Transition Town Brixton Unleashing Visions

At the Unleashing on Thursday 2 October hundreds of people in small groups came up with positive visions of the better low energy future they would like to live in and work towards through TTB. These were arranged on the Transition Tree according to catagories.

General

  • I'm hoping to feel a lot less sceptical
  • Feel safe
  • All these ideas on tee-shirts from Brixton Market.
  • Get everyone involved
  • Talk to TT Peckham and Nunhead and help us and we'll help you.
  • 'Work that Reconnects' support groups.
  • No blame culture, inclusive solutions
  • Honest living
  • More equality

Community

  • The Ritzy becomes the inclusive meeting space for all Brixton local groups as well as a movie theatre (owned shared by the people)
  • These visions (and projects) on Tee-shirts sold in Brixton Market.
  • Gates in garden walls. A team going round fitting gates between gardens. More neighbourliness.
  • Make imaginative use of community spaces involving local residents.
  • Community enterprise.
  • Community tree fund
  • Community waste management
  • Community Housing
  • Community Communication local internet
  • Sheep grazing in Brockwell Park
  • Monthly street parties to dance, cook, eat, play, drink together. Children and Games. No cars
  • 100% participatory budgetting.
  • Community investment fund.
  • Strengthen links between people – making it easier for people to speak with one another.
  • Communities within communities
  • Communities that exist to empower each other to be sustainable in all ways. - learn and act with neighbours.

Local Street Groups

  • Front garden sales by street
  • Community tools exchange (gardening etc)
  • Local street/neighbourhood Groups
  • More green lanes, replacing roads, for walking, cycling, growing stuff, birds, and little baby hedgehogs.
  • Strengthened links between people – making it easier for people to spark with one another.
  • Communities that exists to empower each other to be sustainable in all ways – activate neighbours
  • Sat 29 Nov is Buy Nothing Day
  • Revive Brixton LETS
  • Give lonely house-bound pensioners/older people useful local things to do/help/pass on skills
  • More community activities
  • Local money
  • Less parking space
  • Meeting places – for community skills exchange
  • Holistic Communities
  • More (enough) time to do NOTHING
  • Electric car pool and (solar charged?) bicycle pool.
  • Local Skills Exchange, Internet Network for Brixton
  • Inter estate powered down music competition.
  • I'd like to know my neighbours
  • Less ego, More communication More cooperation
  • The Land: discussion, questions/action/campaigning/legislation etc relating to specific projects and initiatives. Who owns it who controls planning, investment, what criteria to use, ending the speculative, market in Land.
  • Street parties like New York's block parties. Every year people sell/exchange on tables all along the street. Meet their neighbours.

Outreach

  • Engage local youth group like Whippersnappers in Brockwell Park
  • An inclusive community of cultures, class and colours
  • Whole community of Brixton
  • More non-white faces in TTB
  • Every knows about this and feels ownership and pride
  • TTB information board – permanently up in a central visible place – so people can see the opportunities available.
  • Green Events – get people together to celebrate community, creativity and eat nice local food.
  • Positive local media. Brixton Broadcasting – Cooperative – BBC
  • Exchange of gluts (food and resources)
  • community sale to raise funds for community projects
  • Skills exchange

Economy and Businesses, Currency

  • Wholesale buying coop
  • Our savings will be invested in mutual societies – to fund decentralised energy generation off the grid.
  • More more and more Reskilling workshops, wild food walks community gardens, community composting (Aardvark is good but they haven't helped me! :-( when I wanted it.
  • Thriving local market (Keep Brixton Market alive!)
  • Community bond issue to raise money for TT or to underwrite the Brick [added: YAY!]
  • Learn working together skills, coaching, facilitation, planning, problem resolution, project management, local skills exchange.
  • local work earning local currency buying local goods
  • Repair Centre, training people in forgotten skills (refugees teaching banker)
  • Mixed use of land throughout the borough, houses craft/work/office/recreation
  • Pedestrianised High St, (except public transport)
  • No chain stores
  • Local Food or any delivery depots. Groups of neighbours taking turns on their day off to wait for deliveris so no cars needed for heavy shopping, etc
  • No Tesco
  • No fast food, 'Chicken Cottage' style.
  • An easy exchange scheme where any skill can be traded for organic food.
  • Community investment fund.
  • Land owned and stewarded by local community
  • Community currency widely used.
  • No more 9-5 jobs
  • Flexitime jobs and schools
  • Local production of everything in small scale micro-factories 'fab-labs'
  • Lots of co-working spaces
  • facing fact that drugs are part of the Brixton economy.

Waste

  • Compost bin points thoughout all estates
  • Bins split for recycling
  • Only healthy chemicals in consumer and commercial products
  • Never see a skip again – all stuff cycles to the re-use centres
  • De-municipalisation (de-privatisation) of recycling. Reclaim waste from Veolia and recycle it properly
  • Every home will have a composting toilet
  • All disposable packaging replaced with re-useable systems
  • Drive source-separation in our household recycling instead of co-mingling
  • Remaking 'new' clothes and recyling out of unwanted clothes (work with London Printworks Trust and TRAID)
  • Creative Re-use Hub in shipping containers? 'Remade in Brixton.
  • Brixton air tastes good. Yum.
  • Every house has access to composting
  • Stuff furniture with hair collected from hair dressers.
  • Less polution.
  • 'repurpose' commercial waste bins into portable allotments
  • Workshop, tools and space to make new bicycles out of old ones.

Energy

  • All possible insulation in Houses.
  • Easily available information on what can be done.
  • CHP unit and encourage 'economy 7' [night time cheap rate for electricity]
  • Plug gym equipment into grid. - Real people power.
  • Autonomous Energy Production
  • Windmill in Brockwell Park
  • Solar Panels
  • Placing windmills on blocks
  • Brockwell Lido fusion – using energy of gym users to power buildings
  • Harnessing power from swings in kids playground or trampolines – is that possible?
  • Waste wood and methane CHP [Combined Heat and Power plant]
  • Help everyone in Brixton reduce their fossil/carbon fuel usage
  • Harness Energy from Human activity – public gym powers public library
  • Make all buildings as energy efficient as they can be in streets around me.
  • Pedal power energy generation.
    • Pedal power buses which people power.Power
    • open gyms generating power to local grid
    • pedal powered food waste processing
  • decentralised microgeneration to be fed into the grid.
  • road network for bikes
  • generous feed-in tariffs
  • every building producing own electricity
  • Carbon Reduction Plan (Energy Descent Plan?) for existing housing stock.
  • Free household energy audits.
  • All pensioners warm
  • All housing blocks in Brixton are zero carbon as a result of a full refurbishment programme.
  • Solid wall homes retrofitted with insulation, so warm and economical
  • Carbon Reduction Plan for existing housing stock.
  • Housing energy audits
  • Community wide heating and cooling network.

Buildings and land use

  • Restore and enhandce old buildings. Retrofit to be zero carbon.
  • Improved insulation for all pensioners
  • More greenspace, parks, gardens
  • Land owned and stewarded by local community

Food and Growing

Go to the FoodWiki

  • Trees, trees, trees
  • No paved over front gardens. All productive.
  • A Community Fruit and Nut Tree Fund. Via TTB Website
  • Roof gardens/living roofs on every roof.
  • Cooking communally in each others houses. Spreading and sharing recipes.
  • Drinking fountains in the streets
  • Orchards all across Brixton
  • Every house composts
  • Every garden growing food. Everyone involved.
  • Food Growing on school rooftops
  • Gates in garden walls. A team going round fitting gates between gardens. More neighbourliness.
  • Exchange of gluts.
  • Floating barge farms on the Thames (or divert the Thames)
  • Dig up roads and grow food instread. (leave cycle track)
  • More green growing areas for food, front gardens, roofs, verges, community allotments, greenhouses.
  • Fresh local fruit and eggs.
  • Reclaim the streets for Green. Pockets of food growing and biodiversity spots.
  • Containers on pavements, windowboxes.
  • Any trees cut down or lost to be replace by a productive fruit or nut tree.
  • Matching underused gardens to people who want to grow. Especially good for elderly people.
  • Lamp-post/parking meter trellis for beans and vines (eg grapes for wine)
  • Everyone has a bit of garden
  • Orchards in Windrush Square
  • Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo to be giant greenhouse.
  • Rail as food transport links
  • Chicken and bees in back gardens
  • Multi-storey carpark used as vertical veg gardens
  • Utilising any urban space for growing – lamp-posts, bus stop roofs, station platforms
  • Reclaim the streets for green pockets of food growing and biodiversity spots. - even window box or container on pavement or roundabout.
  • More fruit and nut trees as street trees.
  • Use all outdoor space for growing food for own locality
  • Car parking spaces on my estate (near Atlantic Road) dug up and turned into allotments.
  • Pavements growing abundantly (watered by everyone)
  • Use disused land to make forest-gardens, ornamentals near road, fruit further away.
  • Everyone using their gardens to grow food.
  • Allotments on sites waiting to be developed. eg old Cooltan/dole office, Coldharbour Lane
  • 'Green In Da Hood'
  • Community led Restaurant Halls supplied by local city farms.
  • Subsidised local organic cafes on every corner
  • Guerilla gardening – use railways

Health

  • Free (especially 'green'*) gyms. Green Gyms + volunteering for conservation volunteers or simply digging your allotment.
  • make more links between health and ecology and beneficial technology.

Transport

  • Cycling accessible to all. Subsidies and more reconditioned bikes for sale.
  • Critical Mass Brixton
  • Grassed over side streets
  • Horse-driven grocery delivery
  • No private cars
  • Shared car clubs
  • Tram
  • Riverbus
  • Car-free day inBrixton once a month
  • Every residential street: kids skipping, playing football and their parents sitting outside chatting to each other.
  • Safe bike parking
  • Electric car delivery service
  • Far fewer cars – more walking and cycling
  • Traffic doing a max of 20mph
  • Close many roads to motor traffic
  • Take out some roads and use space for
    • parks
    • play
    • shops
    • houses etc etc
  • Brixton Hill 'freewheeling' pulley system
  • Bring back the canals
  • Wearing the latest Brixton made outfit, cruising along on my Brixton built bike going to swap some of my homegrown veg. for some bricks
  • toll booths on the A23
  • safe cycling everywhere
  • all cars shared
  • no car day
  • No cars at all
  • Electric car pool and bicycle pool. (solar charged)
  • Far greater proportion of cycling as a mode of transport – to get things moving.
  • More green, less concrete and cars
  • Pedestrianised road
  • Better public transport
  • Closer communities.
  • Rail as food transport link.
  • Making cycling more accessible eg more affordable second hand bikes, refurbished.
  • Free cycle trailers

Education

  • Use schools for adult education in the evenings (as Jamie Oliver says)

Arts

  • Powerdown – the musical [picture of 2 hands ie 'The World Made by Hand]
  • permanent exhibition of visions for the future. Library?

Water

  • Water saving toilet in all public buildings
  • Free (deculvert) the Effra

Textiles

  • Design and make our own eco-textile shopping bags and create our own clothes. Green Fashion
  • Compost facilities for textiles and clothes
  • All clothes made of natural fibres.
  • Natural fibres grown locally, hemp, flax, nettle
  • a national hemp growing industry.
  • Nettle cloth has now been invented (see it @100%design)
  • Design and make our own
  • Composting facilities for textiles/clothes (natural fibres)
  • Bring back hemp

Leisure:

  • Swimming while watching a film in the Lido powered by bikes in the gym
  • Free (Green) Gyms (volunteering for useful outdoor projects)
  • More street parties (monthly) (meet new people and a day with no cars)

Comment:

Admitting, appreciating, discussing and engaging with the issue that a large part of the Brixton population are involved with and affected by drug use, prostitution, illegal drug dealing, v9ilent behaviour. I live on a street where this activity is prevalent and I'm not saying that it should be wiped down or there should be a crack down but actually these are people too. And it's very hard to engage with them at all. Maybe TTs have some answer here. We must look at other interests in theses communities, like Art, music, their squat, their friends or children. I just know that we are going to find it hard to get certain areas of Brixton into TT in a happy and creative community wayif we don't recognise this and begin to have conversations with these people. What are their visions?

Saturday 29 November is Buy Nothing Day