Walking down the high street of a place described as one of the UK’s most ethical towns, the first thing you notice is the absence of national chain stores and fast food outlets. Instead, you find a diverse mix of independent shops selling organic food, clothes, art, antiques and furniture, as well as cafes and restaurants and an abundance of charity shops.

This is Totnes – a small, historic market town in the south-west of England that has garnered a reputation as a thriving hub for art, music, theatre and alternative lifestyles. Noticeboards around the town advertise everything from yoga lessons to Zen meditation, together with posters for various events – including the next Extinction Rebellion non-violent direct action training session.

In many shop windows today, there are stickers which read “Totnes pound accepted here”. Sadly, after 12 years of operation, the Totnes pound will come to an end on June 30, 2019. This highly symbolic initiative inspired other local currencies including the Bristol pound and the Brixton pound, which encourage people to spend locally and keep money in the community.

But the gradual shift to a cashless society and a lack of uptake by local government agencies have ultimately led to the Totnes pound’s demise. Rob Hopkins – co-founder of community-led charity Transition Town Totnes and initiator of the local currency – thinks the Totnes pound has helped to build a sense of community and strengthened the town’s identity, with the £21 note reflecting the local sense of humour.

The impact of austerity

The Totnes pound is just one example of the kind of outside the box thinking that has kept this local community resilient in the face of austerity. Since 2010, the pressure on local authority budgets across England has been intense, with a 50% decline in central funding support. The result has been cuts to public services and less money circulating in local economies.

In Totnes – as elsewhere – there are visible signs of these trends, with the closure of local bank branches and “to let” signs on vacant shops. According to Francis Northrop, former manager of Transition Town Totnes, smaller rural communities like Totnes face difficulties because they lack the economies of scale which make cheap goods and services more accessible in big cities.

Leer más: Retail decline, in maps: England and Wales lose 43m square metres of shop space

Totnes has responded by developing a new ethical economy that puts community values at the core. The closure of the Dairy Crest factory in 2000 convinced many locals that the answer was not to wait for inward investment from big businesses outside of the town. Instead, the focus is on internal investment: harnessing community wealth to address community needs.

But unlike anti-austerity efforts seen in larger cities – such as Preston – a small town like Totnes cannot rely on anchor institutions including local government, universities or hospitals, to redirect their spending into the local economy.

Indeed, one such institution – Dartington College of Art – relocated to Falmouth in 2010 with the loss of an estimated £6m a year in local spending from 900 students and staff. Instead, Totnes has had to show it’s possible for small towns to withstand such losses, by drawing from a toolbox of different methods to build community wealth.

A new ethical economy

The response has grown from more than a decade of community trust building, since the launch of Transition Town Totnes in 2006. Initially set up to promote local resilience in the face of climate change and peak oil, Transition Town Totnes now coordinates an extensive range of local projects, and forms part of a global Transition network, with initiatives from around the world sharing knowledge and ideas.

Some of these projects focus directly on combating the effects of austerity. For example, Caring Town Totnes is a collaboration of around 80 organisations seeking to counter the impact of budget cuts on local health and social services.

Current Transition Town Totnes manager Jenny Gellatly is also working with the Common Cause Foundation to explore how it may be possible to place compassionate values at the heart of the future transformation of the town. During a recent visit for my research, she explained to me how initiatives like these promote caring for neighbours, friends and family, to help ensure that the most vulnerable people in the community get the support they need.

Other projects focus on building up the local economy and making it more self-sufficient. An important breakthrough came with the launch of the Reconomy Center, to support new enterprises and promote local investment. The centre hosts an annual Local Entrepreneur Forum to crowdfund low carbon, ethical and sustainable business projects.

A number of organisations also came together to produce a Local Economic Blueprint, which highlights the economic benefits for small independent businesses in Totnes of sourcing goods and services from other local businesses and suppliers, to ensure more money circulates in the economy.

The next critical step was the launch of the Totnes Community Development Society – a not-for-profit that raises funds and implements local development projects. It’s currently implementing the Atmos Totnes project, to transform the disused Dairy Crest site into a school for food entrepreneurs and a business incubator, with affordable housing.

In the face of severe challenges, Totnes has shown how a community can mobilise to achieve a more ethical and resilient local economy. It will be fascinating to observe how the town changes in the years ahead, and to see what the next initiative will be, to replace the Totnes pound.

Author Brendan Barrett is Specially Appointed Professor, Center for the Study of Co*Design, Osaka University

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Mirella Ferraz:  Since 2013, the Network of Wellbeing, where I work, has hosted community potlucks in Totnes, a small town in the south of England. These potlucks, which are open to all, have been helping build friendships among residents since day one. We started the potlucks because we realized that there weren’t many avenues for local community members to participate in events that are accessible, affordable, and family-friendly. The community potlucks take place on the third Friday of each month at the local church hall. The premise is quite simple: just bring some food to share. Around 50-100 people of all ages, including children, attend these events. During holidays and festivals, the potlucks have attracted around 300 people. Often there is entertainment, such as live music, poetry readings, children’s activities, wool spinning, or cooking demonstrations that are led by local volunteers.

“It has been wonderful to see the Community Potlucks go from strength to strength, and help transform the town in the process,” says Larch Maxey, Network of Wellbeing’s community project manager. “When we started, very few people had even heard of a potluck, let alone been to one, now it’s become the default whenever an organization meets, when people have a party, or celebration, it’s a potluck.”

For five years, the Network of Wellbeing took responsibility for organizing the community potlucks, but recently, a group of local residents has taken on this responsibility. Now, the potlucks are run by the community for the community, Wendy Douglas, one of the volunteer coordinators, says. “Potluck suppers are a wonderful community event, open to everyone, and costing no more than the contents of the homemade pot of food for you,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity to meet other locals over a plate of delicious food. No need to be lonely or eat alone when there are events like this to attend. The Totnes Community Potluck has enabled me to meet many like-minded people, and I enjoy my involvement as a volunteer. I hope it will continue well into the future.”

The initiative is also helping tackle social isolation, one of the greatest issues of our times. “I love the simplicity of potlucks — open to everyone and a great way to help bring people together,” Maxey says. “Loneliness is as bad for us as smoking, and potlucks are a great way to connect people and overcome loneliness.”

If you are inspired by the idea of the community potlucks, but are unable to attend the regular events in Totnes, you could launch a similar event in your local community. If this is of interest, then check out the Network of Wellbeing’s Community Potluck Guidelines, which provide you with all of the information and inspiration needed to successfully organize these community-building events.  “We’re also happy to speak with you about our experience of this event, and provide any guidance that may be helpful,” Maxey says. Please get in touch with Maxey at [email protected] for any support you may need.

Have you listened to our new podcast “The Response“? It’s a riveting look into how communities help each other out after deadly natural disasters. Listen here:

Images provided by Network of Wellbeing

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Join us for this intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and Synergia Institute. This course offers participants a practical guide on how we can shift our economy to put people and planet first This programme brings together international scholars and experts who will explore all key areas of society; food, democracy, housing, social care, the commons and social finance. This course is useful for people involved in developing social enterprises and co-operative organisations, students, activists and academics.

An intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and the Synergia Institute

What is the ethical economy and how does it work?

• Comprehensive exploration of economic democracy and sustainability as viable bases for system change at local, regional and international scales.
• Unique combination of history, theory, and practice.
• Strong focus on personal & professional experience & participation as key elements of the course.

The Synergia Programme will include

The Problematic with John Restakis
How might we frame the historic moment in which we find ourselves from a political economy perspective? This session presents both a historic retrospective on the movement for economic democracy and how the current configuration of global capitalism demands new perspectives, models, and action strategies for change makers world-wide.

The Partner State with John Restakis
The current crisis of the welfare state is the culmination of a process of de legitimation that has been in the making for more than a generation. For many, the very notion of the state as a force for the good is untenable. But is there a way to reclaim and re conceptualize the state as an institution in service to the common good? This session introduces the concept of the Partner State as an extension of the principles that characterize co-operative economic democracy as a political, economic, and social ideal.

Labour and the Precariat with Cilla Ross
With the emergence of revolutionary digital and informatics technologies, traditional forms of labour are rapidly being replaced with the rise of a new class of precarious and atomised work that threatens not only the livelihoods millions but also the very meaning of work itself. This session examines the implications of this revolutionary shift in the forms of labour, what this entails for the well-being of workers, local communities, and society, and how co-operative and human-centred models of work can challenge the dominant paradigm.

The Commons with Michel Bauwens
Over the last decade, the idea of the commons has emerged as a powerful antidote to the prevailing private property and free market notion of how economies, markets, and social relations might be organized. In particular, the rise of digital platforms and the restructuring of online work through the operation of peer-to-peer networks has offered a revolutionary re think of how co-operative and commons-based principles are redefining both economic and societal relations in service to the common good. This session examines what the idea of the commons means for re visioning models of political economy as alternatives to the status quo.

For more information and registration, visit the Shumacher College site

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379 mayors representing more than 68 million Americans said they would implement the Accord regardless of the head-in-the-sand attitude of the country’s president. More significantly, given the weakness of the Paris agreement, more than 40 cities have gone further and committed to 100% renewable energy no later than 2050.

This practical defiance highlights how the city in our globalised world is emerging as a place of resistance, alternatives and solutions to our world’s multiple crises.

Cities are privileged places

Cities have a long history as cradles of social transformation, whether it was the urban revolts in Budapest, Stockholm and other European cities in 1848, the municipal victories and participatory budgeting experiments of the Workers Party in Brazil in the late 1980s or the emerging municipalist movement in Spain and other regions more recently. Cities constitute a privileged place to organise collectively and to imagine new ways of living and working together, spaces where bodies and minds interact and where ideas spread quickly and have unparalleled impact.

This is not to over-romanticise them. Cities, as other human constructions, have their own structures of concentrated power, inequality and exclusion. Greek city-states framed ideas of democracy that we still use today, but their societies were based on slavery and patriarchy. Medieval city-states were laboratories of modern liberal democracies and welfare systems based on taxation, but they were also the places where capitalism, colonialism, international finance and unfair trade relations emerged. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries.

Nevertheless, cities have noticeably emerged as a critical arena for many recent social struggles from the Arab Spring in Tahrir square, Cairo or the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. It has happened at time when cities for the first time in history now house more than 54% of the world’s population (expected to reach 67% by 2050).

For social movements, the cities are a strategic place to organise, not only practically but also politically. More than two decades of neoliberalism have succeeded in entrenching corporate power within national and international institutions and international legal frameworks – making it ever more difficult terrain for people’s movements, who have to defeat powerful interests and appeal to a deliberately disempowered electorate. Cities by contrast offer a more level playing field where people power can still take on and defeat corporate power and thereby prove that political mobilisation can deliver results.

Participation and power

The political theorist, the late Benjamin Barber, argued that cities are capable of reconnecting “participation, which is local, with power, which is central”. While nation states used to play that role, he argued they have become too large (and we would add also too captured by corporate capital) to sustain the kind of “bottom-up citizenship, civil society and voluntary community” that is essential to democracy.

Across the world, social movements are actively seizing this potential power,advancing important social demands, whether for dignified work, sustainable food systems, green energy or racial justice. Much of this transformation takes place under the radar, as mainstream largely corporate media continues to focus all its attention on the happenings in the national corridors of power.

Even we were surprised in 2015 when our organisation, the Transnational Institute, decided to look at the number of municipalities who had brought water services back under public control and discovered 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water. Given the power of transnational water companies like Suez and Veolia – and the grip that the ideology of privatisation has on national and international water policy – this was nothing short of a silent revolution. 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water… – nothing short of a silent revolution.

A follow-up report earlier this year that broadened its focus to include energy and housing unveiled 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services involving more than 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries. TNI researcher, Satoko Kishimoto, says “What is most important about these cases is that they kill once and for all the myth that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism. They show that not only is there a clear alternative to privatisation, but that it also has the potential to both improve services and transform society and environment for the better.”

An alternative to neoliberalism

In many cases, the experience of resisting corporate capital and defending rights, such as those of access to water or housing, has itself been transformational. It has helped activists reconnect with those alienated by neoliberalism, and also opened up peoples’ imaginations to think of new ways of organising work, services and social needs. The energy and dynamism that is released is palpable, captured in documentary films such as Demain (Tomorrow)

The experiences of trying to set up green businesses in Totnes in the UK, for example, eventually led to an international project, Reconomy, that seeks to build local economies that are sustainable, equitable and anchored in wellbeing, rather than tied to economic growth at any cost. An initiative by the New Delhi government to set up hundreds of small free health clinics to do diagnostics and simple treatments has inspired health activists across the world. In Barcelona, the experience of resisting house repossession inspired some activists to fight and win municipal elections based on a participatory platform of policies that include fining banks that speculate on empty homes, creating a new municipal energy company and providing sanctuary to refugees.

Barcelona’s new city council is now helping to foster a movement of ‘fearless cities’ committed to the same principles of participation, openness and social and environmental justice. Their first gathering in Barcelona in June 2017 attracted more than 600 participants representing more than 100 municipalist platforms from around the world.

The feminization of politics

Municipal activism is also an opportunity to put feminism and the feminization of politics at the forefront. As Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird have argued “the feminization of politics, beyond its concern for increasing presence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing the way politics is done.” In practice, this means leaving aside patterns of our patriarchal society such as competition, dominant leaderships, vertical organizations, egoism and structures that have typically excluded women from politics. It is noticeable how many of the new leaders in the municipalist movement are women.

Perhaps the proximity, scope and nature of the political conflicts at the city level, such as struggles for access to water and housing, rather than monetary policy or military alliances, also provide an arena where non-patriarchal modes of political action are better suited.

Vandana Shiva, philosopher and activist, at Fearless Cities, June 9 – 11, 2017. Flickr/Barcelona En Comú. Some rights reserved.

Transformative Cities Initiative: a unique participatory award

These successful experiences around the remunicipalisation of public services and the rising municipalist movement have inspired TNI to launch the Transformative Cities Initiative. Our goal is to build an atlas of real utopias, make these experiences viral, and to share the learning that comes from implementing these experiments. This month, we are launching a unique participatory award to recognise transformative experiences. In the first year, the focus will be on water, energy and housing. In future years, the initiative will expand its focus to other areas such as migration and solidarity, territorial food governance and drugs harm reduction.

We are encouraging both social movements and cities to use this opportunity to share your story. We plan to bring participants together, to learn from and systematise these experiences, in order to inspire and accelerate the process of transformation in other regions and places. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates.

At a time when our current political framework offers most people a choice between neoliberal globalisation and authoritarian nationalism, between the global mall and the border wall, it is critical that the real alternatives coming from social movements are fertilized and strengthened.

A strategy that only seeks to resist increasingly authoritarian national governments, defending an ever-shrinking civic space, is demoralising and self-defeating. Similarly a strategy that articulates national and international alternatives that have no chance of realisation is equally disempowering.

Cities offer the chance to break with the dichotomy of despair – they give us a chance to trial out transformative change at a local level, and in so doing providing the building blocks for the global transformation that is so desperately needed. As the Fearless Cities gathering put it, “The local was where democracy was born; it is now where we will recover it.”

About the authors

Originally published in Open Democracy

Lead image:  Some rights reserved by Overpass Light Brigade

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Thursday, 21 June, 2018 – 18:00 to Saturday, 23 June, 2018 – 13:00

The 4th International Transition Design Symposium
6.00pm Thursday 21st June – 1:00pm, Saturday 23rd June 2018
Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon

The 2018 Transition Design Symposium will, for the first time, bring together representatives from major movements and initiatives to discuss the urgent need for sustainable societal transitions and systems-level change, and initiate the connections that will make rapid transition possible.

Speakers: Rob Hopkins, co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and the Transition Network, Professor Terry Irwin, Head of the School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Michel Bauwens, P2P Network and Commons Transitions; John Thackara, author of How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today; noted futurist Stuart Candy and Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design at University of New South Wales, Australia.

Panelists: Laura Winn, Head of the School for System Change, Forum for the Future, Sarah McAdam, Delivery Director, Transition Network, Andrew Simms, Co-founder, The New Weather Institute (Transition Economics), Professor Terry Irwin, Head of the School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University (Transition Design), Peter Newell, STEPS Centre, Sussex University, Cheryl Dahle, Flip Labs and Future of Fish (Transition Design), Jules Peck, The Next Systems Project, Damian White, Just Transitions and Rhode Island School of Design, Michel Bauwens, P2P Network and Commons Transitions, and Idil Gaziulusoy Socio Technical Research Network and Aalto University

About the symposium

Held on the Dartington Estate, home to pioneering experiments in education, the arts and crafts and rural development and now entering an exciting new phase where it is reviving its position as a laboratory for social change, the Symposium will bring together leading figures in global sustainability transition and system-change movements with designers, educators and activists to explore the potential for greater collaboration and the possibility of more widespread rapid transition.

Invited panelists, each representing a different area of transition related activity or system change, will present their perspective on societal transformation which will inform and guide the two panel discussions on day one. Participants will be invited to take part in these discussions and join a growing worldwide network of people engaged in transition-related projects, initiatives and research. On the second day of the Symposium a visioning session, led by the renowned futurist Stuart Candy, will introduce panelists and participants to the role future visions play in societal transitions and the value of the foresighting process in catalysing systems-level change.

The Symposium will begin on Thursday evening, with a welcome reception and dinner on the beautiful Dartington Estate that will provide panelists and attendees with the opportunity to meet one another and begin conversations. Friday will be comprised of panel discussions that explore the similarities, differences, and common goals among the different approaches to societal transition and systems change and discuss the potential for greater collaboration. On Friday evening participants will have further time for relaxed conversation over the collective evening meal. On Saturday, Stuart Candy will facilitate a foresighting workshop comprised of working groups and panelists. Cameron Tonkinwise offer closing remarks and reflections just before lunchtime.

Papers and proceedings from the Symposium will be published by Carnegie Mellon University and Schumacher College in the months following the event.

Fee:

£250 residential. This covers single accommodation for Thursday and Friday night, opening reception, all meals (but not Saturday lunch) and participation in the Symposium. BOOK FULL RESIDENTIAL HERE
£200 non-residential. This covers the opening reception, all meals (but not lunch on Saturday) and participation in the Symposium. BOOK NON-RESDIENTIAL HERE

You can also book by Telephone: 01803 847070

The Symposium is hosted by Schumacher College and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design and the Dartington Hall Trust.

Organisers are Professor Terry Irwin, Head of School and Dr. Gideon Kossoff, Coordinator for Doctoral Studies at the School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University and Ruth Potts, Schumacher College.

Photo by Hollywood North

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