project powerdown

scrapbook style imagining for postcarbon futures

[post-carbon]

Pachamama House is hosting its first birthday celebration with an Open Day. Join us at your favourite community hub for our annual open day on Sunday, November 30th, noon til 5pm.

[post-carbon]

The Makerspace at Pachamama House hosts a monthly open day, where the crew bring along ideas, works in progress and completed projects. To date, we’ve seen robots, 3d printers, drones, and the collaborative project of building a new security system for Pachamama House itself. The Newcastle Makerspace is open for making on the first Sunday of the month at 10AM and the third Monday of the month at 6PM. Organisational meetings are on the second Wednesday of the month at 6PM.

If you are interested to find out more, there’s a mailing list  and also a Facebook group you can join. Otherwise, you can keep up-to-date via the website at http://www.newcastlemakerspace.org/

  What Happens at a Newcastle Makerspace Open Day? The Makerspace at Pachamama House hosts a monthly open day, where the crew bring along ideas, works in progress and completed projects.

[post-carbon]

Celebrate World Environment Day 2014

The Wilderness Society Newcastle and Hunter Community Environment Centre (HCEC) thought it would be nice idea to host a lunch at Pachamama House this Thursday to mark ‘World Environment Day 2014′!

World Environment Day Lunch! Time: 1pm Where: Pachamama Common Room (upstairs 21 Gordon Avenue, Hamilton) Details: Bring a plate, eat, chat, then join the Bonus Greenhouse Tour!

So please bring a plate and…

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[post-carbon]

The Coal Dust Free Streets project forges grassroots community networks while gauging public opinion of coal dust and the proposed fourth coal loader (T4).

This is a how to guide for those who want to doorknock in your local area and add your voice the ‘chorus’ of suburbs already surveyed.

[post-carbon]

Culture Hunter Refresh

Hunter’s leading online arts directory and information hub – is being refreshed and you can have your say!

Produced by Pachamama residents Octapod since 2006, Culture Hunter is a comprehensive online guide to the Hunter’s arts and culture. It is currently being revamped – and Octapod need your input!

Let them know what you thinkabout how to best capture all the arts and cultural events,…

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[post-carbon]

Humanity’s strength is in groups. In fact, It is our way of cooperating and communicating together in small and large groups that has

[post-carbon]

The crowds clamoring for just-dug produce at the farmers’ market and the local food co-op suggest that this movement is no longer just a foodie fad. Today, almost 80 percent of Americans say sustainability is a priority when purchasing food. The promise of this kind of majority is that eating local can reshape landscapes and drive lasting change.

Except it hasn’t. More than a decade into the movement, the promise has fallen short. For all its successes, farm-to-table has not, in any fundamental way, reworked the economic and political forces that dictate how our food is grown and raised. Big Food is getting bigger, not smaller.

How do we make sense of this odd duality: a food revolution on one hand, an entrenched status quo on the other?

[goobingdetroit]

A garage in northeast Detroit deteriorates.

[post-carbon]

University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives studies and promotes cooperative action as a means of meeting people's economic and social needs.

What Emilia-Romagna shows is that people may not always be able to choose their leaders, but they can never avoid choosing their political culture. People either opt for solidarity and participation or they choose indifference and clientism. The left here must stop counting its failures like rosary beads and grasp the possibilities of the present. We see where mass political disorganization leads -- to the South Bronx -- and where solidarity and mass political organization can lead -- to Bologna.

[what3v3r-spac3]

The closest existing model for sustainable manufacturing is Emilia-Romagna. In that region of 4.2 million people, the most prosperous in Italy, manufacturing centers on “flexible manufacturing networks” of small-scale firms, rather than enormous factories or vertically integrated corporations. Small-scale, general-purpose machinery is integrated into craft production, and frequently switches between different product lines. It follows a lean production model geared to demand, with production taking place only to fill orders, so there’s no significant inventory cost. Supply chains are mostly local, as is the market. The local economy is not prone to the same boom-bust cycle which results from overproduction to keep unit costs down, without regard to demand. Although a significant share of Emilia-Romagna’s output goes to the export market, its industry would suffer far less dislocation from a collapse of the global economy than its counterparts in the United States; given the small scale of production and the short local supply chains, a shift to production primarily for local needs would be relatively uncomplicated. The region’s average wage is about double that of Italy for a whole, and some 45% of its GDP comes from cooperatively owned enterprises.

Kevin Carson (via fluidstaccato)

[post-carbon]

Post-Carbon Transition Papers

Applications of solar mapping in the urban environment

Promoting the use of solar energy in urban environments requires knowing the geographical distribution and characteristics of the best places to implement solar systems. In this context, buildings can be used to locally generate electricity. Based on remote sensing data, the city's surface can be modeled and the solar income at each location can be estimated. The results constitute an initial assessment of the city's solar potential that can be used to support management decisions regarding investments in solar systems.

Fluid transitions to more sustainable product service systems

While Product Service Systems (PSS) are not inherently sustainable, they may form part of the mix of innovations that contribute to the development of more sustainable futures. However, whether the current trajectory of PSS research, with its emphasis on universal frameworks and standardisation adequately reflects and builds upon PSS diversity revealed by case study research may be questioned. Opportunities for transition to more sustainable PSS may be lost. In response, this paper draws on sustainable architecture to propose fluid transitions to more sustainable PSS: to PSS design practices that embrace diversity and enable specific PSS to be developed which address contextual interpretations of sustainability challenges.

Zero emission housing: Policy development in Australia and comparisons with the EU, UK, USA and California

A change to a zero emission housing future requires significant innovation in both policy and practice, as described by socio-technical transitions theory. This paper examines emerging policies towards zero emission housing standards from the EU, UK, USA, California and Australia to determine alignment with socio-technical transitions criteria. This analysis is then positioned within the Australian context, which is characterised by a lack of policy innovation.

The double hermeneutic of sustainability transitions

How should sustainability transitions deal with the fact that ‘transition’ has become a buzzword in political discourse and a label for social ecology movements? Building on Giddens’ conception of a double hermeneutic, the paper explores the current appropriations and interpretations of the transition category by political and social actors, and outlines the challenges and opportunities of this double hermenetic in terms of symbolic politics and transformative research.

[post-carbon]

The article sets out to expose futurist Pentti Malaska (1934-2012) as a social thinker. His theory on social evolution where societies have developed from agricultural to industrial, and the currently emerging post-industrial service society, is explained. His idea of threefold society is discussed where each sector (culture, social life, economic life) is understood as domains of distinct principles. We also take a deep look into his list of key societal challenges. We end up by reflecting on Malaska's idea of future consciousness, in other words, our chance to penetrate into the future with our thinking.

[post-carbon]

[post-carbon]

Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy Technology Ready To Go Whenever

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Stating that they just want to make sure it’s something everyone keeps in mind going forward, an international consortium of scientists gently reminded the world Wednesday that clean energy technologies are pretty much ready to g...

[adhocratic]

The problems that tactical urbanism must address do not stem from any spatial or design flaw, but that it presents its tactics sans strategy. Those who subscribe to this regime of small-scale spatial intervention must remember that even cheap, quick, and tactical appropriations of public space entail a level of responsibility to the public – especially when they proceed under the guise of “pre-existing community support” or “resident buy-in.” There is no spatial or design fix that can undermine the constellation of forces that conspire to rapidly and dramatically transform neighborhoods, or alleviate the anxieties borne of such transformations. There is only earnest engagement with and respect for those affected by spatial intervention.

Aaron Shapiro, “The Tactics That Be: Contesting Tactical Urbanism in New Orleans” (via adhocratic)

[soundbitecity]

Airport Gardens

I recently paid a visit to the disused Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and was excited to find that part of it is set up as a community garden. The size of the garden compared to the overall airfield is pretty small, but its still meaningful to see that local residents are able to use the land.  Its also pretty impressive to see how much land is left behind in the wake of a closed airport. There are many other plans in the works as well.

Photos taken April, 2014.

[oahficw]

Here’s what you do when you end up with an entire airport’s worth of space to come up with a new use for. 

[post-carbon]

The exploitative economy has gotten us into trouble, but there is a logical—and hopeful—alternative.

SCOTT: What you’re describing reminds me in some ways of bioregionalism, the idea that human settlements and economies should be scaled according to distinct ecological regions.

GAR: Yes, I think scale is a very important aspect of this. We tend not to remember how gigantic the United States is compared with other countries: you could take the whole of Germany and drop it into the state of Montana. It’s very hard to organize a democratic politics in a system of that scale. Large corporations can dominate the media and dominate the capital city, as we’ve seen.

So the logic does point toward a regional structure of some kind: New England, the Pacific Northwest, the Upper Midwest. Or the state of California, which is itself a giant region. In fact, debates about this took place in the 1930s among liberals, conservatives, and radicals. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, began as a regional body oriented around a river system.

Still, though, we’ve got to think at both small and large scales. For instance, in the future, if anybody still wants to fly an airplane to get across the continent, or take a large train, the work of building planes or trains will likely not be done in one neighborhood. That kind of work requires larger, more sophisticated institutions, and we should be thinking about those, too.