Showing results 11 - 15 of 16 for the month of July, 2010.
Every community that organises an Unleashing produces a very different event, a unique reflection of place, culture and people. Last night’s Unleashing of Transition Town Tooting in London was no different. Following hot on the heels of last week’s extraordinary Trashcatchers’ Carnival, the event marked the arrival of Transition Town Tooting, and signalled a collective statement of intent for the future.
I am feeling very guilty about the infrequency of posts here, dear Transition Culture reader, and so wanted to explain my lack of regular blogging activity. I am very close to finishing the PhD I have been doing over the last 3 years (alongside everything else), which is entitled “Localisation and resilience at the local level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)”. A PhD, I am rapidly, and wearily, discovering, is rather like building a house. When you build a house, you reach a stage where you think you are 90% done, walls up, all the slating done on the roof, windows in. You soon find out though that you are only about halfway there, that all the fiddly bits and finishing things off take an inordinate amount of time. So it is with a PhD. I am aiming to hand it in by the end of this month, so am flat out tweaking, editing, cross-checking, throwing my hands up and wondering why I ever started it in the first place… . It will be more widely available from mid-Autumn, but I thought for now you might at least like to see the Contents, to give you a taster of what’s to come (click ‘Read More’ to see it). I do hope it will be something that you will all find useful… Right, back to it…
A few people have asked me what my thoughts are on the whole ‘Big Society’ concept being promoted by the new British government. I have attended a couple of events over the last week that have given me space to think about it all, so here I am with a few reflections. Last week I attended the Community Land Trust conference, and yesterday I was at the launch of the Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘The Future is Local’ report. So, for those new to the idea, the ‘Big Society’ idea is David Cameron’s big idea, focusing on localism, returning power to local communities, making central government smaller and shifting its role to the devolution of power wherever possible, calling for “a massive, radical redistribution of power”. Here he is talking about it….
Here’s a press release from Transition Town Tooting about yesterday’s wonderful Trashcatchers’ Carnival….
Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival stops the traffic.
Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town! Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza. Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…
Transition Maastricht in the Netherlands open their new community garden (see below)...
This month we’re starting with some Transition snapshots from the US…and here we see the US is permablitzing too, with a potluck to follow up, while T Mill Valley has combined their potluck with a rambling hike along local trails. They recently held a very successful and enthusiastically received first event focussing on ‘Resilience from the Ground Up’, so we wish them success for the future. T Putney has now got a community garden to divide into twelve plots…great for improving people’s access to land. We look forward to seeing some pics of work in progress! Here’s a piece about TT Albany written by an interested follower. From TT Milwaukee we have lots about their Powerdown Week 2010: there’s a week’s events calendar, a report with an audio story too, and a slideshow.
