The post New Book Out Now: Political Ideas for a New Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The book showcases the wealth of transformative ideas that the international commons movement has to offer. With contributions by Kate Raworth, David Bollier, George Monbiot and many others, Our Commons is a political call to arms to all Europeans to embrace the commons and build a new Europe.
Commons Network’s very own Sophie Bloemen and Thomas de Groot worked on this book for almost two years, doing research and interviews, working with academics, policy makers, authors and activists to paint a colourful picture of the commons as the blueprint for a new future, one that is inclusive, ecologically sustainable, equitable, democratic, collaborative, creative and resilient.
Our Commons features reflections on the enclosure of knowledge and the monopolisation of the digital sphere, stories about renewable energy cooperatives and community foodwaste initiatives and urgent pleas to see the city as a commons and to treat health as a common good. Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, the book is first released online as an e-book, free for all to download and share and as a printable PDF. The book will also be available on a wide variety of print-on-demand platforms.
In the next few months, Commons Network will organise a number of official events around the book. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you are interested in hosting a book-launch with the editors and possibly with some of the contributors of the book. Off- and online media that are interested in publishing texts from the book or interviews with the editors and/or contributors are encouraged to reach out to [email protected].
Download the ePub or the print-PDF here and make sure to share this page with as many people as possible, using the hashtag #OurCommonsBook
For all further questions, press inquiries or event bookings, possible citations or cross-posting, or requests for hard-copy printed books, please do not hesitate to reach out to the editors, Thomas de Groot and Sophie Bloemen.
Reprinted from commonsnetwork, you can see the original post here.
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]]>The post Sustainable cities need more than parks, cafes and a riverwalk. They need equity, too appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Originally published on The Conversation
Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran: There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?
We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.
As scholars who study gentrification and social justice, we prefer a model that recognizes all three aspects of sustainability: environment, economy and equity. The equity piece is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. We are interested in models of urban greening that produce real environmental improvements and also benefit long-term working-class residents in neighborhoods that are historically underserved.
Over a decade of research in an industrial section of New York City, we have seen an alternative vision take shape. This model, which we call “just green enough,” aims to clean up the environment while also retaining and creating living-wage blue-collar jobs. By doing so, it enables residents who have endured decades of contamination to stay in place and enjoy the benefits of a greener neighborhood.
‘Parks, cafes and a riverwalk’ can lead to gentrification
Gentrification has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are whiter, wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.
A recent spate of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco- or green gentrification.
Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of toxic sites are scarce in many cities. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for condo towers or lucrative commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can exacerbate the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential gentrifiers and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green amenities.
Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.
Tools for greening differently
Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. There are tools that can make cities both greener and more inclusive, if the political will exists.
The work of the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn and Queens provides examples. The alliance is a community-led organization working to improve environmental conditions and revitalize industry in and along Newtown Creek, which separates these two boroughs. It focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals, as defined by the people who have been most negatively affected by contamination in the area.
The industrial zone surrounding Newtown Creek is a far cry from the toxic stew that The New York Times described in 1881 as “the worst smelling district in the world.” But it is also far from clean. For 220 years it has been a dumping ground for oil refineries, chemical plants, sugar refineries, fiber mills, copper smelting works, steel fabricators, tanneries, paint and varnish manufacturers, and lumber, coal and brick yards.
In the late 1970s, an investigation found that 17 million gallons of oil had leaked under the neighborhood and into the creek from a nearby oil storage terminal. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Newtown Creek on the Superfund list of heavily polluted toxic waste sites in 2010.
The Newtown Creek Alliance and other groups are working to make sure that the Superfund cleanup and other remediation efforts are as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, they are creating new green spaces within an area zoned for manufacturing, rather than pushing to rezone it.
As this approach shows, green cities don’t have to be postindustrial. Some 20,000 people work in the North Brooklyn industrial area that borders Newtown Creek. And a number of industrial businesses in the area have helped make environmental improvements.
Just green enough
The “just green enough” strategy uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. Our new anthology, “Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification,” provides many other examples of the need to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. It also describes efforts to create environmental improvements that explicitly consider equity concerns.
For example, UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, is combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The group advocates for investment and training for existing small businesses that often are Latino-owned. Its goal is not only to expand well-paid manufacturing jobs, but to include these businesses in rethinking what a sustainable economy looks like. Rather than rezoning the waterfront for high-end commercial and residential use, UPROSE is working for an inclusive vision of the neighborhood, built on the experience and expertise of its largely working-class immigrant residents.
This approach illustrates a broader pattern identified by Macalester College geographer Dan Trudeau in his chapter for our book. His research on residential developments throughout the United States shows that socially and environmentally just neighborhoods have to be planned as such from the beginning, including affordable housing and green amenities for all residents. Trudeau highlights the need to find “patient capital” – investment that does not expect a quick profit – and shows that local governments need to take responsibility for setting out a vision and strategy for housing equity and inclusion.
In our view, it is time to expand the notion of what a green city looks like and who it is for. For cities to be truly sustainable, all residents should have access to affordable housing, living-wage jobs, clean air and water, and green space. Urban residents should not have to accept a false choice between contamination and environmental gentrification.
Header photo: Small tankers unload along New York’s Newtown Creek in 2008. Jim Henderson
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]]>The post Why did the German Energiewende succeed appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>First of all came the voluntary, politically and ecologically motivated pioneers, who made it politically viable to introduce the second factor, without which it would have stalled or remained a niche.
The second factor is the regulation that permitted feed-in tariffs, which created a safe market to recuperate investments, which was the third factor.
This combination made the enduring success, while in other countries, where such policies and favourable market conditions were not present, the transition stagnated or even regressed.
Report: Diversity is Strength. The German Energiewende as a Resilient Alternative.
By Tadzio Mueller. Source Network /New Economics Foundation / Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2017
Extract:
The Energiewende and its institutions
Social movements, it has been argued since their heyday in the late 1960s, are actors, or maybe processes, that expand the limits of the possible, that bring ‘the new’ into the world, precisely because they emerge around problematics that the existing set of social and political institutions cannot find solutions for. At the same time, it is precisely this quality of bringing the new into the world that also brings with it one of the key problems of a politics based in movement(s): how do the gains of social movements become generalised and permanent? It is hard, in fact impossible, to constantly stay mobilised. The German anti-Nuclear movement, for example, fought long and hard against any new nuclear power installation in the country. But nobody can stay in the streets forever, so at some point, it becomes necessary to institutionalise movement gains. It is here where movements often fail – and where, for a variety of reasons, the German Energiewende did not fail. It is therefore to the institutionality of the process we now turn. I will argue that its remarkable dynamism and resilience are the result of a peculiar combination of local movement processes and national legislation, and of an unusual combination of political and economic logics. It is what it is not because of the basis of a particular purity, but because it lives by an open logic of articulation.
Diversity is Strength by Tadzio Mueller, as recommended and curated by P2P Foundation on Scribd
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]]>The post Project Of The Day: TransforMap appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Open Map is an open source foundation for a variety of cartographic purposes. Yet a variety of new organizations are developing projects that document commons based resources. One such project is TransforMap.
Extracted from: https://discourse.transformap.co/t/transformap-a-short-introduction/289
There are Plenty of Alternatives. TransforMap makes them visible.
It will give everybody the opportunity to map all the initiatives, communities, projects, worker-owned, self-managed, democratically organised companies and other institutions dedicated to meeting people’s needs, serving the common good and/or contributing to a sustainable way of life.
TransforMap will/can show all the places, spaces and networks that work on fostering cooperation and deepening human relationships through (co-)producing, exchanging, contributing, gifting and sharing, for a free, fair and sustainable world.
TransforMap invites all existing mapping initiatives to cooperate and co-create maps based on an open pool of data, a common taxonomy, free software and standardised APIs4. It will be/is published under an Open Data License.
Our world is transforming. There are old and new alternatives all over the planet. TransforMap will show you how to get there.
Extracted from: https://wiki.transformaps.net/wiki/Main_Page
Background about TransforMap:
TransforMap works towards an online-platform for you to visualize the myriads of alternatives to the dominant economic thinking on a single mapping system. It will give everybody the opportunity to map all the initiatives, communities, projects, worker-owned, self-managed, democratically organised companies and other institutions dedicated to meeting people’s needs, serving the common good and/or contributing to a sustainable way of life.
On this mediawiki you are able to view and edit the following TransforMap components in its early beginning. It is called TransformapS to stress the fact that there are many many maps that are showing the transformation. There are three components on this wiki:
- Collection of Points of Interest (POIs) (overview of last edits) – this is where you can add an initiative or an event relevant to TransforMap
- The Atlas – A Collection of Mapping Resources – here you can add existing maps and other mapping resources that are relevant for TransforMap
- Transformap Taxonomy – this is a place to work on TransforMap’s categories of initiatives
Extracted from: https://discourse.transformap.co/t/how-to-get-involved/231
You like the idea of TransforMap? You want to get involved?
Here are a few ways you can choose to contribute! Find the right place and task for you to become part of TranforMap! Add your questions and suggestions. Help us to integrate more people. W E L C O M E!
- You have a database of initiatives:
- Open your data and get in touch [add contact]: let’s discuss what kind of license will enable both maximum collaboration and the preservation of your interests
- Why not testing TransforMap’s Taxonomy version 1.0?
- You have programming skills or are an organization with such skills at hand? Contribute with programming, pool your technical resources with the TransforMap community. Visithttps://trello.com/b/adHSEyXl/engineering5 to know what needs to be done on the software side (we’re working on making this more comprehensive, bear with us).
- You are well connected to the local alternatives of your city/region: why not running a local test mapping using TransforMap’s Taxonomy version 1.0. Check out the tools available here!
- You’ve got some other skills to volunteer? Support with any other means and get in touch via our globalmailing list [email protected]
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]]>The post Project Of The Day: Stocksy appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Consequently, it was a surprise to her to receive an infringement notice for using one of her own photographs. Getty Images, a corporate stock photo cite, hosts a collection of public domain images on its site, apparently without indicating they are public domain.
Getty’s enforcement arm, Licensing Compliance Services, apparently didn’t put a parameter in they monitoring algorithm to disregard public domain images. So they ended up threatening public access activist for using her own work.
Highsmith is not the only person disenchanted with Getty.
Extracted from: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-business/founder-of-istockphoto-reveals-real-reason-he-left-why-hes-started-new-stock-photo-company/
In 2006, Bruce sold iStockphoto to Getty Images for around £30 million, and later left the company, but has now decided to start a new stock image venture. We caught up with him to find out why.
AA: Why did you sell iStockphoto to Getty Images?
BL: “There were several reasons. I had partners I couldn’t get along with. They were focused on revenue and profits. I was focused on the community. I couldn’t afford to buy them out. I felt like I had accomplished everything I had set out to do.
“I love to build things, trying to maximise revenue and margins is not as exciting to me. The community at iStock was surprisingly strong. Even today, with nobody at the helm of iStockphoto, there are still people hanging on the ship as it is sinking into the depths of apathy.”
Extracted from: http://www.fastcompany.com/3007439/tech-forecast/istockphoto-creator-bruce-livingstone-takes-second-stab-stock-photos
“It’s hard for me to criticize their corporation,” Livingstone says. “They’re responsible to their shareholders. They have to keep making profits and keep having growth. I totally get it. I don’t fault them for that.” But within his photographer network, it seemed like what started as a friendly business had grown up to become a monster. “One of the most depressing ones for me,” Livingstone says, “[were] people who I had helped change their lives—real estate agents or veterans or policemen who had quit their jobs and had focused on making stock photography and were earning a living—suddenly saying, I’m going to have to go back to my old job.”
Extracted from: http://collectivehub.com/2016/05/how-to-be-successful-for-the-second-time/
Their start-up story was the stuff of fairytales. But in 2012, three years after selling iStockphoto to Getty Images for US$50 million, Bruce Livingstone and Brianna Wettlaufer decided to start all over again. The pair, along with a small team of iStockphoto veterans, founded Stocksy – a rapidly growing photographer’s co-operative where the photographers own equity in the company, with a finely curated collection of stock photos and a distinctive aesthetic driven by a relentless ambition to make stock photography better than it has been before. Where this industry often pays photographers around 20 percent of profits from each license, Stocksy passes on 50 per cent on all photos, as well as paying dividends.
Extracted from: https://www.stocksy.com/service/about/
Stocksy is home to a highly curated collection of royalty-free stock photography that is beautiful, distinctive, and highly usable.
We’re also a cooperative! (Think more artist respect and support, less patchouli.) We believe in creative integrity, fair profit sharing, and co-ownership, with every voice being heard.
OUR CO-OP APPROACH
We are a photographer-owned cooperative founded on the principles of equality, respect, and fair distribution of profits. Our contributing photographers receive 50% of a Standard License Purchase and 75% of an Extended License Purchase – and every single Stocksy contributor receives a share of the company.
Extracted from: http://www.vicnews.com/news/258039681.html
The model has competition elsewhere, but its co-op structure means each of Stocksy’s 600 contributing photographers directly benefits from year-end profits.
“After a year of operating, we’re getting close to that magic number of $200,000 in royalty payments per month,” Livingstone says. “We hit profitability after eight months, started spending again and now we’re in profitability again. It’s evidence that we’re there. After a year, for any business, it’s kind of unheard of, especially for an online start-up.”
“The co-op model helps set up a new paradigm, but it doesn’t help the other 95,000 photographers out there struggling,” Livingstone says. “But we wanted to create something sustainable first and then worry about big numbers after that.”
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]]>The post Vernacular Transport appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>One of the interesting effects of advancing technology is a progressive reduction in economies of scale in many industries and systems. Some of the bottleneck technologies you note do have some interesting, if still speculative, alternatives.
New proposed systems like SkyTran or Hyperloop have significantly lower economies of scale than conventional rail–deliberately so because they find themselves challenged by political conservatives increasingly resistant to ‘big ticket’ infrastructure investments.
There have also been small scale systems overlooked in the conventional urban context,
like cable car systems or, one of my favorites, the ‘banana monorail’ which has been experimentally adapted to passenger use in the developing world context.
These have always looked like a lot of fun to me, and could have potential space applications as the supports for the cableway can be designed to be self-supporting and quick-deployable.
Monorail
The WireRoad (TarBato in Nepali) is a low-cost, pedal-powered monorail transport system for people and goods, modified by EcoSystems/VillageTech Solutions from an original technology called the ‘banana cableway’. Those industrial systems cover many hundred thousand kilometers, and carry ‘trains’ of bananas, pulled by a worker who walks under the wire. EcoSystems modified the cableway to provide an alternative all-weather, self-propelled transport system, with low environmental impact, using human- or electric-power. In agricultural areas, it can pass over the fields, so it does not displace agricultural use of the lands.
Train
In Cambodia there was an aid program to encourage rural development through the supply of a kind of simple general purpose modular motor that could be adapted to many uses. One of the ingenious uses devised by locals was a simple rail car that could be used on the long-abandoned traditional rail system. Called the ‘bamboo train’, these have now become something of a tourist attraction in themselves.
These trains run through the countryside around Battambang in Cambodia. They are an incredibly simple design and as the name suggest are made of a considerable amount of bamboo, which gives great strength for little weight. They run on the old railway lines that were built by the French when Cambodia was still a colony. So who gets right of way? Well the rule is the train with the most passengers gets right of way. However if a train is carrying a motorbike it has right of way over a train carrying more passengers. However everyone seems to take it in their stride and help each other out in taking the trains off the tracks.
Shipping
Shipping now finds competition, at least in some niches, from revived sailing vessels, such as the Fair Trade Cruisers which now travel to the under-served markets of West Africa and South America. With the benefit of new
technology, new kinds of sailing vessels based on technologies like rigid solar wingsails, offer potential to make this increasingly viable.
I think these things represent a long term trend in the Post-Industrial era.
Industrial demassification is driven by the shrinking economies of scale afforded by advancing technology–one of the key factors eroding Industrial Age paradigms from within.
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