Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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.


14 Jun 2012

A day at Bristol Big Green Week (with presentations by Tim Smit, Kevin McCloud and Rob Hopkins)

I spent a very enjoyable day at Bristol Green Week yesterday. Green Week is a celebration of green ideas and thinking in Bristol, which has featured a wildly eclectic mix of talks, workshops, music, comedy, films, walks and much more. I arrived midway through the week’s festivities, to participate in two events. The first was a screening of ‘In Transition 2.0’, shown as the third in a series of films under the somewhat uninspiring banner of ‘Documentary Evidence’. Apparently Monday’s had attracted 30 people, and Tuesday’s just 4, so it was suggested that I might want to temper my expectations in terms of attendance. In the end over 40 people came, and the whole thing went really well.

The audience for 'In Transition 2.0'...

After the film we had about 40 minutes of discussion and questions, including questions about broadening Transition’s appeal, whether it matters if it is called Transition or not, and many others that I can’t remember any more. People really enjoyed the film and the story it had to tell about where Transition has gone in the past 5 years and where it may yet go.

Then I was over to @Bristol for an event called “Regeneration for Real: on the ground and in your mind”.  An odd title, but the near sell-out event went really well. It was chaired by Juliet Davenport of Good Energy, and featured Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Kevin McCloud of TV’s ‘Grand Designs’ and a practicing architect, and myself (there is a great review of the evening here).

I spoke first and here is my talk:

Then Tim Smit, and you can hear what he had to say here.

Finally, Kevin McCloud spoke, and here is what he had to say:

There wasn’t that much time for questions, but there were some good ones, about how we accelerate change, how communities can unlock land on a meaningful scale, and one developer who spoke about how he now saw how communities needed to be at the centre of development that happens in their community. It was a great fun evening, very energetic.

Then, after hanging around for a bit to talk to people it was a mad dash to the train, and back home. Had I been able to stay around for the whole week I would have been able to see the electric bike races up Park Street, seen Vivienne Westwood talking about climate change, gone on ‘Bristol’s Biggest Bike Ride’, done a course on keeping chickens, gone to a gourmet cider-tasting and gone to a permaculture day. Oh well, there’s always next year.

[All photos apart from the second one by Darren Hall.  Thanks for that Darren].

Comments are now closed on this site, please visit Rob Hopkins' blog at Transition Network to read new posts and take part in discussions.

2 Comments

Kevin Wilson
14 Jun 4:52pm

We showed In Transition 2.0 last night to about 25 people, and had a great discussion afterwards about where the gaps are in what we’re doing, and what needs to happen next.

I have a list of 12 names here to put in touch with each other this morning to form an Energy working group, and there’s another smaller group want to look into a used building materials store.

Working groups like this are something we haven’t had a lot of success getting off the ground so I’m really happy to see these start.

Helen
15 Jun 10:00pm

Nice to have you up in this part of the world Rob. I asked two members of my family who live in Bristol if they knew about this week’s events and they hadn’t heard anything about it – hope it was well advertised.