Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities.
Modern societies like cultural diversity, preferably when it is far away, reasonably photogenic and does not inconvenience them politically. They also like to marginalize minority cultures and transform them either into folkloric caricatures or into assimilated ghosts of their former selves. During the last two centuries, modern civilization has absorbed most of Earth’s cultural diversity and is currently quite busy assimilating or destroying the rest while multiplying the subcultures in its midst. It is a typical case of replacing geographical cultural diversity by internal heterogeneity. It had to be expected from societies which had, until recently, accumulated an embarrassing surplus of cheap energy, but that is still a bad idea, and one which will become really problematic as our energetic surplus dries up.
Global warming challenges us to go beyond ordinary political tactics to the level of social inventions. Ordinary tactics can be heroic, seemingly all we have, and even effective up to a point, but in this case we may need to supplement them with tactics not drawn from past struggles.
Zorge Ritoma on the Tibetan Plateau is home to Norlha, a textile workshop that specializes in creating gorgeous textiles from khullu, the soft insulating layer of Yak fiber. Akin to Fibershed ideals, Norlha has cultivated relationships with local nomadic herders, from whom they directly purchase Yak and sheep fiber. The workshop employs a group of approximately 100 persons from the village, offering well-paying, local employment for both women and men. Not only does Norlha have beautiful fiber in their products, but they also offer a path to continue sustainable traditional Tibetan livelihoods and culture.
Don’t get me wrong, there are rural investments and there are rural initiatives, but they tend to be sectoral – you can run a project for older people or younger people or business people or just about any other ‘people’ you care to mention. But it’s a hard sell to persuade those holding the purse strings that rural areas deserve an integrated, holistic approach, an approach based on geographies rather than targeted bits of the population. This piecemeal approach to rural development gradually undermines the sustainability of rural geographies and chips away at our understanding of geographical identity and belonging. As a result of this, power and money and skills and resources have haemorrhaged away from rural communities over the decades, to be only partly replaced by the energies and aesthetic of a legion of culturally creative incomers.
For many people, a city means the excitement and the cultural allure—as well as the crowding, pollution and other problems—of an enormous metroplex. Yet that notion of a city is being challenged as more and more people come to appreciate small-city living. The former steel town of Troy, New York offers a case in point. Despite being small, it lays just as much claim to offering true “city” life as does any major world center, from New York City to London to Mumbai. It’s simply a different brand of city life.
It’s been a little more than a year since I launched the present series of posts on the end of America’s global empire and the future of democracy in the wake of this nation’s imperial age. Over the next few posts I plan on wrapping that theme up and moving on. However traumatic the decline and fall of the American empire turns out to be, after all, it’s just one part of the broader trajectory that this blog seeks to explore, and other parts of that trajectory deserve discussion as well.
The recent Italian elections have seen the rise of the "five star" movement founded and led by Mr Beppe Grillo (shown in the picture above). The movement is a "non party" completely structured around Internet networking. We may call it "networked politics" and it is surely a revolutionary innovation. But will it make a difference?
I get invited to speak to a lot of US Transition groups, and often I go. Often the leaders are blog readers, sometimes people I know through the internet, often future-friends. While every talk is different, they have some real similarities. Whether speaking in a suburb of Maryland, a large city in Ohio or to a coalition of rural towns in Virginia, I know that some things will probably happen.
If the fossil fuel era has been about anything it has been about acting; doing. Whenever we have a problem, we do something. But when are we ever encouraged to reflect? When do we apply a filter to our thoughts that allows us to sort the good ideas from the bad? Rarely. Instead, we’ve papered over these cracks in our thinking with billions of years of concentrated solar energy. Fossil fuels have allowed us to be lazy, turbo-charging all our activity whether or not it is good or useful. But when activity is the sole measure of success, reflection isn’t valued. In political or activist circles, not ‘doing’ is likely to bring an accusation of failing to deal with a problem.
Massachusetts Avenue Park was not a place you’d want to take your kids. Before, the small neighborhood park in the heart of Buffalo’s West Side was little more than vacant land with a small playground and a crumbling basketball court. “It was a real mess,” says Terry Richard, a neighborhood resident who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and later moved to Buffalo by way of Brooklyn. “So we figured … why don’t we just take this on as a task to really force the city’s hand to take care of their problem,” she adds, standing next to the park’s new playground with a bright smile.
Mark Plotz is the director of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, a resident program of the Project for Public Spaces. What that means, in practice, is that Mark is the man who makes Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place happen! Mark’s been poring over the results of last September’s conference in Long Beach, CA, and we recently had the chance to sit down with him when he made the trek up to HQ, to get a sense of how people responded to the new “Pro Place” focus. Mark also offered some teasers about the lead-up to Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2014, which will take place in Pittsburgh, PA next fall.
