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
Archive for “Culture” category
Showing results 96 - 100 of 183 for the category: Culture.
6 Jan 2011
Welcome back to Transition Culture… You’re looking well, I hope you had a good break. We start with a warm sunny story to bring a smile on these chilly winter days, kindly penned by May East about the Unleashing, just before Christmas, of the first Transition Favela, in Brazil.
It was a sizzling Saturday morning in December when members of the low low-income Brasilândia community of 247.000 people in São Paulo, gathered with great expectancy for the official unleashing of ‘Transixion’ Brasilândia. Led by the initiating group created earlier in May by members of the Stickel Foundation, with representatives from the arts community, environmental groups, health workers, educators, local authority the first part of the morning was dedicated to celebrate a remarkable chain of achievements.
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23 Dec 2010
I know that I have officially signed off for Christmas, but I can’t resist the temptation to post this now, think of it as my Christmas gift. About 3 weeks ago, I travelled to a snow-covered West Sussex to meet one of my heroes. Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly. It is sometimes said that it is generally best not to meet your heroes as they usually disappoint, but that wasn’t the case here. I met Chris and his wife Maggie in their beautiful old home (I’m starting to sound like a writer for Hello! magazine), and after lunch and a general chat about the Transition approach (about which Chris knew very little in advance of our conversation), we did the following interview. I am deeply grateful to them both for a fascinating and illuminating afternoon.
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20 Dec 2010
Well now, here’s an idea. At last week’s ‘Confronting Change’ event in London (see left), a question was asked about politics, and how Transition might be accelerated in terms of mainstream politics. Polly Higgins, who is a barrister, and who is promoting the idea of international legislation to outlaw ‘ecocide’, suggested that, in the same way that certain key pieces of enabling legislation have led to great advances in the past, perhaps the time is right for a Transition Enabling Act, designed not to ban lots of things, but positive legislation that enables all that needs to happen in order for Transition to scale up rapidly over the next 5 years. This was met with much excitement, with Michael Meacher MP saying that were such legislation to exist, he would be happy to help drive it through the House of Commons. So, how about it? What we need now is your input, debate and discussion…. (read on…)
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6 Dec 2010
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece ‘The Evolution of Transition in the US‘, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of ‘premature triumphalism’, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the ‘Sacred’ at the heart of what it does.
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2 Dec 2010
Members of Transition Town Barcelona head off on their 'Caminata'
In Europe, exciting news from Ferney-Voltaire, which has decided to become a Transition Town and they’ve just started their awareness raising activities, so welcome to them. SQYenTransition in France have this great project with the lovely name of verger dans ma ville…an orchard in my city. And for an idea worth sharing, have a look at Transition Town Barcelona’s La Caminata, or Transition Walkabout…a nice idea that helps you get to know your town and community more, and helps them to get to know about you too.
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