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

June 15, 2012

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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].

Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality.  In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events. An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.

Tags: Building Community, Media & Communications