Of Maps & Places (part 1)
Bioregionalists are interested in deeply integrating maps and map-making with natural distinctions, because they seek to live not in an abstraction but in the real, concrete and natural world.
Bioregionalists are interested in deeply integrating maps and map-making with natural distinctions, because they seek to live not in an abstraction but in the real, concrete and natural world.
This is how a future that includes me was created. This, place-based farming, is wisdom. And, I suspect that, in places like mine, this is the only path that can lead to another future millennium.
The good news is that when place-based wisdom informs local solutions, the solutions are all the more sustainable.
Landskap, therefore, is the nature we have together, where we live. The word expresses that we are part of the landscape and that the landscape is part of us.
To clear the way for these groups to be “allowed” to use the lots for the community’s benefit, LA residents have to make their requests known, a mission that Ben Tyson, Director of Rise Together, a nonprofit working to inspire and educate voters, is pursuing.
This is what “living like a perennial” should look like: having an attitude of longevity and love that fights back against the consumerism of our age, and against that incessant internal voice that asks, petulantly, “How does this benefit me?”
What is place? Recently, it has sparked for me a reflection on something I’ve been calling “place-fullness”.
Start with wherever they’re able to get to start to say yes. And then you get to the next yes. And the next yes. Until the process begins.
Wanderbaumallee’s walking trees take over Stuttgart, Germany bringing green spaces and shelter, nature, biodiversity and community spaces to the city while championing for citizens’ freedom to change their neighbourhoods.
It’s worth remembering how acts of commoning can have lasting consequences, including legacies that we may not even remember. Bernard Marszalek, who has lived in Berkeley, California, since the 1980s, brought to my attention the near-forgotten history of Ohlone Park in his city. The park is a fairly large patch of greenery that a forgotten corps of enterprising commoners in effect gifted to later generations.
Every placemaking project is also a transportation project. Whether you’re improving a park, a plaza, a waterfront, or a public building, odds are that there is a street on one or more sides of your site—and that street can make or break your placemaking ambitions.
Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher from the 20th century, argues that if ideas or values are not physically implemented in space, they become mere fantasies. As such, if degrowth wishes to prevail, it has to leave its mark on space, just as consumerism has successfully done. This article considers ideas of creating space and human-nature connectedness, which in combination, seem to be a perfect match in forming a strategy for degrowth.