That’s the welcome news this morning from the Transition Network, making St Albans the 196th Transition Town. We’re on something of a summer holiday lull at the moment, but it’s all ticking away behind the scenes. Watch this space. In related news, Luton has got the Transition bug too – we’ll be holding our first [...]
Archive | August, 2009
What is appropriate technology?
A few weeks ago I reviewed E F Schumacher’s book ‘Good Work‘, his broad critique of industrialised society. It was in this short book, published after his death, that Schumacher explained his notion of ‘appropriate technology’, or ‘intermediate technology’. It’s an idea that has been very influential, mainly in the field of overseas development, but [...]
Pick your reburbia winner
Remember the re-designing suburbia competition we mentioned a few weeks back? The entries are in, and now is your opportunity to vote for your favourite out of the top twenty. Among the finalists are a new airship transport system,car park farms, and mini-power stations in your garage. My own favourite is the ‘sprawl repair toolkit‘, [...]
Food Matters – the UK food strategy
Welcome news from DEFRA yesterday, as it published the first report into the sustainability of Britain’s food chain. The report follows up ‘Food Matters’, which came out last year and was a remarkable piece of work. (I reviewed it for Celsias here). Food security can easily be taken for granted, but as the 2008 price [...]
The spiralling numbers of quantitative easing
Kudos to the Guardian’s design team for making quantitative easing beautiful, but it’s still an ugly set of figures. £125 billion so far, with a further £50 billion to go. You do have to wonder what the long term effects of articificially injecting 12% of your GDP into the economy will be. Then again, what [...]
What we learned this week
The more women a bank employs at the highest levels of management, the better it did in the financial crisis, according to a French study. John Prescott is an unsung climate change hero. Congestion in the US cost $87.2 billion in 2007, took up 4.2 billion hours of extra travelling time, and consumed 2.8 billion [...]
speaking louder
A peak oil image this week. Not sure where this one comes from originally, but it sums up the oft-repeated Saudi warning: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel. I drive a mercedes. My son drives a mercedes. His son will ride a camel.” No country will be more aware of the [...]
Park(ing) day 2009 – september 18th
Friday September 18th is Park(ing) Day 2009 – a day to reclaim the city, make a point about the prioritising of cars over people, and add some greenery to your community. The website has all the information you need, and lots of ideas for creatively subverting the urban landscape. It would be a nice bit [...]
Kick it over – reclaiming economics
Kick it over is the latest campaign from subversive Canadian design movement Adbusters. It is, essentially, a challenge to economics students to reclaim their subject from their professors. As long as it is dominated by free market orthodoxy, it is a bankrupt pseudo-science, incapable of fixing the multiple disasters it has already created. It’s up [...]
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