This week I've covered a good chunk of the issues around turning a city into an ecocity.
On Monday lunchtime I was on a meeting of the building where I work about greening the workplace. A good number of tips and tricks were shared, and there was even a mention of the wider context, whether it's better to work in an office or from home (clearly, better from home). In the long run, I wonder how many offices will survive, or even office-type jobs. If we give up on capitalism as the way of distributing goods, how many office jobs are just make-work to justify giving somebody a salary? How sustainable is it to keep hamsters running in wheels instead of having a hard look at what is it that we really need to keep going?
Monday evening was a meeting of the Transport Group, with a good look at transport planning. Organizing transport within a city is crucial, especially when our current transport systems are based on exploiting a dwindling resource. Unfortunately, even within the group there is a conviction that things aren't going to change much in the short term. I wonder what use will be many of the things that are discussed by transport planners if we get soon to the scenario described in "Timescape", with lots of old cars rusting at the sides of the streets, and people complaining that they never got sent to the dismantler.
Tuesday lunchtime I met a retired professor to discuss my "Limits to growth" updated model. This is looking at the very big scale, where even cities are too small to notice, but the implications are directly relevant to how you run a city. If you are thinking that industry will have trouble chugging along when there is less and less energy to run it with, and food will be scarce because unexpected weather will affect crop yield in a big way, how do you give the population of a city enough of the basics?
Tuesday evening I went to the Food Group meeting. They are running some interesting projects, but all very small scale. The truth is, you can't hope to feed everyone from food grown in allotments around the city. You need to think about the wider hinterland, and about food distribution, but they aren't giving much thought to that yet.
Friday evening I went to a double whammy of meetings. First, another look at food from a representative of the "vegan police" from Birmingham. "Vegan police" is a term of non-endearment given to vegans that run the lunches on the Brighton Unemployed Centre. The food is by tradition vegetarian, but vegans often insist to make it vegan, and non-vegans call them "vegan police" behind their back. The green argument for being vegetarian is straightforward: the amount of farm animals that we currently keep for the purposes of keeping the amount of meat on the table that people currently eat is an incredibly inefficient use of land, with lots of it devoted to animal fodder, when it could be used to feed people instead. The argument for being vegan is a lot weaker, among other things, because farm animals are the best source of natural fertilizer. People that have decided for some reason to be vegan would like everyone to know that it's perfectly possible to growth food organically without any animal inputs, which is useful information, but perhaps not wholy relevant to the question of feeding people as efficiently as possible.
The second one was a meeting on the issue of Transition cities and how to make them happen. It was mostly about the organizational issues that all of the Transition groups are having everywhere. This is more to do with the shortage of useful skills and abundance of wacky characters than anythings else, but of course, it would be taboo to mention the second and the first isn't too well received either.
All in all, almost a full round around the issues of turning a city into an ecocity. No clear answers emerging yet, but at least most of the relevant questions are getting asked.
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