Posts Tagged ‘networks’
Community through Gardening: Post-Industrial UK
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 8th, 2011
Via The Ecologist
Photo © Henry/Bragg
From “Blooming Britain photo exhibition tours RHS gardens this summer“:
In 2010, artists Julie Henry and Debbie Bragg visited post-industrial regions around the UK to photograph people and communities who enter gardening campaigns, including RHS Britain in Bloom and RHS It’s Your Neighbourhood. The images are an anthropological study of the dynamics between public display and the gardener’s social standing and explore how this impacts on the wider community.
Visiting ‘in Bloom’ and It’s Your Neighbourhood groups in Manchester, East Ayrshire, Fareham, Castle Point and Tower Hamlets in London, the artists said, “We were initially sceptical about photographing community gardening groups. We felt that communities didn’t really exist anymore. What we found when we visited various groups around the country blew us away. We found that community could exist in the most unlikely places, from a tower block to an alleyway, using gardening as a cohesive link to bind the community together and improve their environment”.
Check out a selection of Exhibition Images.
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Using ICT for Water Management in India
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 21st, 2011
Source: Springwise
From In India, mobile water tracking system updates local residents:
The reliability of water supply is a major issue for millions of households in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Although water is meant to be delivered to communities via a piped supply on a rotational schedule, the water often isn’t being piped when it should be — leaving families waiting indefinitely for supplies. Hoping to provide a solution, we recently came across NextDrop.
The NextDrop system, designed and set up by a team of Stanford and Berkeley graduate students, began operations in Hubli, India last year, having won a grant from the Gates Foundation, according to a report on MobileActive.org. In order to communicate with residents when the water is available, valvemen call the NextDrop interactive voice response system upon opening their neighborhood valves. NextDrop then texts the inhabitants of the area the news that water is being piped 30 – 60 minutes before it arrives, as well as texting the engineers at the utility live data on the water delivery. Residents are then contacted randomly to verify the accuracy of the data supplied by the valvemen.If there is any conflict between the data supplied by the valvemen and the residents, the engineers are alerted. These engineers are also able to step in if the valves are not initially reported open when they should be.
According to mobileactive.org, the Hubli pilot initially launched with 180 participating families across five water valve districts in Hubli, and NextDrop now plan to go on and expand to encompass 1000 households covering 25 valve areas over the next year. Crowdsourcing may be one of the simplest ways of solving social problems we know of; relying on the participation of those it benefits. What other social problem could you apply the model to?
Read the full article on Springwise for related articles. or visit NextDrop to find out more
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Effective Use of Trigeneration in Australia
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 11th, 2011
Source: Green Buildings Alive via Sustainable Cities Collective
Investa’s Trigen Image via The Fifth Estate
From “Australia’s first trigeneration ‘precinct’ is up and running!” by Craig Roussac:
[...] Sydney now has its first trigeneration precinct, where one building’s engine can power another one’s energy needs. Why was it necessary? To answer that question, let’s clarify a couple of things. First, when we say trigeneration we’re really describing a more elaborate form of cogeneration or combined heat and power (CHP). Cogeneration describes a system where the waste heat from a natural gas-powered engine that generates electricity is captured and used on-site. In instances where that waste heat (thermal energy) is directed through an absorption chiller to generate cooling, the system is referred to as trigeneration. Using gas as a fuel offers a significant reduction in carbon emissions when compared to coal-fired power generation, and the heat reclaim adds to the system efficiency. Sounds good, doesn’t it? As always, the devil is in the detail – particularly in warm climates such as those enjoyed by most Australians.
It goes without saying that electricity is almost always useful in buildings, wherever you are. Heat, on the other hand, is useful for much of the year in cold climates, but its benefits are greatly reduced in mild climates such as the one we’re blessed with in Sydney. The obvious solution for warm-weather situations where you don’t need much heat is to convert it into another form of thermal energy known as “coolth”. Hence the popularity of ‘trigeneration’ in this part of the world.
Investa installed a trigeneration plant along with a host of other environmentally-friendly features at its new 6-star office development, Coca-Cola Place in North Sydney. Ideally such plants are designed and operated to strike a balance between electrical loads and thermal loads. That is to say, you want to run the generator for extended periods at peak efficiency and have sufficient demand for thermal energy to take up all the waste heat from the electricity generation process.
Reciprocating gas engines need to be heavily loaded. If the electrical load drops below 60-70% the engine has to stop. If there isn’t demand for all the waste heat, you merely have a gas ‘generator’, not co- or trigeneration. What Investa found was that efficiency measures which were driving down electricity demand were compromising the efficient operation of the plant. It was sitting idle almost all the time. Because the base building is operating so efficiently, even with increased demand for electricity during warm weather (due to air-conditioning) the problem didn’t go away because the electrical load would drop right off whenever the absorption chiller kicked in. There was simply no way to run the building efficiently and also operate the trigeneration plant. This appears to be the choice faced by many owners of trigeneration plants.
Investa’s solution was to lease the building’s entire Energy Centre (plant room) to a specialist operator and enter into two 12-year energy supply agreements to round out the package. The arrangement links the Coca-Cola building and Deutsche Bank Place via the electricity grid. Because Investa’s partners, Cogent and Origin, are licensed electricity retailers, they are able to manage the electrical loads between the two buildings on the National Electricity Market. Effectively the system now services an electrical load of a combined 70,000 sqm highly efficient building coupled to the thermal load of a 28,000 sqm building. This is sufficient to allow for daily and seasonal fluctuations in energy demand while still allowing the plant to run efficiently for up to 14 hours per day. Most of the thermal energy will now be captured and used efficiently most of the time.
[...]
Read the full article by Craig Roussac for Green Buildings Alive.
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Mandela Market Place: Urban Food And Community Initiative in Oakland
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 3rd, 2011
Source: Mandela Marketplace via this article on Sustainable Cities Collective
The WYSE Team delivers fresh food to the sales point at the local bottle shop.
Mandela Marketplace is a non-profit organization that works in partnership with local residents, family farmers, and community-based businesses to improve health, create wealth, and build assets through cooperative food enterprises in low income communities. Mandela Marketplace uses a community-driven economic framework to improve health, create wealth and build assets in low-income communities. The organization evolved since 2001, first as a project of the Environmental Justice Institute – Tides Center, until incorporating in 2005 as a stand-alone 501c3 organization. Mandela Marketplace innovates the assessment, development, and application of a community food system economy that strengthens community health, integrity and identity through economic opportunity and empowerment for inner-city Oakland residents and businesses, and local family farms.
Projects Include:
- Mandela Foods Cooperative: A worker- and community-owned retail grocery store and nutrition education center in West Oakland that addresses economic empowerment and community health. It offers fresh, affordable produce from local family farms, food preparation classes and healthy prepared foods, as well as profit sharing with the community through community-investment accounts.
- West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered (WYSE): An afterschool program with a mission to teach leadership skills to youth and young adults. WYSE’s goal to advocate for healthy communities focuses on the built environment and food security through projects like: Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance, Burbank Garden, and WYSE Streets.
- Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance (HNSA): An alliance between store owners, community members and Mandela MarketPlace that works to improve community physical and environmental health by not only improving the affordability and quality of produce in convenience stores, but also by improving the store environment and its relationship in the community.
- Family Farmers: Mandela Foods and Mandela MarketPlace have a strong commitment to local, under-resourced and minority producers. We have long-term working relationships with farmers who use sustainable farming practices from Bakersfield, Fresno, Dinuba, Watsonville, Salinas, Gilroy, Livingston and Modesto. Our Produce Distribution Center supports small, local farms by establishing a local, alternative distribution network that passes on wholesale prices to networks of neighborhood stores and other community based businesses.
- Senior Market Booths: Mandela Marketplace operates weekly fresh produce market booths at area Senior Centers and residential facilities. Seniors are able to purchase farm fresh produce and wholesome basic staples at affordable prices in a convenient, friendly, and helpful atmosphere.
- Burbank Garden East Oakland: Early in 2009 we met a man by the name of Bill Richie, who worked for the city of Oakland. He had been left in charge of the sprawling Burbank Garden. Bill offered WYSE the opportunity to revitalize the garden and reconnect the school and community to the garden. Our goal is to renovate the garden and grow pesticide-free produce there. We plan to organize the community around self-sustainability by growing food locally with their own resources and those available through Mandela MarketPlace.
- Building Blocks Collaborative: The Building Blocks Collaborative (BBC) is a partnership of multi-sector community organizations in Alameda County. We are developing a blueprint to improve community conditions in order to support the well-being of our children, starting from the earliest stages of life.
At the USSF2010, Mandela Marketplace’s Quinton Sankofa and James Berk of Mandela Foods Cooperative presented to a workshop hosted by Permaculture.coop called Pathways to Sustainable Self-Governance. Check out these videos to find out more.
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Connecting Britain To A European Supergrid
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on April 19th, 2011
Source: guardian.co.uk
Image: The Guardian
From “BritNed power cable boosts hopes for European supergrid” by Damian Carrington:
It stretches 260km under the North Sea, contains 23,000 tonnes of copper and lead, and may represent the first step towards a renewable energy revolution based on a European electricity “supergrid”. The £500m BritNed cable, which has just entered operation, is the first direct current electricity link from the UK to another country in 25 years. The high voltage cable, a joint venture between the UK National Grid and the Dutch grid operator TenneT, has a capacity of 1,000MW, the equivalent of a nuclear power station. It runs from the Isle of Grain in Kent to Maasvlakte, near Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.
High voltage DC (HVDC) cables allow electricity to be transmitted over much greater distances than existing alternating current lines, which start losing power after 80km. A network of HVDC cables across Europe is seen as the key to “weather-proofing” the large scale use of renewable energy, some forms of which are intermittent and have to be balanced in real time with generation elsewhere. “Our investment in this interconnector means that we are joining a much wider European electricity market,” said Nick Winser, executive director of National Grid. “This ability we now have to move power across national borders means we can use the full potential of renewable energy from wind – making it easier to import when wind is not available and export when there is a surplus.”
In the short term, linking the UK and European grids boosts the UK’s energy security and helps stabilise wholesale energy prices. Chris Huhne, secretary of state for energy and climate change, said: “Renewables win as it means surplus wind power can be easily shared [and] consumers win as a single European market puts pressure on prices.”
“This is a major step,” said Louise Hutchins, head of UK energy campaigns at Greenpeace. “It sends a signal to renewable manufacturers that we’re a step closer to unlocking the potential of one the world’s main renewable power houses – the North Sea.”
Read the full article by Damian Carrington on the Guardian.
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Adelaide’s Urban Orchard: DVD
Posted in Models, Research by Kate Archdeacon on April 7th, 2011
Source: Friends of the Earth (Adelaide) via Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network
Tracing the history of food gathering and production on the Adelaide Plains, from the Kaurna Aboriginal nation to present day backyard gardens, An Urban Orchard is a celebration of growing and sharing good food.
In the inner southern suburbs of the city of Adelaide, South Australia, local residents meet to share the bounty of their backyards. Around the table of the ‘Urban Orchard’ produce exchange, people from diverse backgrounds share their knowledge of food production and preparation. While deceptively simple, the exchange is a rich opportunity for building community, reducing waste and powerful element in emerging local food systems, where the talk is more often of ‘food metres’ than ‘food miles’. Focusing on the emergence of homegrown fruit and vegetable exchanges, the film follows the journeys of local gardeners involved in the exchange and offers inspiration for other communities to build more just, sustainable and local food systems in their neighbourhoods.
Check out the Urban Orchard trailer here, and visit the Friends of the Earth’s website to purchase a copy. DVDs cost $15, plus $5 postage.
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“Green Demolition”: Localised Redistribution of Materials
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on March 21st, 2011
Source: Change Observer
From D-Build: A sustainable model for the second life of buildings by Maria Popova:
Materials science has been one of the fastest-growing frontiers of innovation, particularly in the realm of sustainable design. Yet there seems to be an odd disconnect between our desire to reinvent tomorrow’s materials and our failure to intelligently address the life-cycle of today’s. This is precisely what Syracuse-based project D-Build is trying to change through a new model for materials reuse and upcycling in building deconstruction, using principles of design thinking to change the afterlife of architecture. An alternative to both traditional demolition, which can be costly and dangerous, and traditional deconstruction, which is time-consuming and requires a large workforce, D-Build uses a hybrid process called “green demolition.” A building is cut into pieces of manageable size and processed on the ground by a tight, efficient local crew. The site then serves as a hub for connecting buildings, people and businesses, offering a peer-to-peer marketplace for users to exchange materials salvaged from deconstructed buildings and sell industrial design products made with these upcycled materials.
This time-lapse footage captures D-Build’s fascinating, nearly ant-like deconstruction process.
Read the full article by Maria Popova on Change Observer.
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Local Food Systems Put To The Test During QLD Floods
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on March 18th, 2011
Source: Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network
Photo of Rocklea Markets by Marty 1989 via flickr CC
From “Where big food fails in the floods, Food Connect connects“ Emma-Kate Rose reports from Brisbane:
“The resilience of this local food system: being small, nimble, armed with local knowledge – really showed itself up through this event.”
As we all clean up after the floods, we’re also now hearing about the difficult times ahead – rising costs, rising expenditure, inflationary pressure, higher rates, etc. One of the major shortages ahead will be food. Not only have the farms been wiped out, but it’s going to take them years to re-establish crops and plantations. We’ve all heard about the problems at the Rocklea markets, but we haven’t heard about how food supplier, Food Connect, has been faring. Food Connect is a social business which aims as much as possible to put the face on farmers’ food, act as a facilitator between farmers and city folk, create drop off spots called City Cousins for city people to pick up fresh produce, get to know their farmer and get a connection with the land in their bioregion.
Mainstream suppliers go under but Food Connect keeps its head above the floodwaters
The Rocklea Markets were taken out during the floods, and they are the major distribution point in SEQ [South East Queensland]. Food Connect were also on tender [sic] hooks on the Thursday night because they couldn’t deliver on Thursday. But by Friday, the Produce Coordinators Reuben and Luke gave the thumbs up. They were worried because most of the farmers are located within the flood-prone areas… the farmers were ready to supply and they’d worked out alternative transport arrangements for some badly affected farmers. Food Connect went through unabated and actually ended up with excess produce and, in the process, also managed to supply 3,000 meals over the weekend and delivered ice to all the areas with no power. Over the course of the weekend, chefs and volunteers turned up to the warehouse, in non-flood affected Salisbury, to cook up all the excess produce. On the Friday many trucks turned up all through the night and it soon became clear that the humble Food Connect warehouse acted as THE transport hub, because Rocklea was completely under. Robert Pekin, the founder of Food Connect, found that living without power at his home in West End was losing its attraction, so he, his family and a few staff took refuge at the warehouse to receive goods for many small businesses and restaurants who’d heard about them and used them as an interim pick up spot. During the floods, Gympie’s supermarket shelves were empty but the little guys had plenty of stock. It surprised even Robert, and he’s been on about a local food system for 15 years now. He thought, “Here we go, this is the test”. Pretty much all of SEQ was wiped out and Food Connect has about 120 farmers in that area. Astonishingly, only five farmers required help and working bees were organised to help them out with mending fences and other clean up jobs. This shows the strength of local family farms having a direct network to their consumers and the advantages in by-passing the major supermarkets. The sheer power of the major logistics chains, owned by the big supermarkets, clearly didn’t cut it in times of emergency.
Not Far From The Tree: Urban Orchard Network
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on March 9th, 2011
© Not Far From The Tree
Not Far From The Tree puts Toronto’s fruit to good use by picking and sharing the bounty.
When a homeowner can’t keep up with the abundant harvest produced by their tree, they let us know and we mobilize our volunteers to pick the bounty. The harvest is split three ways: 1/3 is offered to the tree owner, 1/3 is shared among the volunteers, and 1/3 is delivered by bicycle to be donated to food banks, shelters, and community kitchens in the neighbourhood so that we’re putting this existing source of fresh fruit to good use. It’s a win-win-win situation! This simple act has profound impact. With an incredible crew of volunteers, we’re making good use of healthy food, addressing climate change with hands-on community action, and building community by sharing the urban abundance.
With our first full season in 2008, Not Far From The Tree has grown quickly:
- We transport all of our equipment and fruit by bicycle, keeping our carbon footprint low.
- We were an official part of Nuit Blanche with our all-night cider-pressing art installation, City Cider.
- We participated in 40+ fairs, festivals, and community events across the city this year.
- We ran 12 preserving workshops to extend the harvest year-round and share local food skills.
- We harvest maple syrup from city trees, too, to demonstrate a local winter crop from Toronto trees (see Syrup in the City)
- We will be starting a public fruit tree mapping initiative to be launched in 2011.
- We helped Toronto’s first community orchard become established.
Visit the website to find out more about this very active project http://www.notfarfromthetree.org/
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Banking on Biodiversity: Joined-up Thinking at its Most Urgent
Posted in Movements, Research by Kate Archdeacon on February 4th, 2011
Source: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
Banking on biodiversity by Dilys Roe, Pavan Sukhdev, David Thomas and Robert Munroe
We’re in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. For those of us in the North, that can seem abstract; for the rural poor in the developing world, it’s all too real. Their absolute dependence on the bounty of forests, deserts and coasts means ‘biodiversity loss’ can mean losing all: food, fuel, building material, medicine, forage, livelihoods and culture. The good news is that it can work the other way. Poor communities, as long-term stewards of the South’s natural riches, are steeped in profound knowledge about them. As this pocketbook shows, working with them can reverse the downward spiral of environmental degradation. By banking on biodiversity, we can protect our natural legacy while tackling poverty locally, nationally and globally.
New wealth of nations: biodiversity and poor economies
Take a forest in rural India. Local villagers graze their livestock, gather fuelwood, fruit and medicinal bark, and hunt for honey. The trees help prevent drought and flood damage by drawing up groundwater and anchoring soils with their roots. Most, if not all, of such direct and indirect ‘flows’ of value into rural or forest-dependent households are public goods and services — received free from wild nature, and not priced or traded in any markets. Because of this, ‘ecosystem services’ are economically invisible. And they do not generally figure in the national accounts that measure a country’s economic activity. Does this matter? Yes. We cannot manage what we do not measure, and economic invisibility is not a good starting point for ensuring that ecosystem services thrive. We risk depleting them because of tradeoffs such as replacing forests with cultivated crops. Putting a value on nature and factoring that into national accounting can help governments and business wake up to the fact that healthy economies rest on healthy ecosystems — as do the wellbeing and livelihoods of the poorest of the rural poor.
Chapter 3, Big ideas in development: Banking on biodiversity
Visit the site to download the free PDF.
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