Update: the three day face-to-face conference has been postponed until Spring 2011. There will be a virtual one day conference in its place. Learn more here:
Let's not forget technology--there is so much useful technology that goes to waste because of people's obsession to get the newest and greatest gadget. I'm guilty of this--I've purchased four new laptops in the last four years (one was a replacement for a stolen one) but have been sure to find a new home for the old laptop. I have plenty of friends who can't afford even a bottom-of-the-line laptop, and they've been more than happy to take the old one off my hands.
This is a fantastic idea. Not being a parent myself, I'm often stunned by the amount of wastefulness in the current model for buying and selling childrens' clothes. When I was a child, it seemed that there was much more of a hand-me-down culture, which is fine for kids clothes--they don't care about fashion, after all.
Spot on. I like to say that resilience is humility put into practice. As the Chinese proverb goes, when men speak of the future, the Gods laugh - we do well to remember this!
Greg, your new movie sounds fantastic. We'd love to post the trailer. Maybe you and I could do an interview about the movie? Drop me a line at neal at shareable dot net if this sounds interesting.
Also, have you checked out the urban resilience project being conducted by The Resilience Alliance? See here: http://www.resalliance.org/1610.php
This is a fantastic resource. We are following The END of SUBURBIA and ESCAPE with an exploration of urban resilience, stay tuned for our online collaborative documentary ResilientCITY. cheers!
Great article. I feel like I got caught in the current when you went more theoretical but the practical information is actually quite timely for me.
I just got done reading Father Greg Boyle's book Tattoos on the Heart. While his mission definitely has a Catholic missionary slant, he's responsible for setting up Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles. The organization helps gang members get out of gangs, gives them gainful employment and can foot the bill for tattoo removal. Many of the people who come into Fr. Boyle's office expect to die before they reach the age of 20, with a 16 year old pregnant girl, in one example, deciding to keep the baby because she wanted to have a kid before she died.
In our class discussion we were looking more at representation, who gives this Irish priest the authority to tell the story of someone who has been othered by society, but I think that might tie into something you are getting at here: city planning as a means of social mobility, given that council members are inherently responsible for their citizens well being.
I guess the question our professor was trying to raise is, violent communities are automatically othered by those in safe communities, and the perpetrators of that violence are dehumanized, and there's a level of human empathy which makes those in safe communities want to help. But is that desire to help a modern version of "White man's burden." And I have no idea how to answer that question.
Great piece. The link between resiliency, diversity, and alt futures is absolutely essential.
Over the last 40 years in his Hawaii futures courses, Jim Dator has asked his students to imagine their lives 30 years in the future. He then asks them to envision the world in 30 years. The predominant pattern has been for individuals to say that their lives are great (usually a very mainstream dream of house, kids, and money), but the world has gone to hell. However, in the last few years, Dator reports that he's seen a shift, and that many more of his students are imagining their futures in very negative terms, including death.
The student in your story is a signal of what may be a very disturbing trend, and one that requires even more attention to the need for diverse alternative (and positive) visions of the future. Let's hope your message is widely received.
This article traces an existing form of self-generative community that operates on the basis of limited government involvement and no financial capital. Specific attention was given to those aspects of slums that contribute to a more sustainable, resourceful, and equitable way of inhabiting and developing communities.
This article does not seek to discuss all aspects of either planned or unplanned communities and their respective successes and failures. Both forms can be criticized or romanticized from various perspectives with no apparent outcome beyond obvious perception and prejudice.
We have been interested in visioning strategies for communities that develop on the basis of self-reliance, cooperative capital, and social equity in the presence of limited resources, not an unreasonable idea considering the constant flux of capital and cost of energy. Such strategies would allow the poorest communities to pursue better quality of life without loosing the integrity of the few threads that currently keep their communities together while offering alternatives for the more affluent communities to start to break away from their dependence on government-led initiatives and the global financial markets.
Further, Self-Generative Communities would absolutely rely on local initiative and regulation not in substitution to formal government but rather as a means of filling the gaps of new public policy and development strategies that address localized problems, organically.
I guess I have more sympathy with the original comment than the rest of the commenters do, even if it was my piece. There is indeed nothing revolutionary about buying new books off Amazon. Maybe some pieces are in order about other models of book circulation, my favorite being Baltimore's Book Thing (http://bookthing.org), a used-book non-store where you can take as many as you want for free.
I don't think there's any great mystery here: A harsh, dismissive tone provoked harsh, dismissive replies; incivility breeds incivility. These all came in late in the evening and early in the morning, while we at Shareable were getting our beauty sleep--thus we weren't able to intervene and moderate the tone. But now that they're out there, let's use this as a teachable moment and refer readers to our community guidelines: http://shareable.net/community-guidelines. The bottom line: "We ask you to be excellent to each other." (Yes, Bill & Ted did inspire that line.)
Why so harsh replies? The point anonymous made is clear, I believe - "buy books about sharing (and after you've bought it, beware copyright infringement!)". I don't say I agree with this view, but I think it's valid (if you read between lines in the text Anonymous has posted up there).
You want to know what the most disgraceful thing is? This was written on a computer and published on the Internet! Do you have any idea how much waste is generated every year by the computer industry and how much of it is dumped on the developed world? And all those servers--they consume a huge amount of energy!
Shameful!
Oh, wait...I am typing this on a computer. I'm reading a website. In fact, now that I think about it, I consume a huge amount of energy sitting in my basement all day and leaving self-righteous comments on websites.
The only way to escape this vicious cycle is to sit perfectly still and try to survive on the mold growing on the walls and the raccoons that wander into my basement. This shall be my final dispatch...I hope the world will be a better place....but if anyone knows how to dress and safely consume a raw raccoon, please attach the instructions to a carrier pigeon and send them to my house....
"It is a huge environmental problem and producing more of it does not ring true to me. We need to produce less of the stuff that goes into the wastebasket"
Totally. I only learn stuff running around naked in the woods and licking moss. To do anything else makes you a big fat sloppy capitalist whore. I get cold and lonely sometimes, but at least I know I'm making a real difference. I'm sure people will eventually respect me for that.
Shareable? Hardly.
With each link as a place to buy... which must then be shipped by multiple forms of vehicle, in containers using even more paper or poisonous plastics? And you're buying something physical, tangible, that inspires possessiveness and materialism, and is hard to truly share.
These are not shareable books. There is no revolution here. This is the same old, same old (buy buy buy, consume consume consume, own own own) with a shiny, more "hip" packaging.
Shameful.
Most assuredly, it is the love of money and power that got humanity knee-deep into this petroleum goo. I understand that it takes money to do all of this algae research. Rest assure, if one algae company wants to withhold valuable information from the rest of the , it will eventually come forth from a completely different source. Give thanks now that you already have it, and go to sleep believing it to be true. And then stay loyal to that unseen realm with a confident expectation that these answers are on the way...and then some!
We attempted to establish something similar here in Southern Oregon. We found the land, had the vision, and found partners with experience AND significant money to invest.
We made an offer on the land, and then took a lawyer to the county to insure we could do as we wanted and had been led to believe we could.
Sad to say that The State of Oregon has codified in it's land use ordinance that agriculturally zoned land can only be used for K through 12. No college, no tertiary education, no adult education.
A huge disappointment. We decided we would not be the ones to fight the system and walked away.
I gotta say, Anonymous--that is not my takeaway from this article. I don't think he says "this one will be different"--in fact, the entire point of the piece is that the Treasure Island redevelopment is deeply flawed and that alternative modes of development, like the one proposed by Stephanie Smith, might have yielded better results. That said, he also doesn't go too far in the other direction and sweepingly proclaim that it will inevitably fail--he doesn't know that, and neither do you, and neither do I. I don't think this piece was intended to be an apology for, or a denunciation of, the development--I think it's more of a thoughtful meditation on the distance between ideal and reality, and how we might manage that distance--and also about paths not taken.
Hi Bryan.
Glad to hear that you're starting a similar concept to Trade School! Trade School is actually more of a pop-up school, in that it existed for a month in February this year on the Lower East Side (check out the link to GrandOpening - the venue for the school). It was planned to open again for the fall, but they are still on the hunt for a new space - stay tuned!
Agreed. 100%. This will be another failure. Funny how the author of this article goes on to explain how and why other movements like this failed and then says "oh but this will be different!" without really explaining why.
Thank you for having the courage to share this. So many families are going through this. We're included. I appreciate that instead of feeling bad about where you are in life, you are hopeful and optimistic and real. I'm going to try some of your survival techniques here. Our children are going to reap the benefits of how to be smart and make frugal choices.
Update: the three day face-to-face conference has been postponed until Spring 2011. There will be a virtual one day conference in its place. Learn more here:
http://thecoreconference.com/postponing-thecoreconference
My apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused.
-Neal Gorenflo
Publisher, Shareable
Let's not forget technology--there is so much useful technology that goes to waste because of people's obsession to get the newest and greatest gadget. I'm guilty of this--I've purchased four new laptops in the last four years (one was a replacement for a stolen one) but have been sure to find a new home for the old laptop. I have plenty of friends who can't afford even a bottom-of-the-line laptop, and they've been more than happy to take the old one off my hands.
This is a fantastic idea. Not being a parent myself, I'm often stunned by the amount of wastefulness in the current model for buying and selling childrens' clothes. When I was a child, it seemed that there was much more of a hand-me-down culture, which is fine for kids clothes--they don't care about fashion, after all.
I believe the urge to help others is a cultural survival mechanism. We help ourselves by helping others. Generosity is self-rewarding.
Spot on. I like to say that resilience is humility put into practice. As the Chinese proverb goes, when men speak of the future, the Gods laugh - we do well to remember this!
Greg, your new movie sounds fantastic. We'd love to post the trailer. Maybe you and I could do an interview about the movie? Drop me a line at neal at shareable dot net if this sounds interesting.
Also, have you checked out the urban resilience project being conducted by The Resilience Alliance? See here:
http://www.resalliance.org/1610.php
This is a fantastic resource. We are following The END of SUBURBIA and ESCAPE with an exploration of urban resilience, stay tuned for our online collaborative documentary ResilientCITY. cheers!
Great article. I feel like I got caught in the current when you went more theoretical but the practical information is actually quite timely for me.
I just got done reading Father Greg Boyle's book Tattoos on the Heart. While his mission definitely has a Catholic missionary slant, he's responsible for setting up Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles. The organization helps gang members get out of gangs, gives them gainful employment and can foot the bill for tattoo removal. Many of the people who come into Fr. Boyle's office expect to die before they reach the age of 20, with a 16 year old pregnant girl, in one example, deciding to keep the baby because she wanted to have a kid before she died.
In our class discussion we were looking more at representation, who gives this Irish priest the authority to tell the story of someone who has been othered by society, but I think that might tie into something you are getting at here: city planning as a means of social mobility, given that council members are inherently responsible for their citizens well being.
I guess the question our professor was trying to raise is, violent communities are automatically othered by those in safe communities, and the perpetrators of that violence are dehumanized, and there's a level of human empathy which makes those in safe communities want to help. But is that desire to help a modern version of "White man's burden." And I have no idea how to answer that question.
Great piece. The link between resiliency, diversity, and alt futures is absolutely essential.
Over the last 40 years in his Hawaii futures courses, Jim Dator has asked his students to imagine their lives 30 years in the future. He then asks them to envision the world in 30 years. The predominant pattern has been for individuals to say that their lives are great (usually a very mainstream dream of house, kids, and money), but the world has gone to hell. However, in the last few years, Dator reports that he's seen a shift, and that many more of his students are imagining their futures in very negative terms, including death.
The student in your story is a signal of what may be a very disturbing trend, and one that requires even more attention to the need for diverse alternative (and positive) visions of the future. Let's hope your message is widely received.
Thank you for the passionate comments!
This article traces an existing form of self-generative community that operates on the basis of limited government involvement and no financial capital. Specific attention was given to those aspects of slums that contribute to a more sustainable, resourceful, and equitable way of inhabiting and developing communities.
This article does not seek to discuss all aspects of either planned or unplanned communities and their respective successes and failures. Both forms can be criticized or romanticized from various perspectives with no apparent outcome beyond obvious perception and prejudice.
We have been interested in visioning strategies for communities that develop on the basis of self-reliance, cooperative capital, and social equity in the presence of limited resources, not an unreasonable idea considering the constant flux of capital and cost of energy. Such strategies would allow the poorest communities to pursue better quality of life without loosing the integrity of the few threads that currently keep their communities together while offering alternatives for the more affluent communities to start to break away from their dependence on government-led initiatives and the global financial markets.
Further, Self-Generative Communities would absolutely rely on local initiative and regulation not in substitution to formal government but rather as a means of filling the gaps of new public policy and development strategies that address localized problems, organically.
*The original illustration for this article can be found at:
http://www.wfs.org/content/learning-informal-cities-building-communities
PI.KL
I guess I have more sympathy with the original comment than the rest of the commenters do, even if it was my piece. There is indeed nothing revolutionary about buying new books off Amazon. Maybe some pieces are in order about other models of book circulation, my favorite being Baltimore's Book Thing (http://bookthing.org), a used-book non-store where you can take as many as you want for free.
I don't think there's any great mystery here: A harsh, dismissive tone provoked harsh, dismissive replies; incivility breeds incivility. These all came in late in the evening and early in the morning, while we at Shareable were getting our beauty sleep--thus we weren't able to intervene and moderate the tone. But now that they're out there, let's use this as a teachable moment and refer readers to our community guidelines: http://shareable.net/community-guidelines. The bottom line: "We ask you to be excellent to each other." (Yes, Bill & Ted did inspire that line.)
Why so harsh replies? The point anonymous made is clear, I believe - "buy books about sharing (and after you've bought it, beware copyright infringement!)". I don't say I agree with this view, but I think it's valid (if you read between lines in the text Anonymous has posted up there).
You want to know what the most disgraceful thing is? This was written on a computer and published on the Internet! Do you have any idea how much waste is generated every year by the computer industry and how much of it is dumped on the developed world? And all those servers--they consume a huge amount of energy!
Shameful!
Oh, wait...I am typing this on a computer. I'm reading a website. In fact, now that I think about it, I consume a huge amount of energy sitting in my basement all day and leaving self-righteous comments on websites.
The only way to escape this vicious cycle is to sit perfectly still and try to survive on the mold growing on the walls and the raccoons that wander into my basement. This shall be my final dispatch...I hope the world will be a better place....but if anyone knows how to dress and safely consume a raw raccoon, please attach the instructions to a carrier pigeon and send them to my house....
"It is a huge environmental problem and producing more of it does not ring true to me. We need to produce less of the stuff that goes into the wastebasket"
Melt it down and spin it back into line?
Introducing: ReRepRap
Totally. I only learn stuff running around naked in the woods and licking moss. To do anything else makes you a big fat sloppy capitalist whore. I get cold and lonely sometimes, but at least I know I'm making a real difference. I'm sure people will eventually respect me for that.
Obama's economic takover is not sharing.
It is theft.
You are kidding yourself.
Shareable? Hardly.
With each link as a place to buy... which must then be shipped by multiple forms of vehicle, in containers using even more paper or poisonous plastics? And you're buying something physical, tangible, that inspires possessiveness and materialism, and is hard to truly share.
These are not shareable books. There is no revolution here. This is the same old, same old (buy buy buy, consume consume consume, own own own) with a shiny, more "hip" packaging.
Shameful.
Most assuredly, it is the love of money and power that got humanity knee-deep into this petroleum goo. I understand that it takes money to do all of this algae research. Rest assure, if one algae company wants to withhold valuable information from the rest of the , it will eventually come forth from a completely different source. Give thanks now that you already have it, and go to sleep believing it to be true. And then stay loyal to that unseen realm with a confident expectation that these answers are on the way...and then some!
I drew this fanciful "kiddie pool"-size spirulina home-grow system way back in 2002: http://darinselby.1hwy.com/images/algae.jpg
That's wonderful.
We attempted to establish something similar here in Southern Oregon. We found the land, had the vision, and found partners with experience AND significant money to invest.
We made an offer on the land, and then took a lawyer to the county to insure we could do as we wanted and had been led to believe we could.
Sad to say that The State of Oregon has codified in it's land use ordinance that agriculturally zoned land can only be used for K through 12. No college, no tertiary education, no adult education.
A huge disappointment. We decided we would not be the ones to fight the system and walked away.
Any other experiences out there?
AF
I gotta say, Anonymous--that is not my takeaway from this article. I don't think he says "this one will be different"--in fact, the entire point of the piece is that the Treasure Island redevelopment is deeply flawed and that alternative modes of development, like the one proposed by Stephanie Smith, might have yielded better results. That said, he also doesn't go too far in the other direction and sweepingly proclaim that it will inevitably fail--he doesn't know that, and neither do you, and neither do I. I don't think this piece was intended to be an apology for, or a denunciation of, the development--I think it's more of a thoughtful meditation on the distance between ideal and reality, and how we might manage that distance--and also about paths not taken.
Hi Bryan.
Glad to hear that you're starting a similar concept to Trade School! Trade School is actually more of a pop-up school, in that it existed for a month in February this year on the Lower East Side (check out the link to GrandOpening - the venue for the school). It was planned to open again for the fall, but they are still on the hunt for a new space - stay tuned!
Lauren
Agreed. 100%. This will be another failure. Funny how the author of this article goes on to explain how and why other movements like this failed and then says "oh but this will be different!" without really explaining why.
that sweater is crazy amazing!
Thank you for having the courage to share this. So many families are going through this. We're included. I appreciate that instead of feeling bad about where you are in life, you are hopeful and optimistic and real. I'm going to try some of your survival techniques here. Our children are going to reap the benefits of how to be smart and make frugal choices.