 Your new post is loading...
The City as Commons: a Policy Reader, brings together 34 contributions and 31 authors exploring policies and strategies for creating cities as commons.
“Do these myriad stories add up to a viable alternative to the system that’s wrecking the place now? On their own, probably not. But for me, the most important unfolding transformation of all is the emergence, in many places at once, of a new understanding of our place in the world. .. This new story …
Local connectivity is well within our technical means ... but it needs to be organised, says Mazi, the know-how put together and made available.
P2P Plazas: one year of research looking for interesting, challenging and inspiring autonomous experiences in Southern Europe
Let's address poverty by encouraging resiliency and independence from global markets.
Anne-Sophie Novel is a French journalist, blogger and advocate at the convergence of different topics such as the sharing economy and sustainability, who will be active as well on the next big climate change topic in Paris, i.e. COP. The interview was conducted by Michel Bauwens. * Dear Anne-Sophie, you are well-known in France as …
I want Madison to be seen as a birthplace of the network that is connecting every person on the planet, indirectly, to every other person on the planet, in an explicit agreement to support each other’s right to their best possible life. Is that so much to ask??? Continuing our series on P2P women we …
“The Map describes how to make the rich underused capacity of regional economies more visible. It shows how to engage individuals, businesses, voluntary groups and local government to share their underused assets to meet each others’ needs. The Map is both a vision and a practical action programme.”
Tolfa is a beautiful town in Italy, in the Tolfa Mountains, with 95 percent of its surrounding land owned as a commons by the people. Here’s a brand new video giving an overview of the place:
Jordy Cummings (JC): Your book is called No Local and it is an immanent critique of inward looking reactions to neoliberal capitalism. One poignant episode you recount surrounds urban agriculture, and the idea that we've come to a really problematic situation when poor people are encouraged to grow their own food in addition to working their jobs and raising their kids. What is the political or strategic problem with localism? What are your thoughts, for example, on campaigns like “Occupy the Economy” and so forth?
There’s a long history in the UK of community ownership going back over a thousand years - of people arguing against enclosure right through to the Occupy movement in more recent times. What’s interesting is that it appears to stop there, with land and built assets, upon which the old agrarian and industrial economies were based. It hasn’t really been considered by proponents within the context of the knowledge economy. Building the confidence of local communities to acquire and develop their own land and built assets has been core to my work over the past five years. But, more recently, I’ve been looking at the potential for communities to develop digital assets – both tangible and intangible. Locality helpfully sponsored a pilot programme, managed by The Creative Coop, to explore how community knowledge transfer might be harnessed to develop online services and enterprises.
The first Electronic Social Currency in Brazil has been launched by a government in Maricá, the state of Rio de Janeiro (130km from the city of Rio de Janeiro).
“Restart was started by Janet Gunter and Ugo Vallauri in 2012. Their mission is to help grow a more widespread culture of repair. They organise Restart Parties in London twice a month, where people can bring along their broken gadgets and work with the Restart repairers (or Restarters) to try and find a fix. These events encourage more people to think about repair as a possible option for their gadgets, to become better skilled and to also save repairable items from ended up as landfill.
|
Next year will be the 40 years anniversary of Christopher Alexander‘s seminal work “A Pattern Language”. 20 years ago Nikos A.
“Do these myriad stories add up to a viable alternative to the system that’s wrecking the place now? On their own, probably not. But for me, the most important unfolding transformation of all is the emergence, in many places at once, of a new understanding of our place in the world. .. This new story …
In this two-part article on medium, Xavier Damman raises an important point. If we want to promote bottom-up grassroots type activities, it should be easy to raise money to fund a project, an action, a pre business activity, without having to first form a legal entity and open a bank account. That is too much …
Help our friends at the Mutual Aid Network (MAN) build local, resilient, peer to peer economic networks through their crowdfunding campaign.
Excellent presentation which asks citizens to re-invest their savings in the local economy. Watch the video here:
This is a truly heartening interview to see the depth of activity of urban commoners. The interview with Marion Rousseaux was conducted by Michel Bauwens, with the assistance of Mélanie Gabard and Simon Sarazin who are active in the same projects. * Michel Bauwens: First of all, tell us a bit about your personal backgrounds …
Just few weeks ago, I’ve been informed for the first time about the existence of an Open Source Hardware Startup called Atadiat, operating in Syria. I stumbled upon the news since a friend shared a tweet mentioning the Shamduino board (an Arduino inspired board) and the fact that the board was basically made out of locally sourced materials. I basically reacted enthusiastically since – as you probably know if you’ve read some of the opeds here on the OPen Electronics blog – I’m strongly interested also in the impacts that open source hardware must and could have towards manufacturing and relocalization of productions also in terms of materials and supply chain in general.
Here’s a short but very well explained introduction to the Cleveland Model of urban cooperativism, where a city’s public institutions and land-based assets turn towards local worker-owned co-ops for all manner of goods and services, keeping the wealth circulating in the community rather than going to outside investors. Visit this link to find out more about Cleveland Model.
Extracted from our friends at Telekommunisten and described as a “Global Pipe Dream Come True”, OCTO is Telekommunisten’s response to the looming fuel crisis which will surely affect the shipping industry, food supplies, etc. Rather than passively wait for the collapse of globalized capitalist production and distribution, or turn to overtly reactive lifeboat-based solutions, OCTO will re-enable physical glocalization to such a degree that we’ll even be able to throw the P2P Foundation’s stance on “keeping what is heavy is near, what is light is far” out the window (as seen in this video). Read on to find out more…
= “In the fall, we’ll be hosting The Civic Consumption Summit to bring this community together and make exciting plans to continue growing Civic Consumption as a new impact-oriented movement within the new economy”. [1]
Extraordinary vitality, clarity of vision, efficiency and determination have been distinct characteristics of the Elpidohori experiment which was formed in 2009. The initiative begun as a relatively simple idea to provide alternative education and holidays for children and has gradually developed into a full-fledged center of experimental and alternative practices and approaches to communal living aiming to become an eco-community for interested individuals,with a small footprint in mind, being implemented with integrity and consistency. Providing education and opportunity for a retreat remains the fundamental intention. Despite its statedgoals and record having been identified by a communal ethos and lifestyle, the current form of governance and management at Elpidohori remains attached to one person’s will, the power and vision of its founder, a woman of extraordinary capabilities, intentions and intuition. Ithasn’t become a full-time residence for any number of people, but rather, functions as a gradual build up of momentum, dependent on open calls for a variety of educational events.
“COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, is a new 37 minute film that tells the story of a series of revolutionary innovations by the community of Great Barrington, MA to address, at the local level, some of the economic challenges of our nation’s current hard times.
|
Scoop.it!
