Free E-Book Showcases Collective Action for Healthy, Resilient Communities
In 2022, contributors to the Island Press Urban Resilience Project dug into the details, devising concrete plans for collective action to build a fairer, greener future.
building resilient communities
Entrepatios: Cooperative housing thrives in Spain
Entrepatios, a cohousing building in Madrid, is now home to 17 families and boasts the title of the first zero carbon footprint housing cooperative in the city.
A Degrowth Housing Vision for Maine
If we are to be intentional about equitably meeting human needs and prospering within ecological boundaries, I believe we need to do the work of imagining that world first if we want to create it.
Skyrocketing Population and Carbon Dioxide: Watershed Moments Wrap-up (Episode 63 of Crazy Town)
The astute listener will recognize the trends in population and greenhouse gas emissions over the course of our chronologically arranged episodes on watershed moments in history.
It’s the End of the World’s Fair as We Know It: Why Technology Won’t Save Us (Episode 55 of Crazy Town)
Explore the diminishing marginal returns of both World’s Fairs and technology in general, and consider what’s next as dreams of a high-tech utopia go the way of the animatronic dinosaurs.
Lord of the Swans: The Tragedy of the Enclosure of the Commons (Episode 52 of Crazy Town}
The “tragedy of the commons” is an idea that has so thoroughly seeped into culture and law that it seems normal for people and corporations to own land, water, and even whole ecosystems. But there’s a BIG problem: the “tragedy” part of it has been debunked – it really should be the triumph of the commons.
A radical land occupation in Brazil shows how to reimagine our societies for the better
Resistance will always face repression if it is strong and poses a real challenge to the elites and the privileged. It will need resources and a community to survive and endure.
A Revolution of the Heart
We need to move from civil disobedience to political disobedience.
We need to move from captured corporate representative democracy (democracy in name only) to the real and deep democracy of deliberative peoples and citizens assemblies.
Challenging Power by Building Democratic Autonomy in Rojava / North and East Syria
Democratic Autonomy means that despite of and parallel to the oppressive structures of the nation-state, local and regional people’s councils, cooperatives, academia, and self-defence forces are being built up.
Europe’s flooding shows why the green transition must be driven by people-power
As flooding events like those seen in Germany, Belgium, China and London become ever more common, policymakers must not see people just as potential victims of the climate crisis.
Brave New Normal
Cultivating cooperative, self-sustaining communities can undermine destructive economic systems and offer meaningful responses to social-ecological crises in the wake of the pandemic.
How Uganda’s ecofeminists are fighting back against oil-industry land grabs
But despite women bearing the heaviest burden as primary farmers, they own only 7% of land and are marginalized in any decision-making on how the land is used. The lack of land-ownership means women do not benefit from compensation packages offered by infrastructure developments.