’, whereby communities could use empty buildings to try out new uses for them. At the heart of his solutions is the idea that owning property requires a mindset of stewardship, of responsibilities as well as rights. As he puts it, “People who are trying to make a quick buck tend to be poor stewards”. We all know how that feels in the places we live.
But all is not lost – the future, as they say, is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Across the UK, in the face of appalling development, as he puts it, “local identity is flickering back to life”. Indeed, rather than being something exceptional, working co-operatively to solve problems is our natural state. As he puts it “far from being a utopian fantasy, cooperative attitudes simply need to be stirred from their slumber”. And they are indeed stirring, through a dazzling diversity of campaigns, movements, projects and social enterprises.
Having mentioned the wonderful Coin Street Community Builders in London, among others (and no doubt Atmos Totnes had he heard of it in time), he writes:
“There is ample evidence that ordinary people, with determination and support, can affect lasting change and create value both for people who need somewhere to live and for the wider residential and business community”.
So what’s the alternative? “The challenge” he writes, “is to create places that work, where people are productive and feel at home, where human beings can flourish as citizens and not just consumers”, places he later refers to as “places of possibility”, a term I had been searching for for some time now. How might we start doing this? He identifies what for him are the key tools needed: “thinking in terms of risk, resilience and restoration”.
For Dobson, like Transition, rethinking local economies and how they work is an enormous opportunity. “If we want to assess the real state of our economy”, he writes, “we need to pay less attention to GDP figures that show whether or not we are in or out of a recession, and focus more on our ability to generate wealth intelligently; value it accurately, share it fairly and recycle it effectively”.
Dobson’s starting place is very much on the same page as Transition. Here are two passages that could have come straight out of a Transition publication:
“The resilience we need to build locally shares the same DNA as the resilience required to address global problems such as poverty and climate change”.
“We need an alternative to the Hobson’s choice of unaccountable and unresponsive global institutions and vulnerable, undercapitalised local ones – both of which have proven unsustainable when disaster strikes”.
Transition appears regularly in these pages: the Bristol Pound, the Brixton Pound, the NoToCosta campaign in Totnes and Transition Town Totnes’s Economic Blueprint, which he describes as being “not about backwoods isolationism or making do with second-best; it seeks to maximise public benefit by redirecting money that is already being spent”.
‘How to Save our Town Centres’ is a call, like Transition’s REconomy Project and many other great initiatives popping up everywhere, to step up and create the new economy. It is rare to find a book about urban regeneration and local economies that you can’t put down, but this is one. And he even names a chapter after a song by The Clash (“Lost in the Supermarket”, thankfully not “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”).
It’s brilliant. I recommend it hugely. Buy copies for everyone on your local council. Buy it for everyone in your Transition group who are trying to figure out how best to impact the local economy for the better. It contains the passion, the ideas, the approach that we will need if we are to bring our High Streets back to life.
His closing paragraph is one that sums up his approach, and which I couldn’t agree with more:
“The best future for our town centres is not merely as places to buy, but as places to be; places where we can live and act as citizens rather than as consumers. Then they can be places where we rediscover local identity and community, where we can be more fully alive and more fully ourselves. As many a shopkeeper has said, why settle for less?”.
You can order the book direct from the publisher here.
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23 Mar 2015
Heather Ackroyd (HA) and Dan Harvey (DH) work together as Ackroyd and Harvey. Sculpture, photography, architecture, ecology and biology are some of the disciplines that intersect in their work, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process and event. For over 25 years their work has been exhibited in contemporary art galleries, museums and public spaces worldwide. They are also one of the contributors to Lucy Neal’s book ‘Playing for Time’, and active members of Transition Dorking. I started by asking them what, for them, is “art”?
HA: In a way now it’s become a way of life. As a way for people to get a handle on what we do we say we’re artists, but sometimes it will be the question “do you paint?” Or depending on who you’re having the conversation with, people by and large now say “what kind of art do you do?” Usually at this point, we bring out some postcards that we have lurking in our bags because working with visual media as we do, it just seems easier to say “ok, this is an example of what we do”. That then allows people to go “oh, right, ok”. Then they start to ask questions.
DA: Because our work doesn’t naturally fall into a category; it’s not painting, it’s not sculpture as such, it has its own life energy. So it’s quite difficult to explain what we do, but it is in very much a visual language.
HA: Well you’ve managed to explain it to me after about 24 years!
In your section for Lucy Neal’s book ‘Playing for Time’ you write about “energising the creative response to climate change”. What does that creative response to climate change look like, and why do we need one?
HA: I don’t think there is one singular way that we respond to it. Going back to the point that Dan and I first met back in 1990, the medium of our work was actually chlorophyll, working with seedling grass, using seedling grass grown in a clay base, growing vertically over an existing architectural structure. That was our point of connection. We were talking about processes of growth, processes of change, processes of transformation. In a way, whenever you are dealing with processes of growth, you have to also embrace the inevitability of decay or of degradation as well. So we’ve always been interested in these pivotal points.
Around 1988 I was really very keenly aware of all the conversations around the greenhouse effect. Following on from the very pivotal speech from James E Hansen about saying “Houston, we have a problem”, and we’re pretty sure that what’s gone wrong is we’re unleashing far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is causing this phenomenon called the greenhouse effect. This really caught my imagination, but I think it was a number of years before Dan and I started to actually…
Put it this way: we would never actually say “this is climate change”. That doesn’t sit comfortably with us at all. We don’t like that bald categorisation of what we do.
DH: I think as artists, you work with things that interest you and intrigue you, and sometimes maybe things that you don’t understand as well. With one of the materials, working with the seedling grass the way we do and talking about chlorophyll and photosynthesis, in some ways it is the photosynthesis that has changed the climate, having created a climate that we can actually survive in. So it’s quite interesting, the way that works, starting to move into looking at the environment that we exist within.
Can you tell us a bit about some of your work, some of your projects?
HA: One aspect, just to pick up on what Dan was saying about the chlorophyll is that we make these very complex biochemical photographs working with chlorophyll as a light sensitive pigment so we can make these incredibly complex images that grown on the vertical we’ll often make the space into the dark room. The images are taken by ourselves, that we’ll project onto a wall of growing grass. And then within about 8-10 days, we have an incredibly detailed and very exquisite positive image.
DA: The only space that these species receive are from a projected negative onto them, so where the light falls it produces the chlorophyll and goes dark green, where there’s less light is goes less green. Where there’s no light, they grow but they stay yellow.
HA: These are pieces of work that we’ve been doing for about 24 years now. Specifically a project that we initiated in 2007 which we called ‘Beuys’ Acorns’. There is a very famous artist who died in 1986, Joseph Beuys, a German artist. He had incredible worldwide fame and he became very articulate and very passionate about ecology, about the environment, about nature. He actually was one of the founder members of the German Green Party. He got out of politics when he realised how toxic it was on some levels, but he could bring his fame and he could bring a lot of leverage to subjects.
If you look at the way that Germany is now in terms of renewable energy, in terms of how it manages energy, how it’s managing the whole debate around climate change, it really is far in advance of where we are, where we seem to be at times almost Medieval wanting to go into fracking.
He did an amazing piece of work called ‘Seven Thousand Oaks’. He didn’t complete the project before he died, planting seven thousand trees. We collected acorns from a number of the trees and we’ve been growing them, we have about 200 surviving saplings. For the last few years, we’ve exhibited them in some high profile galleries and venues.
We’ve also done some high profile events, for example the Nobel Laureate Symposium and we’re trying at the moment to get a major project in Paris happening to coincide with COP 21 which is based around tree planting, but it’s also about planting ideas, very multi-disciplinary, visions for now, visions for the future, which will place ecological and social biodiversity into a framework which is mutually beneficial, and will allow evolution that isn’t going to put us into boiling water.
DH: We got involved with a project ‘Cape Farewell’ in 2003 that was taking artists, musicians, writers and scientists on a very small sailing schooner into the High Arctic, and experiencing, seeing the changes that were taking place there. We were lucky enough to be involved over a number of years – the last trip was in 2007. But in that time actually really physically seeing the glaciers retreating, but also having scientists on hand, oceanographers and people to speak with, I think that stimulated a number of pieces of work.
HA: The ‘Ice Lens‘.
DH: There was a big lens that we carved out of a section of glacial ice. The idea was to get it to focus the sunlight to melt or burn things. Unfortunately, the warmest it got at that time was -27 and the ice just kept on glazing over and frosting and cracking, so we never really got it to focus the light, but it acted as a sort of sun catcher anyway.
There was another piece we did, ‘Stranded’ where we managed to access the skeleton of a stranded whale that was washed up in Skegness through the Natural History Museum. We fenced it on the beach, took the bones out and crystallised the whole piece, the idea was talking with oceanographers about changes in the chemical balance within the oceans that are directly affecting corals but also the plankton that the whales live on. So it was a piece that speaks directly with that. ‘The Polar Bear Diamond’ was another.
HA: We sometimes say that there’s an orchestration of responses that we have. It has very much grown out of our body of work. It’s very embedded in the way that we think about natural processes of growth and inorganic processes of growth such as crystals. Some of the earlier work we’re doing in some ways was drawing some really important science that’s been done in this country to show how critically important it is to plant more trees, have green roofs, have more parks in our urban and city spaces to counteract the effects of the heat island effect and warming temperatures and flooding and storms. We’re trying to get to the point where we’re trying to physically engage with people I suppose in more of an aesthetic than an activist role.
RH: And what’s your sense of the role that the Arts can play in Transition? Why does Transition need the Arts and then as an extension from that, why does the Arts need Transition?
HA: We all need art in our lives, whether it’s in the broader sense: music, writing, paintings, sculptures, beautiful aesthetic designs. Creativity should be almost welded into our beings, and whether or not one is an engineer or a physicist; the people I often find the most exciting are from very different disciplines. Lawyers have such an embedded creative approach which is also quite critical, and when I say critical I mean there’s a criticality there which is good, and communication skills are really important.
It’s about trying to use imagination, use vision, use wit, use insight, use, I don’t know, use inner dreams to navigate our way through these various crises that we find ourselves in. Art has been both a guardian and a guide and an absolute independent presence that has shaped and inspired going back to cave paintings really.
Yes, Transition is about getting ourselves off this fossil fuel dependence which is heavily promoted by businesses and corporations who we know historically have done some pretty rotten stuff to stop it advancing as we should do, but it’s also all about how we teach, how we share knowledge, what’s important in our world, what we deserve, what we should be protecting, what we should be embracing and celebrating as well.
[Here is the unedited podcast of our conversation].
Ackroyd & Harvey are just two of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered“ (see cover, right). The book is published at the end of this month. TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time. Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015. Valid until 31 Dec 2015.
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22 Mar 2015
I had never been to Luxembourg before. Having recently visited France and Belgium to meet Transition groups, I had just about got used to the fact that in one (I can’t remember which) people kiss on one cheek, and in the other they kiss on two cheeks, and I always get it wrong, either over-kissing or leaving people feeling short-changed. My confusion was multiplied substantially therefore to find that in Luxembourg people kiss three times! I kept life simpler by just shaking peoples’ hands. Once I had got used to the fact that the capital city and the country as a whole have the same name, it turned out to be a friendly and charming place.
Compared to its neighbours, Germany, France and Belgium, Transition in Luxembourg is in its infancy. Its genesis can be traced back to 2010, and the founding, by Katy Fox, of Centre for Ecological Learning Luxembourg (CELL). CELL was initially founded as a vehicle to bring permaculture and eco-village thinking to Luxembourg. Katy, who was moving home after living in Scotland for many years, was also inspired by subsistence agriculture she spent time studying in Romania. In 2010 she also discovered Transition and liked the “inclusive, do-it-where-you-are, integrated, Head/Heart/Hands thing”.
So CELL was formed in 2010 as a structure that could put on trainings and events and generally raise the profile of these various initiatives as well as supporting the emergence of citizen-led, self-organising action groups with either thematic or geographical focus. It had its formal launch in January 2011. By 2012 the first community garden in Luxembourg city’s first Transition initiative was underway, and SEED, a group dedicated to saving seeds, had formed. In April the first Transition group emerged, Transition Minett, which embarked on, among other things, urban gardening projects, food co-ops, an energy co-op and a DIY skillshare festival.
In 2013, Transition West began, a rural initiative with a rather nice logo (regular readers will know that I am a bit of a ‘collector’ of good Transition group logos – sadly I can’t find this one online…). They started doing interesting things with aquaponics among other things. Transition West and the CELL headquarters are located in Beckerich, which has been pioneering energy autonomy projects (gas biomethanisation cooperatives with farmers, retrofitting houses, green energy and solar cooperatives, clusters for innovative businesses) since the mid-1990s.
In 2014, TERRA, a great CSA market garden, of which more later, got started. Two more Transition initiatives formed in the north of Luxembourg, largely with a focus on food projects Transition Bonnevoie also formed. Something is stirring.
I spent one very full day there supporting the work of the Luxembourg Transition Network, who have recently been funded by the Ministry of the Environment to have a fulltime national co-ordinator in order to help accelerate Transition. My first activity of the day was to run a four-hour workshop at Henri Tudor Centre, for architects planners and engineers. Titled “The post-carbon city: the concept of ‘transition towns'”, the aim was to bring them up to speed on Transition and how it might relate to their disciplines.
About thirty people came, from across that professional spectrum, and it was a very entertaining morning. We played the ‘Web of Resilience’ game with string, we did a self-taught ‘milling’ exercise with the Transition Ingredients cards, we discussed Transition, the leaky bucket and how resilience differs from sustainability. Very enjoyable, and hopefully useful for them too.
Then after lunch we headed off to TERRA, Luxembourg’s first Community Supported Agriculture project. Situated on a plateau looking across to Luxembourg city, the garden was started last year by three passionate permaculturists/Transitioner/food growers, Marko, Pit and Sophie.
Their 1.5 hectare site already contained a number of mature fruit trees. To this they have added two polytunnels, a water tower, and many no-dig beds for outdooor crops. As a CSA they already have 150 members who receive a monthly box. They reckon that 200 would be the maximum their site could support.
When I arrived, a large group of Transitioners and others were already there, and in a beautiful barn in which they sort and store their produce, we gathered for tea and a discussion of some questions that were, for them, especially pressing. After a while, as the sun broke through outside, we headed out to see the field in which the CSA is based.
Very impressive it was too, although clearly not the time of year to really see it at its finest. They offer two different sizes of vegetable box, the ‘Pierre Rabhi’ (Rabhi is a well-known French advocate of small scale farming) and the larger ‘Vandana Shiva’ (for 3-4 people per week). Most entertaining. Thankfully the ‘Rob Hopkins mixed nut assortment’ has yet to see the light of day.
From here we whizzed back into town for the evening’s talk. This was hosted at l’Athénée de Luxembourg, a secondary school, in their largest hall. By the time the talk began, the hall was packed, standing room only, 350-400 people (I was told that generally in Luxembourg getting 50 people to a conference is an achievement, and 100 is exceptional, so this was quite something).
The evening began with Norry, one of the co-ordinators of Luxembourg Transition Network, setting the scene, and then Katy Fox giving an overview of the arrival of Transition and its unfolding in Luxembourg. I then spoke for about 40 minutes, with Nicolas and Antoine, my excellent translators, doing their very best to keep up. We had a great Q&A session, and it all seemed to go down very well. Here are a few photos:
By the time I’d finished, the potluck supper brought by many people had largely been devoured, but I managed to get enough, and a beer, and had many good conversations with lots of different people. Very enjoyable and entertaining. Eventually I headed off into the night for a short night’s sleep which included an odd dream about sharks nibbling my toes, before getting up early for the Eurostar home.
My thanks to Katy, Norry and the other organisers, to Carole Reckinger and Joanne Theisen for letting me use their photos here, and to all the great people I met. And wishing the guys at TERRA an abundant harvest in 2015.
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18 Mar 2015
Today’s blog is a podcast recorded in poet Matt Harvey’s composing shed in his garden in Totnes. A few weeks ago, SWIMBY The Musical (original working title ‘Transition Town: The Musical’) raised over £10,000 in a Kickstarter appeal, and this was followed by some Arts Council funding.
So now the team of Matt Harvey (poet/lyricist), Thomas Hewitt Jones (composer) and Chloe Uden (producer) are hard at work actually writing it. So we met in Matt’s shed to find out where they’re up to and what happens next.
They are still needing some funds, so if you are inspired to help them out, do get in touch. They’re on Facebook and Twitter. (You can either just play this podcast, or download it to listen to at your leisure).
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16 Mar 2015
Bristol was the first official ‘Transition City’. Transition Bristol has been instrumental in many pioneering initiatives in the city, such as the Bristol Pound, the UK’s first Peak Oil Report produced by a city council, the Food Resilience Plan to name just three. Last Saturday the penultimate Transition Roadshow came to Bristol and both looked back to the group’s beginnings as well as forward to what comes next.
Hosted at the Trinity Centre, ‘Transition at Trinity’ attracted over 100 people from both within Bristol and from further afield too, and was a mixture of workshops, downtime, group activities and talks.
The opening process, led by Angela Raffle, involved getting people to meet each other, find out why they had come, and to see where everyone had come from, by getting people to ‘map’ themselves in relation to each other.
This led into the first workshops, a choice between Sarah McAdam talking about ‘What is Transition?’, and Sophy Banks introducing the Transition Healthcheck. I went to the ‘What is Transition?’ one, which also included a potted history of Transition Bristol. An excellent overview of what Transition is, which also managed to weave in the Transition Healthcheck.
Lunch was provided by Moveable Feast, a social enterprise working with asylum seekers, a delicious Iranian dish. After lunch there was a choice of three workshops. The choice was between ‘Becoming the ‘Perfect Activist” with Sophy Banks, ‘Innovative problem solving – using a constellation technique’ with Jenny Mackewn, and ‘Building Collaboration and making the whole greater than the sum of the parts’ with Maddy Longhurst and Sarah Pugh.
After a cup of tea, and choice of the amazing cakes that many of those attending brought with them, I gave a talk about Transition and how it is building to be a really powerful model for a different future, one that leaves two thirds of fossil fuels underground in order to create something fantastic above ground. I started by quoting from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (you had to be there).
![My presentation on the need for "places of possibility".](https://www.transitionculture.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/3194fd86cc_b5.jpg "My presentation on the need for "places of possibility".")
The day then wrapped up with a closing session reflecting on something that had surprised us during the day, and something we would be taking away with us. This was one of the best of the Roadshows that have happened so far, and one that generated a great deal of enthusiasm and revitalisation. The sign of any good event is that people stand around for ages chatting afterwards, and as I dashed out for the train home, it looked like lots of people were going to be continuing those conversations for some time.
Congratulations and thanks to the Transition Bristol crew who made it happen: Angela Raffle, Ciaran Mundy, Jez le Fevre, Kristin Sponsler, Sim Osborn and Tom Henfrey. Heroes all. Thanks to Chris Bettles for all the good photos above (I took all the rubbish ones). The final Transition Roadshow takes place in Berkhamsted on 19 April. It looks like it will be a cracker too.
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