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7 Oct 2009

Carolyn Steel on How Food Shapes Our Cities

Here is one of the best talks I saw at TED 2009 in Oxford, Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent ‘Hungry City’.

Categories: Food, Resilience, TED Talks

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4 Comments

Franz Nahrada
15 Oct 10:40am

Great speech, very enlightening.

At the same time from a link in this video I witnessed an incredible blatand blunder in another short TED talk by Steward Brand.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_on_squatter_cities.html

We live in times where people dont really understand the outrageous contradictions in quality of thoughts any more. I wish Carolyn would challenge Steward Brand.

Franz Nahrada
16 Oct 11:45pm

Another one that shows it slower and clearer: http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environmental_heresies.html
Dont get me wrong. That is a person I admired all my life. Thats what really worries me. Whole Earth Catalogue – that was like a bible. Immense support to communities, immense creativity to solve any problem. A person that majored in Ecology and Evolution. Still now is giving in to megaurbanisation, nuclear, genetic engineering and geongineering. No thought about the destructive footprints of those urban monsters.

“Ecological disaster of subsistence farms”? -I think we can apply our creativity to conceive organic city-villages that blend into the metablolism of nature and enhance it. Beautifully outlined by people like Claude Lewenz, http://www.villageforum.com.

Education is only available in large cities? We can apply our creativity to align nodes of communication with nodes of development. For example – Many people from Kibera are thinking of returning to the countryside, bringing their urban knowledge and achievements with them. Broadband technologies could be helpful to enable lean and green cities embedded in nature.

We have no way to store solar energy? What a weird proposition. start googling “storing solar energy” and get 139.000 hits.

and so on. I really think the challenge is there. Ecological thinking needs to be more creative.

Franz Nahrada
21 Oct 7:10am

Looking forward to meet Carolyn in Barcelona, where she will take part in a joint design effort to create a prototype of a sustainable village. This way we will seek a pattern language that is srong enough to contradict the megacity-nuclear-nano-genetech-geoengineering madness.

http://www.clear-village.org/lab

Some ideas here:

http://clearvillage.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-village-as-a-planetary

marvin
21 Oct 4:15pm

Its really nice one….thanks for highlighting and sharing

Here i was suprised and inspired by the boy
who powered village with his windmill made of junk

TED Talk Teen inventor generates power from junk http://bit.ly/oz9C0

Keep coming with more guys…..Go Green and save the earth