Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Chris Tittle If you follow the River Dart from where it meets the sea in Dartmouth (a small harbor town in Southwest England) to its many sources high up on Dartmoor (one of England’s largest national parks) you would travel a landscape that is both timeless and ever-changing. Standing atop one of Dartmoor’s large outcroppings of granite, you can actually begin to see the planet’s carbon cycle at work.
For over two decades, Rome’s FORUM PA has been experimenting with novel forms of engagement in Italy and beyond. Through its annual Expo, the organization encourages public administrators and citizens alike to discover what community empowerment, the Web 2.0 and sharing have to do with social innovation.
The underground gourmet is an old tradition. From lemonade stands to supper clubs and modern blind pigs, people love to play restaurant. Now a new tradition, started in 2011 in Helsinki, is bringing together hundreds of make-believe restaurateurs into a worldwide celebration of this alternative economy: Restaurant Day, “a worldwide food carnival when anyone can open a restaurant.”
If you’ve ever found yourself on the phone with a customer service representative telling you it would cost more to fix your electric tea kettle than to just buy a new one, you are well acquainted with the concept of "planned obsolescence." The good news is that people across the world are getting wise to the intentional design flaws hoisted upon us by clever manufacturers eager to sell more products, and are coming up with new and creative ways to salvage perfectly usable things.
I was on assignment for Shareable in Ann Arbor, Detroit and Chicago to help students organize sharing economy projects. I had a hunch that you can find sharing anywhere. Maybe it looks different in the Midwest than the Bay Area where I’m from, which is a kind of charismatic poster child of sharing economy. I gathered from living in Kansas this past year that Midwesterners do more informal types of sharing based on existing relationships. This may be less visible to the outsider than sharing that’s facilitated by the Internet. There are agricultural, energy, and telecommunications cooperatives (the ultimate shared enterprise) throughout the Midwest which serve millions of people, but they don’t necessarily identify as part of the sharing economy.
Weeds have been given a bad reputation, but they are a spectacular movable feast. By weeds, I am not referring to pot, but the regular herbaceous plants that grow everywhere, where no one planted them… your aunt’s backyard, by the sidewalk, parking lots, park, etc. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, weeds are plants that are not valued for their use, or beauty. Plants that grow wild and strong. So wild and strong that they can take over the growth of what some call ‘superior vegetation’ — meaning those you buy at garden stores and supermarkets.
Two years ago, I stumbled onto an idea that just may be the solution to climate change or, more accurately, the paradigm through which innovative solutions will be widely implemented around the world that reduce our collective impact on the environment. No, it is not a “tech fix” in the form of new gadgets that people use. Nor is it a piece of legislation that places a price signal on carbon emissions (although that remains essential as part of the restructuring of our economic systems as we transition to sustainable models). Simply put, it is a way of sharing good ideas so they spread far and wide.
Just over a year ago I was given a ‘community cake’. A cake tin full of all the ingredients needed to make white chocolate and blackberry cake. All the ingredients that is, except for one cup of sugar. It was a birthday cake and my challenge was to ask a neighbour I didn’t know for a cup of sugar. I have to say my initial reaction was one of fear. I thanked my friend, but I was also angry that she’d put me in the position of having to follow through – you can’t do a PhD on neighbourhood sharing and then chicken out of asking a neighbour for sugar!
Workers at the former Republic Windows & Doors have been much celebrated in the press for their victory over Bank of America. Their story is an inspiration, and a precious victory that we will continue to cheer. True to the cooperative movement, their transition to become New Era Windows was supported by a network of allies who propelled the workers into the limelight and helped them overcome those banks that were deemed too big to fail. Theirs is a story of sharing ideas and making a joint effort at movement building, with co-op developers, unions, and the workers themselves as players.
Last Monday five thousand people poured into Ivanofio Stadium in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, for a concert headlined by Thanassis Papakonstantinou, one of Greece’s foremost folk musicians. The stadium was packed, sold out, and more than a thousand people were left outside, unable to enter and hear the concert. On any other Monday, such a show would be unremarkable, just another event in Greece’s vibrant cultural and educational capital. But on Monday, February 11, these thousands were not just there for the music, they were there in solidarity with the workers of Vio.Me.
We’ve been working on the Trading Spaces concept for about a year. It’s exciting to be sharing a year’s worth of thinking about innovative ways of increasing collaborative activity on high streets (primary business streets) that doesn’t rely on local residents to be simply consumers –> but partners, makers and social investors as well.
This week, Strike Debt tweeted out triumphantly: “It’s a new era. First machine fired up at worker owned factory. #NewEraWindowsandDoors”. For those of us who’ve been following news about the Chicago factory formerly known as Republic Windows and Doors, this was the culmination of years of struggle. It’s an exciting moment, and a victory which hopefully can inspire other factories across the country.
