Greetings,
I'm involve in the mulling process that we're calling 'Transition City Birmingham?'. I was unable to be at the recent conference, however. I am very keen to hear what particular ideas are emerging for Transition in Cities. How are other Transition Cities moving on from mulling?
Many thanks,
Amanda 'treaclemine' Baker in Birmingham
hi there amanda!
i live in swansea and we are at the very earliest stages of the process also. we are still very much mulling although there is a strong pull towards wanting to become 'official' at some stage.
i think the most helpful suggestion i can give at the moment is to maybe contemplate not thinking of birmingham as a whole - we are already running into a situation where we, as a small group, feel we need to take on the whole city, or perhaps even county. i read a good thing by rob hopkins recently saying he couldn't imagine one transition group covering more than about 10,000 people and that really got me thinking. we started our group as 'transition city swansea' but really the area (however one might define it) of swansea city is far too large for us to be thinking about at the moment in terms of how many people we have involved.
my personal feeling is that it might be more productive to concentrate our energies on one small area and get a really vibrant project going with a lot of events and building a lot of experience, then let this domino out into other areas. i don't think it would matter initially whether the people we have currently involved all lived in that area. it would be more about choosing somewhere the majority of the group felt a link to and getting started. i'm going to suggest this at the next steering group meeting and see how it goes!
i'd love to keep in touch and hear how you're getting on!
much love,
hannah
Hello from Brighton... I agree with Hannah that it's very difficult covering such a large area as a city, and here we're very much aware that we've only really reached out so far to people who are quite green-minded already.
One thing we are starting to do more of is to give talks to community groups in different areas of the city, we put together a 15 minute presentation and contacted the groups to see if they'd be interested in us coming to talk to them about Transition Towns. Many community groups are very happy to have someone volunteer to give a talk, and it can be a way of stimulating what we are calling Neighbourhood groups in a particular area.
So the scary bit is putting together a presentation and presenting it... but I've done one now and feel much better about it!
If this was something you wanted to do I can email you the presentation that we put together whenever you wanted it...
regards
Chris
Chris, I'd love to see your presentation! I don't know how to send a private e-mail on this site, so -- my address is derekt@mycybernet.net
Me, too! Our transition group would LOVE to see your 15-minute presentation. Contact me at judithanew (at ) gmail <DOT> com
Thanks!!!
Judith (N California)
Chris
If you could send your presentation to transitionchapelallerton(at)hotmail.com, it would save us a lot of time building our own.
Hi everyone. We are moving towards York in Transition - in 3 weeks we have had very warm responses. Have been networking with local groups in York last night went to a speech by Clare Short last night who is really keen on Transition - Birmingham note! - I was wondering if any other MPs might be interested.
Would be interested to see the initial presentation form Brighton please send to bagra@btinternet.com
Best wishes
barry
Transition City Bristol's Sarah Pugh is putting together a day for people involved in city groups to come together and look at how the model might work at this level.
Hello!
How fantastic to hear other people talking about cities!! I'm in Edinburgh (500,000 people), and we set up our group in December/January. We had a lot of people coming along, and set up a small steering group. It wasn't very much fun being part of it! We just had one very long argument about whether to work 'city wide' or through smaller 'area' groups. In the end we decided to try to do both. I'm still really not sure about it. I just can't see how local people can feel ownership of projects that are city wide. I've been over and over this with different people, and I guess one reason I decided not to keep arguing was I just got BORED with it!! I think that it stems back to the way we ran the very first session, where we had a few talks, and then when everyone was good and inspired, we did an open spacy-type session, asking people to say which subgroup area they felt passionate about, and then they got into groups around that. I think if we'd asked them to say where they lived, and then get into groups around that, we'd have started a very different trajectory... Blah blah I could go on all day about this! So I decided that I'd form a 'temporary initiating hub' group. Unfortunately there's only me in it at the moment...
xe
Can you remember where you saw Rob's comment about only going up to 10,000 Hannah? I've not heard him being so specific about it. Could be helpful...
xe
G'day from Sydney!
It is really heartening to see that so many UK (and US) cities are starting up Transition groups - Swansea, Birmingham, Edinburgh as well as Brighton and Bristol.
We set up Transition Sydney 4 weeks ago - and decided we did want to aim to facilitate transtion right across the Sydney basin, not least because it has a wide mix of agriculture and industry as well as Australia's largest city. And I guess because we felt we had to aim at what we really want to achieve. I know there is not a ready to hand model for this... but if we share ideas across cities it's going to be much easier than trying it alone.
I am very interested in existing presentations as well. As well as making contact with contacts in other groups and sympathetic local councillors, we want to get out and start talking to meetings, with material they too can use. We're aiming for friendly companies as well as permaculture, green and community groups.
Perhaps we can set up an easy 'transition cities' swap of useful material? Happy to offer my services to distribute it. ruth@transitionsydney.org.au
Warm wishes
Ruth
As quite a few people have asked to see the presentation I drew up for Transition Brighton and Hove, I've put it on the internet... it was a presentation to a community group, none of whom had really heard of peak oil (whereas they had of climate change), which is why the concentration is on peak oil... I imagine this would change considerably depending upon the audience...
here's a link to the powerpoint doc:
http://forum.transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk/documents/tbh_cmpca_talk.ppt
and here's the text to go with it:
http://forum.transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk/documents/cmpca_talk.rtf
Apologies if the text is slightly rambling/only makes sense to me – I thought I was going to be the only one who had to read it! I should point out that most of these ideas came from Rob Hopkins' excellent Transition Handbook.
And I'd be pleased for anyone to point out errors/suggest improvements
regards
Chris
Hi everyone, so good to hear about everyone else. I'm feeling rather isolated! Our climate change action group are putting on a meeting next month with Ben B coming to talk and I've been spending my day inviting people around town. I've had one or two responses which is better than none but I would like to be deluged! I'm new to the peak oil side of things and have decided that it is a useful way to engage people even though I personally think climate change is enough reason to do a transition urgently.
My experience of promoting events in Swindon (a large and fast growing town)is that it is virtually impossible to reach everybody (this is exactly what I'm trying to do for the TT talk). Lots of green and good things are going on but it is difficult to link everyone up.
I sympathise with Eva - the hardest part of all this is having to work with people and finding ways forward that are not divisive.
It's really interesting seeing how other cities are managing this process. I thought I'd put down something about how it is unfolding in Bristol, particularly for Eva in Edinburgh. Intially there was a talk by Rob Hopkins (at which I wasn't present as I'd never even heard of Transition then) I think that was in late spring 2007. As a result Transition Bristol started to get off the ground and lots of people set about forming local initiatives. We have a central hub (Transition Bristol) which at the moment consists of a Steering Group and a Project Team. There are quite a few local groups or Transition 'Neighbourhoods' as we refer to them now, and each neighbourhood is an initiative in its own right and will use local knowledge to carry out its own launch, awareness raising,local networking, unleashing etc.
Transition Bristol as a central hub is organising city wide events, speakers, publicity etc. It will support the neigbourhoods in their transition process. It is in the process of getting a website together where all the existing and emerging neighbourhoods will have their own space. It will oversee the Transition process on a city wide level, guided by the Neighbourhoods. A Neighbourhood Network meeting is held once a month for the local transiton 'neighbourhoods' to get together and decide the direction of Transition Bristol.
It is not an easy task to do this transition thing in a city. At the moment (May 08) there are groups considering unleashing, some just starting out, some mulling it over and also many areas of the city where transition is nowhere in sight.
Bristol has a population of some 400,000 people, and some of the neighbourhoods have a larger population than the whole of Totnes.
While what is going on at Neighbourhood level is really where it's at, it has to be said that a city wide hub is important. If each neighbourhood is eventually going to form its own working groups, on transport, education or whatever, it is unlikely that they will be able to operate only with reference to one geographical area, especially in terms of things like transport where a joined up energy descent plan will be necessary. While nobody can predict what form this will ultimately take, it is likely that city wide working groups will be in place as well as neighbourhood working groups, and that members of neighbourhood working groups will be on the city wide groups for that particular project.
If anyone has any questions, please let me know on this forum and I will try to answer them.
Hello, and especially to the last two posts by Jane and Mummydeb. Talking of feeling isolated, I have been living and working on an island on Sweden's west coast Archipelago, it is a beautiful place and after building Swedish style with "painful" wastage. I feel extremely strongly that these fine and wonderful people could use a little prompting! While I have a smattering of Swedish, I am determined to at least make an attempt to promote TT. While this may seem a ridiculous request but where did you actually make the very first step? Did you put up posters? Did you go around town and just talk to folk? I assume I need to find a place to give a talk. All I'm asking is can someone give me that little boot up the backside to boost my confidence. By the by, how long did you allow from posting of posters and talking to actual presentation?
hello everyone!
firstly, sorry eva, but i don't remember exactly where i saw it although i'm pretty sure it's in the handbook. i remember thinking it made complete sense to me when i read it though! (even 10,000 seems a bit much to me!)
in swansea we just had a steering group meeting where it was proposed we try to work at the neighbourhood level. this excited people so much more than previous discussions which have been about how we can get the word out across swansea! i think what interested us all about the TT movement initially was the idea that we could get stuck in and start doing things in our own small areas. then when we got the group together it was almost like we didn't really know how to work on such a small scale and we were back working in 'city-wide' mode, even though this didn't draw our energy in the same way - in fact i think we all found it quite draining.
it looks now though like we're going to try and rectify this. our plan is to have a mapping meeting of interested people and literally get them to put themselves on a map of swansea. we'll hopefully be able to see where there are groups of people and where there aren't. then we're going to get together in our 'local' groups for introductions and idea brainstorming. people who don't have others surrounding them can either join their nearest group so they can start getting involved or can get together with others int he same position to work out ideas for raising awareness in their areas in the hope that groups will form. we're hoping this will start groups across the city and we can meet centrally to share best practice and plan bigger events. whther we would have an official hub or not is open to discussion for the time being.
i'd be interested to know if anyone else takes this approach or similar in a city. the only other i can think of is that no-one has been announcing 'transition london' - brixton are doing the sensible thing and starting in their own backyard; ater all, this is where we all want to end up:)
it's great to have this space for discussing with others:)
much love,
hannah
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