Inspiration

Placemaking

A Playbook for Inclusive Placemaking: Community Process

By Katherine Peinhardt, Nate Storring, Project for Public Spaces

This article is the first in a four-part series on equity in public spaces. Read part two, which focuses on programming, and part three, which focuses on design. When New York’s High Line opened in 2009, it was hailed as both a landmark in landscape architecture and a grassroots success story. The project began in 1999, when two strangers sitting next to one another at a community meeting, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, began lamenting the planned destruction of a privately-owned elevated railway in Manhattan. They mounted a successful five-year campaign to save it, and then started the design competition that would later transform it into one of the country's most visited parks. Crowds on the High Line. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons But the story doesn’t end there. In the decade since it opened, prices in the neighborhood around the High Line have soared. “Starchitect” buildings sprung up along the disused rail tracks, and most recently, its northern...

  • July 31, 2019
Rockaway Youth Task Force

5 Communities Building Resilience to Thrive in an Uncertain Future

By Aditi Malhotra, Shareable

In the fall of 2012, when hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, New York, the Rockaway Youth Task Force (RYTF) was ready to lead rescue and recovery efforts. Remarkably, the volunteer group was less than a year old. But members of this youth-led task force were reportedly among the most efficient responders to the crisis that followed Sandy. The group was ready because earlier that year, Milan Taylor, the 21-year-old founder of RYTF, and friends, started mobilizing young people in Rockaway’s neighborhoods to get them more involved in local politics and civic life. Taylor had been appointed to a community board in 2010 and the lack of representation of people his age unsettled him. There were many problems such as inequity in schools, discriminatory practices in the criminal justice system, and low voter turnout in Rockaway that needed young people to engage and lead solutions, Taylor said. Far Rockaway in...

  • July 25, 2019
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University of California at Santa Barbara

The UC is Going Fossil Free for Exactly the Reasons we Think it Should

By Theo LeQuesne, Resilience.org

Today UC administrators confirmed that the University of California will be going fossil free at their quarterly UC Regents’ meeting. After a 6-year campaign, led by UC students and faculty, the UC will be divesting their $13.4 billion endowment and $70 billion pension funds from fossil fuel companies.

  • September 19, 2019
Owl in garden

How Then Shall We Live?

By Laurie Cone, Resilience.org

This will be a transition that could lead to a world that is increasingly more just and less desecrated, but we will be doing hard things that we’ve never done. Surprising allies may appear. We may or may not see the fruit of our work. But we’re here now, capable of doing our part, and the world and her inhabitants are still full of beauty and wonder, and there’s no time to waste.

  • September 19, 2019
Biker Club helps Athabascan community

These Extraordinary Times: Indigenous Peoples and Coalition Building for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty

By Carol Kalafatic, Agroecology Now!

In this post I aim to elaborate my belief that, to build or spread food sovereignty, there is an increased need for diverse Peoples, communities and social movements to strengthen relationships and coalitions with one another. Our exchange of knowledges, strategies and practices will keep producing tangible results, and on the less tangible but equally important side, our solidarity will reinforce our resilience in the face of increasing unpredictability.

  • September 18, 2019
Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein: “The Moral Crisis is Inextricable from the Ecological Crisis”

By Naomi Klein, Aaron White, Open Democracy

Klein’s forthcoming book, 'On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal', takes the reader through a journey of essays and lectures spanning the last decade, exploring how our contemporary crises, from the ecological to the moral, reinforce each other.

  • September 18, 2019
School Strike for Climate demo

Why You Should Join the Global Climate Strike this Friday

By Bill McKibben, The Guardian blog

Many people, of course, can’t do without a day’s pay, or work for bosses who who would fire them if they missed work. So it really matters that those of us with the freedom to rally do so. Since I published the first book for a general audience on climate change 30 years ago this month, I’ve had lots of time to think about the various ways to move people to action.

  • September 18, 2019
South-African farm

Regenerative Agriculture is Trending in South Africa

By David Smedley, Sustainable Food Trust

Arable farming systems across South Africa are going through a change. Forced by a variable climate and financial pressure, regenerative farming models are increasingly being implemented on cropping, dairy and beef operations as a result. Ethical motivations and issues of family succession are also reasons for adopting the principles of Regenerative Agriculture (RA).

  • September 17, 2019
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