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Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins is the cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He is a serial blogger, and author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff , The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion. He has been awarded a PhD by the University of Plymouth and an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the West of England. In 2012 he was voted one of the Independent's top 100 environmentalists and one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a keen gardener and one of the founders of New Lion Brewery in Totnes and a Director of Atmos Totnes, a very ambitious community-led development project.

Totnes passport

When Imagination Meets Brexit: the Story of the Totnes Passport

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

One of the highlights of my summer was collecting my Totnes Passport.  The whole Brexit debacle from inception to its current state of woeful ineptitude and brazen jingoism has been one entirely bereft of imagination. 

  • September 11, 2018
Play

Re-engaging Imagination

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

If we’re making political decisions around how we want to exist in the world, then we need to think about the impossible.  And to think about the impossible we need to connect to this place that does not exist within your current state of mind.  This is why play should be a political – to open us up to unknowability.

  • September 7, 2018
Child playing

Hilary O’Shaughnessy on the Playable City

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

For us a Playable City is specifically a human-led response to challenges for cities that are using technology in a way that connects people to each other. 

  • July 25, 2018
Stuart Candy

What’s a Professional Futurist?

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

Orwell nailed it in 1984, that who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future. 

  • July 5, 2018

P2P, the Commons and the Imagination

By Rob Hopkins, Michel Bauwens, Rob Hopkins blog

We need something like the guilds in the Middle Ages.  We need leagues of cities.  We need leagues of co-ops.  In Fukushima you can’t just say, “I’m going to have a fishing co-op in my village”.  Sometimes you need scale to answer certain issues that can’t be solved at any local level.

  • June 27, 2018
Hedgespoken

Hedgespoken, ‘a Vehicle for the Imagination’

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth.  The story that we are separate.  Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive. 

  • June 21, 2018
21 Histories of Transition

“Always the Same, Always Different”: a Response to Ted Trainer

By Rob Hopkins, Transition Network

The late John Peel once said of The Fall that they were “always the same, always different”. The same could be said of Ted Trainer’s critiques of Transition. He just published another one, many of the points in which he has made before, and I have already responded to here and here. But there are some elements to his latest critique which, on behalf of Transition Network, I would like to address.

  • June 14, 2018
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