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
Showing results 71 - 75 of 401 for the category: Resilience.
Here is a great new development, the first edition of a Brazilian Transition magazine, ‘Em Transição’. Very exciting. I can’t tell you much more about it other than to say have a look at it below. It has a recipe for a soup with chives in, and all kinds of great stuff by the looks of it, congratulations to all involved.
There are, as Andrew Simms points out in his most recent blog, two narratives about our economic choices moving forward from here, growth or austerity. Some argue we need austerity in order to get growth, others that we can just cut straight to the growth by printing or borrowing more money. The government recently announced a “massive push for growth“, with £950m being recently allocated for the ‘Regional Growth Fund’ (out of what is expected to be £1.4bn in total), in spite of the fact that money spent so far through the RGF was recently criticised for spending as much as £200,000 to create a single job. One of the key channels for distributing and allocating RGF funds is the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). According to my big-green-book-of-localism the government kindly sent me last year, LEPs are “locally-owned partnerships between local authorities and businesses which will play a central role in determining economic priorities, undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs”. Yet on closer inspection, LEPs would appear to embody everything that is bereft of vision, imagination and indeed of any of the kind of creativity and thinking that these times demand.
This month’s podcast goes into more depth on three of the stories from the April round-up of what’s happening in Transition. We hear from the High School Joan Segura i Valls in Santa Coloma de Queralt (in Catalonia, Spain) who have just completed a big project about Transition, from Transition Oamaru and Waitaki District in New Zealand about their Sustainable Skills School, and we hear from Tooting about their Treasuring Tooting event that took place last weekend. Do note that you can embed it on your own website, and that it is also now available on iTunes.
I posted the video of this a couple of weeks ago, but I am deeply grateful to Vanessa Kroll who has transcribed it, in case such a thing would be of interest/use to anyone. Here it is:
“Hello. I want to tell you a story which pulls together a lot of what we’ve heard already and looks at what that might look like in the context of one place. And it’s a story which I think can change the world. It’s a story which already is changing the world. It’s the story of my town, Totnes, in Devon. A town of about 8,500 people, midway between Exeter and Plymouth. But before I can tell you the story I really want to tell you about Totnes, I have to get another one out of the way first.
What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.
