Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
showing the consequences of peak oil and climate change, but in designing policies
to reduce their effects on the provision of food, energy, transport, health, education,
and waste reduction etc., in local towns, which could be too easily interrupted.
In some ways the Transition Town approach has parallels with three older urban
social movements. One was Howard's (
1898
) proselytizing for new
Garden Cities
that would be built by citizen co-operation, not by governments or industrialists,
a feature that was soon forgotten in the debasement of the ideas into what turned
out to be garden suburbs by governments or developers. Another was Alinsky's
(
1972
)
critical conflict
approach to community development that he developed in
America during the late 1930s to help to improve the situation of disorganised and
impoverished inner city communities. Although a key role was played by a skilled
community organiser who would help initiate consultations, the work would only
be successful through the subsequent activism of the community residents (Davies
and Herbert
1993
, Chap. 6). A third parallel can be seen in several
self-help move-
ments
, such as the citizen-initiated improvements in third world shanty town de-
velopments, the self-build approaches advocated by Turner in the 1970s in Britain
(Hall
1988
), as well as some aspects of the back-to-the-land communes set up in
the 1960s. All approaches stressed the importance of the need for concerned local
citizens to co-operate to create a better future—although in the Transition Town
approach this is not simply as some idealised or preferred new forms. Rather it is a
local town re-organization, designed to produce practical responses that will begin
the process of counteracting what the advocates of the movement see as the inevi-
tability of future problems.
The diffusion of the Transition Town ideas occurred when Hopkins moved
to Totnes in the county of Devon in South West England, a town of 8400 peo-
ple in 2011, but a market centre of 24,000 if the surrounding parishes are in-
cluded. This historic market town had grown to prosperity as a medieval wool-
len centre, and later as service node and a centre of local industries linked to
its role as an agricultural centre and port on the lowest bridging point of the
tidal reach of the River Dart. From the 1920s it was also the home of a progres-
sive educational and art centre known as Dartington Hall. However, by the early
twenty-first century Totnes, like so many small county towns, had lost many of
its local industries, so that apart from the local retailing and service jobs most
people were commuting to jobs in nearby larger nodes. Hopkins initiated a se-
ries of meetings designed to show the impending problems posed by climate
change due to the increasing build-up of human created greenhouse gases and
the dependence of current life-styles and economies upon the finite resource
of oil, stressing the urgent need to seek alternatives and ways of countering the
changes. Within a few years local residents interested in the problems had es-
tablished a series of informal committees that discussed specific problems and
sought practical solutions to the problems of global warming and an oil-based
economy and transport systems. By September 2006 a major, open meeting was
organized to discuss progress. This was attended by over 350 people who re-
viewed the issues brought up by the initial committees and set up a series of work-
ing groups to identify problems, imagine alternative futures and suggest policies
