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 161 - 165 of 183 for the category: Culture.
11 Nov 2009
Gah. I feel a rant coming on. Here’s a crap idea for you. The BBC announced today the idea of ‘The Cloud’, a new hideous construction to grace the city’s skyline in time for the 2012 Olympics. It would take the form of a “giant cloud” that would “float” above the city skyline (well, at nighttime anyway, during the day it would merely look like the ugly and ridiculous construction it actually is). The structure, tall mesh towers with ethylene tetrafluoroethylene ‘bubbles’ on top, would reach 120 metres into the London skyline, where it would be used to project “weather information, spectator numbers, race results” and so on.
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19 Oct 2009
Popped the radio on on Sunday afternoon, and heard an amazing 15 minute programme called ‘The Runaway Train’. It tells the storyof an event in northern Canada in 1987, when railwayman Wesley MacDonald loaded up a train of 50 cars of iron ore, but the brakes failed and before he knew it, he was the only person aboard a runaway train. The discussions between himself and the rail traffic controller about whether to stay on the train or to jump were recorded on tape. The programme is made up of interviews with many of those involved and you can listen to it here for the next 6 days. In some ways it has no relation to usual Transition Culture-related issues, but there is something about how people come together in times of adversity, and the depth of emotion this programme captures, that suggests that as we inhabit our own collective runaway train, the notion that it will inevitably bring out the worst in each of us is at least debatable.
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29 Sep 2009
Marc Wegerif is an old school friend of mine from when I grew up in Bristol. After school he moved to South Africa and was very involved in activism there, and he now lives in Tanzania and works for Oxfam. He recently got back in touch and I sent him a copy of The Transition Handbook. Subsequently he sent me a long and thoughtful letter, with his reflections on the book, and on how it might relate to Africa. The whole question of what Transition might look like in a developing world context is something we have rarely explored at Transition Culture, and Marc has given me permission to reprint his letter here by way of initiating that discussion.
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18 Sep 2009
There really was nowhere else to be last night. Given the amazing amount of press coverage and the fact that this was the first urban complementary currency specific to an urban neighbourhood, Lambeth Town Hall was the place to be for the launch of the Brixton Pound. I arrived after a day of giving a talk at Google’s London offices, visiting Transition Tooting for a chat and a look around the place (thanks folks), and made it to the Hall for 6.30pm. The event started at about 7.40, having been warmed up by some singing local teenagers and a small steel band. Then, with the hall full to capacity, and hundreds of people crammed in around the walls, the event was underway.
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8 Sep 2009
Ted Trainer (right, author of, among other things, the utterly indispensible ‘Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society’ just published a long and detailed piece which offers his thoughts on the Transition movement. He sent me an earlier draft which I, in return, sent him some detailed thoughts on. Given that the final published piece didn’t seem to take on many of the points I sent, the comments I wrote still stand as a response to it, and I offer them below in the hope that they offer a reasonable companion to Trainer’s considered piece.
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Gah. I feel a rant coming on. Here’s a crap idea for you. The BBC announced today the idea of ‘The Cloud’, a new hideous construction to grace the city’s skyline in time for the 2012 Olympics. It would take the form of a “giant cloud” that would “float” above the city skyline (well, at nighttime anyway, during the day it would merely look like the ugly and ridiculous construction it actually is). The structure, tall mesh towers with ethylene tetrafluoroethylene ‘bubbles’ on top, would reach 120 metres into the London skyline, where it would be used to project “weather information, spectator numbers, race results” and so on. 
