The Density of Cities

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend on a Transition Training course - learning how to help create a town that is ready for the world after the Age of Cheap Oil. Thinking globally and acting locally, how will we avoid the worst of climate change, and what will we do when we can't afford the energy we use day-to-day today because the price of oil is inevatably going to rise and everything we do relies upon it? The course assumed an acceptance amongst participants that change was necessary and was designed to enable us to spread the word, expand our local groups and to understand a lot more about the psychology of change, and of the psychology of resistance to change, as resistance is surely what we will meet a lot along the way.

I should also add that the course was amazing. This was an incredibly inspiring weekend - to meet people from all over Dorset who are working towards sustainable communities at all levels fills me with hope. I would urge anyone with an interest in a positive, sustainable future to make contact with their local Transition group and to add their skills and dreams to the mix.

The Transition Network website might help if you want to know more about what I'm on about.

I didn't mention my New York trip last year... I felt too guilty about the carbon footprint of the trip. I did think, however, about the differences in community resilience between a village, a town, and a big city. Villages are reliant on the car for survival and nowadays lack the necessary facilities for everyday living, though they do have land, required if we are to grow food for our own communities. Towns can often be reliant on a larger neighbour (Swanage lacks facilities because our County Council assumes that we will travel to Wareham or to Poole to reach them), but they have more potential to regain resilience, to grow food on surrounding land and so to be sustainable environmentally and as a community. Big cities can do this too - many cities are a collection of towns and villages that have merged together to become a larger entity, but they may lack the green space they'd need if they were to be self supporting.

The Transition Handbook has an interesting quote about New York. New Yorkers have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the USA because of the way they live within a dense city, so in a sense they are getting something right. In a recent pwer outage, however, the structures the city dwellers were dependent on began to crumble, however - without energy based on fossil fuels the modern city cannot function. New york does have a Transition movement though - it'll be great to see how they get along. Maybe next time I go, which I hope will be soon, I'll travel there by boat and pay the Transition people a visit ... wouldn't that be nice!

This picture, taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, shows the density of the city and the lack of anything natural. It's an exageration of course, the whole city doesn't look like this, but it paints a picture of an artificial space that we need to work back from towards sustainability.