Why Banning Uber Makes Seoul Even More of a Sharing City

by Neal Gorenflo, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/why-banning-uber-makes-seoul-even-more-of-a-sharing-city

This past Monday Seoul City said it planned to ban Uber, the smartphone car-hailing service, and launch its own app for official taxis. 

Some reacted by calling Seoul’s sharing cred into question because, after all, Seoul is the self-proclaimed Sharing City with arguably the most ambitious sharing economy agenda of any city in the world. 

Shouldn’t Seoul support Uber?

On July 7th at the FAB 10 conference in Barcelona, futurist Bruce Sterling gave an impassioned speech explaining why cities should reject Uber, their collaborative economy ilk, and the horde of multinational corporations selling “Smart Cities” technology - technology which will likely further concentrate control and wealth into fewer hands.

The video of his speech is a must watch:



I say bravo Seoul. Develop a local solution for taxi hailing. Keep control and wealth local. Keep it weird. Disconnect in intelligent ways from the brittle, banal, and destructive global economy.

Independence, self-sufficiency, diversity, resilience, and equity characterize the developmental path of Sharing Cities. This is what Shareable works toward with the Sharing Cities Network, its joint actions, and our policy guide. Other cities should follow Seoul's (and Hamburg, Brussels and Berlin's) common sense lead.

Moreover, cities should not let themselves be bulldozed by the aura of inevitability that companies like Uber and Airbnb create with a tidal wave of capital and press.

This tactic is lifted directly from a shopworn Silicon Valley playbook (which epitomizes technological determinism in its most crass and virulent form), but brought to a new, even more disturbing level. This is "Shock Entrepreneurship," as in using “shock and awe” to stun enemies into submission.

Here’s a statement from Uber in reaction to Seoul’s decision that typifies Silicon Valley propaganda and hubris (and perhaps laziness - this might just be the cut and paste public relations of a company too busy taking over the world to be in tune with local realities):

“… Seoul is in danger of remaining trapped in the past and getting left behind by the global 'sharing economy' movement."

This is laughable! Seoul is one of the most modern cities in the world. And Uber must not have gotten the memo about Seoul’s Sharing Cities initiative. Seoul is leading the urban wing of the sharing movement. It's Uber that represents the past.

One nation, one solution, one app uber alles is a failed 20th century dream, not the 21st century reality we need.

The future belongs to enterprises that distribute control and wealth rather than concentrating it, and that's not a utopian dream, it's an increasingly practical necessity in order to attact and keep customers in a zero marginal cost world.

Venture Capitalist Brad Burnham said as much at the SHARE conference in May as reported by the Wall Street Journal in an article entitled, "Why Uber and Airbnb Might be in Big Trouble."

Yet, Seoul could do better. Why not open source the local cab-hailing solution they create so other cities can use it?

And, since the city government is backing local sharing startups with public money and resources, why not give the public more than just the privilege to use these startups' services?

At a conference in June, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya suggested a 1% equity tax for the city of San Francisco as a way to combat gentrification. I think that’s a great idea, but 1% isn’t nearly enough and citizens deserve a say in public supported businesses too. Mere advisors sometimes get 1% or more.

Cities should demand a stake equal to their contribution and use their influence to democratize local businesses.

In other words, good on Seoul for opting for a local solution over the app-style globalization of Uber and for its Sharing Cities initiative. These are steps in the right direction, yet there's a lot more to do to spread the wealth in cities.
##
Disclosure: I'm a member of Seoul's Sharing Economy International Advisory Group.

Putting Down Local Food Roots in Louth

by Tess Riley, Transition Free Press: http://transitionfreepress.org/2014/07/29/putting-down-local-food-roots-in-louth/

If you are in any doubt as to the benefits of sourcing locally produced food (and have exhausted the brilliant Food pages in Transition Free Press of course!), look no further than ‘Local Food Roots’,  a short film celebrating the wide-ranging benefits of the UK’s local food movement.



We were delighted to hear from Steve Mansfield from Transition Town Louth not long ago, whose Transition Initiative recently put on a film showing of ‘Local Food Roots’ at the Louth community centre one Saturday night, before serving up a three-course vegan meal using as much local produce as possible.

Steve writes:

Why not try this in your town or city? Combining the film with a meal is a way of putting theory into practice, getting people to talk about the issues, making new friends in the community, and eating delicious food.

For those without easy access to local food, such as through a market, local buying group or Transition food project, why not check out FarmDrop and The Food Assembly, two excellent organisations helping connect customers directly with local producers, cutting out the middlemen and ensuring farmers get paid a fair price for their produce while customers access fresh, delicious food - wonky veg and all!

From 8 to 80: Designing Adaptive Spaces For an Ageing Population

"Community" (2001) by Kirk Newman, Toronto (Wikipedia)

by Lorraine Farrelly, Deakin University

Important challenges are facing our society as the population globally ages thanks to higher life expectancy, better housing and living conditions and improved healthcare.

For individuals this is of course good news, but for communities it will place pressure on services to support the ageing population as it becomes more dependent.

Architects and urban designers like me need to take responsibility and consider designing cities, neighbourhoods, places and spaces that can adapt to these changing needs.

Cities need to be inclusive, accommodating people with disabilities but also limited mobility.

Ageing at home

Communities need to be designed to be interdependent - to provide environments that encourage people to support one another as our life circumstances change.

Housing needs to be adaptive over our lifetimes. This means we need to design spaces that could house a society with changing needs from “8-80” - housing and cities should accommodate changing generational needs and lifestyles, from a child to a couple, to elderly people possibly living on their own or needing support or care.

There are many examples internationally of the 8-80 concept, in Toronto, Canada 8-80 cities are supporting sustainable neighbourhoods.

In the UK, the Barker Review of Land Use Planning, commissioned by the government in 2005, consulted widely across the construction industry and professional bodies to consider how housing supply should meet demand.

From the Barker Review came initiatives to create “age responsive housing” and ideas of “lifetime homes”, houses that are designed so they can change as the housing needs change, with movable partitions and easily accessible bathrooms.

This means people can “age in place” and stay in their own homes as they get older, rather than move to a new adapted home. According to a report released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare last year, ageing at home is something that older Australians prefer.

The Commons, Brunswick. Lorraine Farrelly

‘The Commons’ in Brunswick

Adaptive housing is also an important part of the sustainability agenda. Sustainability involves sustaining the community, not just preserving energy and recycling materials. A sustainable community can continue, evolve, and develop over time.

The Commons, a residential complex in Melbourne, is an interesting example of this and was open to the public to explore on Sunday as part of Open House Melbourne.

The Commons is a small project, completed last year, along the railway line next to Anstey station on Florence Street, Brunswick. Designed with no parking, residents all have bicycles. The project is located along a purpose designed cycle route into the city.

From a design perspective, the architects Breathe Architecture have designed simple spaces, with a utilitarian approach, an industrial aesthetic and honest practical materials - concrete countertops and floors.

The Commons, Brunswick. Lorraine Farrelly

More interesting, however, is the approach to community. There are spaces that encourage people to meet through everyday activities. The ground floor has a shared cycle store and cafe where residents meet on the way in and out - but the rooftop is where the real community space exists.

With fantastic views to Melbourne in the south, there is a rooftop garden in which residents each have a “grow box” to grow and share vegetables.

A laundry space is where everyone meets over everyday tasks and a rooftop drying space takes advantage of the natural windy spot. This project also has a carefully considered approach to energy use with photovoltaic (PV) panels to generate electricity.

The approach to building a community where residents across all generations are building a community gives a great deal of optimism for the future of inter-generational living in the middle of the city.

As our population changes and the needs of our society shift, we all need to take part in the discussion about creating a more supportive community.

The city offers support systems such as social services and healthcare, but as communities we also need to adapt our buildings to encourage new social attitudes.

And we all need to engage and participate to create these adaptive environments.

Professor Lorraine Farrelly is giving a public lecture at 6pm tonight, Tuesday July 29, on Designing for the Third Age in the Percy Baxter Lecture Theatre at Deakin’s Geelong Campus.


Lorraine Farrelly is Professor of Architecture at the University of Portsmouth in England. She is currently 'Thinker in Residence' at Deakin University for six weeks.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Our Cities Need More Green Spaces for Rest and Play - Here's How

Green roof, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Toronto (Wikipedia)

by Jason Byrne, Griffith University and Christoph Rupprecht, Griffith University

Your local park is likely playing a vital role in your city’s health, and probably your own too.

Parks and other “green spaces” help keep cities cool, and as places of recreation, can help with health issues such as obesity.

Even looking at greenery can make you feel better.

But in increasingly crowded cities, it can be difficult to find room for parks.

Fortunately, there are other green spaces, or potential green spaces that can provide the same benefits.

In recent research, we found that these spaces are more common than we thought. And innovative green spaces overseas show how we might use them.

Cities are getting crowded

In the next thirty years, almost three quarters of the global population will live in cities. Underpinning this glib statistic is an astounding wave of migration driven by changing livelihoods, global economic changes and environmental change, which is unprecedented in human history.

This presents a number of challenges for urban planning - more housing, schools and hospitals, better infrastructure such as transportation, water, sanitation and electricity.

Parks in this competition for space are often an afterthought. This can lead to some big problems, especially in higher-density cities.

Such problems include urban heat (from concrete, bitumen and glass), storm water run-off, and fewer parks to play and relax. Fewer parks can in turn lead to health impacts such as obesity, anxiety and depression.

Worse still, in some cities parks and other green-spaces are regarded as a luxury, not a necessity. In a climate of fiscal austerity, some city managers and elected officials are making decisions that will potentially harm the quality of life of urban residents, now and into the future.

Some local governments regard under-utilised parks as surplus assets, which might be sold to bolster strained coffers.

Other cities, like Melbourne, have sacrificed some park spaces for new road and tunnel projects. But the short-term financial gain from selling parks or converting them to other purposes could very well lead to long term pain.

Making real urban jungles

Around the world, city planners and design professionals have begun to respond to the problem of park shortages by finding innovative solutions to add more green-spaces to cities. These include green roofs, green walls and pocket-parks.

Some unconventional solutions are emerging too. Parking lots, former industrial sites (brown fields) and even abandoned infrastructure like old railway lines are being converted into new green spaces.

Some cities like Seoul in Korea for instance, have torn down freeways to make room for new green spaces for people, plants and animals, with big financial and social dividends.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has seen billion-dollar returns from its Cheonggyecheon stream restoration project, and has realised other benefits too such as cooler temperatures, increased use of public transport, adaptive re-use of buildings, increased tourism, and a return of plants and animals to the “concrete jungle”.

One of San Francisco’s “parklets” Paul Krueger/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The parklets of San Francisco are reinvigorating urban spaces, improving street life and encouraging more people into active lifestyles.

And in Hangzhou, China, the removal of old factories and conversion of grey space into linear parks, as well as park-making on “wasteland”, has opened up spaces for recreation and relaxation to millions of residents.

More parks aren’t always the solution

But making new parks can be expensive, especially in the urban core. Park-making projects can also increase the value of surrounding properties.

If these projects are undertaken in poorer neighbourhoods, they can harm marginalised and vulnerable residents, by forcing them out of their homes as rents and property values rise and wealthier residents move in (gentrification).

With our colleagues, we have noted that planners must take steps to prevent this from occurring, such as rent control or park-making on a more “informal” scale, making neighbourhoods “just green enough”.

If we can’t get city officials to buy land for more parks, then maybe we can convert grey spaces - roads, rooftops and storm-water drains - into functional, yet affordable, green-spaces that people can use for active and passive recreation.

In New York for example, the High Line Trail along a disused railway line has become a major attraction, and breathed life back to a blighted space.

New York’s Highline: a park on an old railway. David Berkowitz/Flickr, CC BY

In Mexico, an oil pipeline easement has been converted into a beautiful and functional park - La Línea Verde - in socially vulnerable neighbourhoods. There would appear to be similar opportunities in other cities.

Under-utilised and abandoned spaces such as railway corridors, vacant lots, street verges or even power line easements could make excellent parks.

How much green space?

Until recently, it has been hard for city planners to know how many of these spaces exist, what they are designated for, and whether people can easily access them.

Recent research on “informal green-space” that we have published in PLoS One seeks to answer this question.

We have designed a rapid assessment technique to identify how much “left-over” land exists in cities, which could be used for green-space.

Distribution of ‘informal green space’ across Brisbane Christoph Rupprecht

Surprisingly, informal green-space made up around 5% of the urban core in Brisbane (Australia) and Sapporo (Japan), the two cities we surveyed. This means it contributes 14% to the city centres' total green space - that’s almost 900 soccer fields in Brisbane’s core alone.

We also found that over 80% are at least partly accessible for people to use them. Have a look around on your next walk - maybe a verge or vacant lot near you is just the place for a community garden? 

Jason Byrne is a member of the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Better Parks Alliance. He does not receive funding from these organisations, but he is an active advocate for parks and green-space.

Christoph Rupprecht received funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Griffith University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Creating Resilient Communities: Putting Power in the Hands of Local People

Co-operative Tilehurst, run by the Co-op Group (Wikipedia)

by Barbara Hammond, Co-operative News: http://www.thenews.coop/88117/news/community/creating-resilient-communities-putting-power-in-the-hands-of-local-people/ 

 

Co-operative Group members are taking part in Let’s Talk this month - an online discussion panel to shape the future of the organisation. 

 

This week it is talking about resilient communities, and here the Low Carbon Hub’s Barbara Hammond sets out what the Group can achieve …

Communities face many challenges today, not least cuts to local services, closing amenities, falling living standards and, in many areas, greater isolation, with people feeling less connected to the community around them.

One solution to enhance the resilience of communities against challenges such as these is community energy.

This involves neighbourhoods coming together to take control of the energy they use, either through community-owned clean energy generation, joining forces to make their homes more energy efficient or sharing energy-saving advice.

Our experience at the Low Carbon Hub, a social enterprise championing community energy in Oxfordshire, is that the benefits from a community resilience perspective are huge.

Having already facilitated a wave of community benefit solar PV and hydro schemes, our ambition is for the whole of Oxfordshire to be powered by smart grids centred around small scale, community-controlled renewable energy schemes.

This transformation of our energy system would bring not only environmental, but also social and economic benefits. The Oxfordshire Low Carbon Economy Report we are currently working on with Oxford University has identified some surprising data that shows how much this shift is to our economic advantage:

• As a county we spend £1.5bn on energy every year, all of which flows out of the local economy;
• But we also already make £1.2bn every year out of low carbon business sectors and these already support over 8,000 jobs, over twice the number of jobs supported by the BMW car plant at Cowley in Oxford, the largest local employer;
• A combination of business development and infrastructure investment could generate an extra £800m per year and an extra 10,000 jobs by 2030.

This vision could have a major impact on the resilience of our 300+ geographic communities:

• They will spend less on heating and powering their houses and businesses, reducing local fuel poverty and improving economic competitiveness;
• They will make money from the renewable energy projects they own, creating a much needed income stream to be redistributed and reinvested locally for the community’s benefit;
• By coming together to run local microgrids and renewable energy projects, communities will build their capacity as well as being much more socially connected;
• Local businesses and jobs will increasingly be secured by the growth of decentralised energy; and
• Ownership of locally led projects will provide a huge boost to community pride, becoming a source of inspiration and a focal point for community activity.

This is a big, hairy, long-term vision which needs community innovation and collaboration for success. We think that the technical and financial innovation required to achieve it is already well under way and we know how to find it. More difficult is the social, regulatory, legal and political innovation necessary to change the way we do things.

The first steps along the road have already been taken by a number of pioneering community projects in Oxfordshire.

These include the Westmill Wind Farm Co-operative and Solar Co-operative, community benefit societies funding solar projects in both west and north Oxford, the Osney Lock Hydro community benefit society, and the Hook Norton Low Carbon retrofitting fund.

All of these projects contribute to Oxfordshire leading nationally in terms of ‘local run’ enterprises according to a recent Co-operatives UK report: 10 enterprises in total have 9,000 shareholders who have invested £5m to date.

Between 2012 and 2015, the Low Carbon Hub hopes to have helped four hydro schemes, a solar park and numerous rooftop schemes to be developed on schools and local businesses across the county.

Twenty schools have already signed up and will receive cheaper, green electricity for 20 years, while creating an income to support other community projects. Our share offer for these will be launched in September.

We can’t think of anything better than community owned energy to help boost community resilience. I hope the Co-operative Group adopts ‘Resilient Communities’ as one of its causes and champions community energy’s pivotal role in helping them become a reality.

Take part in the Co-operative Group’s discussion on Let’s Talk.

• Barbara Hammond is chief executive of the Low Carbon Hub, to find out more about their work, including how you can invest and get involved with various community energy projects, go to: www.lowcarbonhub.org.

The Case of Nature in Cities

by Marika Haeggman, Stockhom Resilience Centre: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/7-23-2014-the-case-of-nature-in-cities.html

Cape Town, South Africa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As urbanisation continues at a rapid pace, cities provide the daily living environment for a growing majority of the world’s population.

In Asia and Africa, people are moving to the cities at an unprecedented pace and the expansion of urban land is more extensive than ever before, a pattern also seen in South America.

"While these rapid and extensive changes lead to considerable challenges for biodiversity, they also create new opportunities to protect nature in cities and beyond, and enhance the values that nature in cities generates for people," say Stockholm Resilience Centre researchers Maria Schewenius and Maria Tengö in the editor’s note in the special issue, published online by the journal Current Conservation.

Access the special issue

Development brings opportunities

The message that the world is currently undergoing an urbanization process unprecedented in rate and extent, but that this brings unprecedented opportunities to support a global sustainable development, is also the foundation for the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO) project, to which the Special Issue connects. 

The project concluded that for cities to sustainably support human wellbeing, they need to promote biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

The special issue has a special focus on India and cities in other countries in the southern hemisphere. For example, Maria Tengö, together with colleagues Divya Gopal and Harini Nagendra, describes the sacred trees in urban environments in Bangalore in India:

"In India, sacred ecosystems are immensely valued in a way that is deeply etched in the cultural and spiritual realm of society," explains Tengö.

"In urban systems this kind of cultural protection has been less acknowledged, but in Bangalore we have found that the sacred sites act as pockets of greenery in the city landscape."

The special issue further tells the story of heritage trees in Cape Town, South Africa; discusses emerging planning and management frameworks in Colombia; and highlights tools for assessing urban biodiversity.

Drawing upon examples from Bangalore and Rio de Janeiro, it presents some examples of the meaning of nature in cities, and the challenges and opportunities associated with urban nature conservation. A historical narrative from Madras, India, gives readers the chance to reflect upon the changes in the natural landscape in one of the world's largest cities over the last five decades.

Beyond asphalt and concrete 

Urban development can have devastating consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services, in turn affecting human wellbeing and resilience. Madhusudan Katti from California State University, together with Maria Schewenius, emphasizes the importance of good ecological governance in cities:

"Good governance of urban systems requires the involvement of actors on many levels in the system, from governments to local urban planners. Ensuring knowledge sharing between groups, implementing regulations and maintaining people’s engagement are crucial parts in successful governance," says Katti.

The special issue adds weight to the findings of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook project, which argues that it is high time to start thinking of cities as more than grey patches of asphalt and concrete.

"Rich nature already exists in cities, and is an important part of our culture as well as our environment," conclude Schewenius and Tengö in their editorial. 

Access the special issue

"An Urbanizing Planet" takes viewers on a stunning satellite-viewed tour around our planet. By combining more than 10 datasets, and using GIS processing software and 3D graphic applications, the video shows not only where urbanization will be most extensive, but also how the majority of the expansion will occur in areas adjacent to biodiversity hotspots.

Community Resilience by Guest Blogger Chris Skellett

by Chris Skellett, Exisle Publishing: http://exislepublishing.com.au/blog/community-resilience-by-guest-blogger-chris-skellett/

Resilience, in the face of adversity, is seen in two parts.

Firstly, it requires us to maximise our capacity to live in the moment and to accept life’s twists and turns, but it also requires us to take stock and re-commit determinedly to valued goals.

Following trauma, some individuals will tend to grieve for the affront to their prior sense of contentment. The world will now seem unpleasantly challenging and they will be prone to depression. They may self-soothe inappropriately with excessively indulgent activities.

Conversely, individuals  with an achievement orientation may feel flattened and overwhelmed by the setback to their ambitions. They will be prone to frustration and anger at the futility of their previous efforts and the sudden lack of momentum to their lives.

Of course, we all carry aspects of both orientations, and we can learn to recognise these emotional markers as cues to prompt a change in perspective.

The depressive response requires us to set goals and expect ourselves to drive forward. An angry response requires us to slow down and be more accepting of events. Resilience requires us to move calmly yet purposefully through the minefield that our lives have become.

As a native New Zealander, I am privileged to be able to comment on the community resilience shown by the people of Christchurch following the tragic earthquake in February 2011. One hundred and eighty five people died and the heart was ripped out of the country’s second largest city. The trauma and devastation to people’s lives continues to play out as we speak.

Many businesses were destroyed. A lifetime’s work lost overnight. The iconic cathedral lay in ruins. The social fabric of many suburbs was in tatters as whole areas were ’red-zoned’ and deemed uninhabitable.

The on-going aftershocks required a particularly robust commitment to resilience, with every tremor challenging ones sense of well-being.

So, how did the people react? Two distinct themes emerged. Firstly, there was a huge sense of relief at having survived, which in turn generated a huge sense of gratitude about the privilege of being alive.

People valued holding each other. They sought out the company of family and friends. Music suddenly became more poignant to them, and poetry thrived. People re-defined what they felt was important in their lives.

As with other traumatic events, many tales of compassion and human kindness emerged over the subsequent months. The tragedy had allowed the community access to a very special experience of ‘being human’. Being resilient rested on a sense of knowing who we were, and valuing ourselves and each other.

This somewhat mellow, reflective state is not easily sustained however, and it was soon swept away by a different perspective on the crisis. Community leaders were charged with getting the city ‘back on its feet’, and economic demands required that trading resumed as soon as possible.

The emergency response had also swung into effect, and a student volunteer army emerged, evoking admiration for their commitment to help residents in a practical way.

Everyone with an achievement orientation now rolled up their sleeves and ‘got stuck in’. This was their moment to apply their enthusiasm for digging deep, grinding it out, and determinedly striving towards tangible goals.

There was now a different kind of resilience afoot. It was predicated on pride in the community’s ability to move on and to bounce back. Resilience now required individuals to be energised in response to adversity.

Christchurch has shown us that community resilience has two parts. Firstly, we see the need to accept set-backs in life, and to always look for the silver lining to a cloud. And when the goalposts shift, or when we draw an unkind hand from a deck of cards, we need to stay calm and embrace the experience without judgement.

Every minute of every day is to be savoured. We must never forget to celebrate and appreciate life for what it is, rather than feel regret that it was not how we had wanted it to be.

But acceptance in itself is not enough. We also need to respond positively to the challenge, and to look for what we can do to move forward. The ultimate reward for setting and achieving demanding goals is the sense of pride and satisfaction that can only be experienced through purposeful and meaningful effort.

The people of Christchurch are clearly resilient. They are quietly bonded in their response to common adversity, and the internal community cohesion has been strengthened by the trauma. Life feels good, and it is experienced more appreciatively than before.

They have learned to live more ‘in the moment’, and some of the petty ambitions that were held before the earthquake now seem pointless. Residents now take each day a step at a time. Resilience requires them to remember that every moment is to be savoured.

But also, there is a huge potential for community pride in the re-build. People are getting on with their lives, and moving forward. A creative new shopping complex constructed from shipping containers sprang up, and a new cathedral spire is on the way.

To be human is to search out opportunity and to be curious about how to regain momentum in life. To feel pride in one’s endeavours, and to effect change. Resilience also requires us to respond positively to adversity.

These two components of resilience apply to us all. To find our inner resilience, we must firstly know who we are, and celebrate life for what it is and whatever challenges it throws at us. We must always feel confident in ourselves. But also, we need to respond adaptively, and to look at what we can do to move forward with confidence and pride.

‘Resilience’ is one of the most admirable qualities of the human spirit. By nature, we can be either flexible and accepting of adversity, or else be determined and unrelentingly driven to achieve.

Our individual tendencies will draw us towards one set of resilience values or the other. To build an optimum inner resilience, we need to ensure that we carry characteristics from both sides of the continuum. There is clearly a balance to be struck.

Chris Skellett is a clinical psychologist, executive coach and author of When Happiness is Not Enough and The Power of Second Question. He will be guest speaker at the 2015 Happiness and Its Causes Conference.

New Start-Up Guide for Budding Social Entrepreneurs

by Social Enterprise UK: http://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/news/new-start-guide-for-budding-social-entrepreneurs

A new guide has been published for those interested in starting a social enterprise, like Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant chain, the Big Issue and Cornwall’s Eden Project.

The UK is home to 68,000 social enterprises - businesses that, akin to charities, exist to make a positive difference.

But unlike their cousins in the charitable sector, social enterprises earn their income by selling goods and services, competing in the open market with private sector businesses.

Download 'Start your social enterprise'

The latest figures* on Britain’s social enterprise sector show that it’s flourishing and experiencing an explosion: 1 in 7 of all social enterprises is a start-up, more than three times the proportion of start-ups in the mainstream SME business sector. London is home to an even greater number, where 1 in 5 social enterprises is a start-up.

According to Social Enterprise UK, an upsurge in social enterprise start-ups is often seen when economic circumstances are difficult.

Social Enterprise UK’s Chief Executive, Peter Holbrook, a former social entrepreneur, said:

“Social entrepreneurs see a problem and want to fix it. And at the moment, with youth unemployment, fuel poverty, reduced services in social care and other problems coming to the fore because of the economic crisis, we’re seeing an upsurge in people wanting to remedy these issues in their communities. Social entrepreneurs are people who are not willing to watch their communities and the people living in them suffer. They use business acumen to tackle the issues head-on. Setting up and running a social enterprise is not for the faint-hearted, not only do you have to satisfy your customers, you’ve got to make the business sustainable and achieve your social or environmental mission, but the rewards are incredible."

The recent launch of Big Society Capital, the world’s first social investment bank, is expected to help finance and grow the UK’s social enterprise sector. The Government-backed bank has an initial £600million, and will lend to social enterprises.

‘Start your social enterprise’ takes you through the essentials to help you plan your social venture, and covers everything from writing your business plan, finding investment and funding, deciding on the most suitable legal structure and governance.

Social enterprise facts and figures

• Over a third (39%) of all social enterprises are based and working in the most deprived communities in the UK, compared to 13% of all SMEs, creating jobs and making a positive difference where needed most.
• Social enterprises are outstripping mainstream businesses for confidence and twice as likely to have reported growth in the last year - 58% of social enterprises grew their business last year compared to 28% of SMEs.
• Social enterprises are more likely to be led by women and young people - 86% of leadership teams boast at least one female director - in comparison, just 13% of the Institute of Directors’ membership is female.

Trailblazing social enterprises

Beyond Food Foundation

Simon Boyle, a chef, is founder of the Beyond Food Foundation, which runs programmes to support people living in hostels and at risk of homelessness. Simon returned from Sri Lanka in 2004 where he had been working to create a relief camp after the Tsunami. He wanted to share his passion for food with people who he thought would benefit from his energy and enthusiasm for cooking. One of the programmes run by the Beyond Food Foundation supports people through a six-month apprenticeship in the recently opened Brigade Bar & Bistro in London, which has already received a visit from the Prime Minister. The apprentices receive part-time training at the nearby Southwark College and volunteer mentors help with confidence building, money management and CV writing.
www.beyondfoodfoundation.org.uk

Who Made Your Pants?

Founder Becky John got Who made your pants? off the ground in 2009, after a life changing experience led her into counselling and a personal epiphany to do more in the world in which she lived. And so knowing that there was a huge refugee population in Southampton, and suspecting that many of the women within it were isolated and not feeling able to go and have fun, Becky started wondering if these women might like a job, making lovely pants. In a factory in Southampton women who have had a hard time come together to work. Who made your pants? provides jobs, training, support and advice.
http://whomadeyourpants.co.uk/

Bikeworks

Founder Jim Blakemore, was running his own bike hire company in Cambridge before he started Bikeworks in East London in 2007: “I put £2,000 of my own money in and had a small grant to buy bikes from the London Cycling Campaign. Bikeworks was set up to train children, adults and disabled people how to ride bikes. I didn’t have premises and had twenty bikes stored in my spare room”. He was soon joined by business partner Dave Miller, a former development manager for a charity. Together they are growing Bikeworks, which supports disadvantaged people into training and employment. They deliver public sector contracts and have multiple retail outlets across London where they sell and repair bikes.
www.bikeworks.org.uk

‘Start your social enterprise’ is supported by RBS.

* Figures from Fightback Britain: State of Social Enterprise Survey (August 2011).

The Rise of Resilience: Linking Resilience and Sustainability in City Planning

"Sustainable development" diagram (Wikipedia)

by Dr Timon McPhearson, Get Resilient.com: http://www.getresilient.com/article/Riseofresilien
 

Cities around the world are making plans, developing agendas, and articulating goals for urban resilience, but is urban resilience really possible?

Resilience to what, for what, and for whom?

Additionally, resilience is being used in many cases as a replacement for sustainability, which it is not.

Resilience and sustainability need to be linked, but with care and clarity.

The rise of resilience

Resilience as a planning and managing priority for cities is on a meteoric rise with NGOs, governments, planners, managers, architects, designers, social scientists, ecologists, and engineers taking up the resilience agenda.

The rise of resilience is evidenced by the most recent resilience conference. In May 2014 the Resilience Alliance hosted Resilience 2014, in Montpellier, France. With over 900 attendees, the diversity of topics presented by researchers was overwhelming.

If you only look at the Twitter activity under the hashtag #Resilience2014 you can see how the research community is grappling with concepts that vary from social justice, to planetary boundaries, to unsustainability (most of the presentations are already online, so feel free to catch up on this discussion).

Resilience is now being bantered around as sustainability has been for more than a decade, which is to say with little meaning and often as a label to fit conveniently on top of pre-existing agendas. In fact, some argue that resilience has already replaced sustainability as the main concept in the urban discourse.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times filed shortly after Superstorm Sandy described this new wave of resilience thinking as forming major agenda setting in the United States.

But what is urban resilience, and how does it relate to sustainability? In recent discussions I’ve had with city planners, government officials, natural resource managers, researchers, and practitioners it is clear that what resilience means is definitely unclear.

Resilience and sustainability

The large overlap in the meaning of the resilience and sustainability threatens to make both concepts weak. I fear we are quickly losing hold of the specificity of these influential concepts, and therefore the power of the resilience approach to improve human wellbeing in urban contexts.

Other scholars have begun voicing similar concerns.I came away from the Resilience2014 conference with the realization that we still have serious work to do to understand how all this research and discussion on the benefits of urban nature and ecosystem services relate to the rapid rise of resilience planning, resilience design, and resilient cities initiatives.

I’ve discussed the utility of resilience theory for understanding complex systems previously in this space, but see also other contributors that have also discussed the relationship between resilience and sustainability (see Maddox, Sanderson, Mancebo and Elmqvist for examples).

Defining resilience

More often than not resilience is still mostly discussed as “bouncing back” from a disturbance.

For example, in the New York City post-Sandy resilience report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” from the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, the focus is very much on rebuilding and recovery, a particular engineering resilience perspective.

This is not unique to New York, but is quite common in many other cities around the world. However, the current, more ecological concept of resilience is not only about bouncing back and recovery but also about the ability to adapt, often discussed as adaptive capacity.

In this context resilience is the capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining function, structure, feedbacks and, therefore, identity.

Definition of sustainability and resilience concepts (after Folke et al. 2010 and Tuvendal and Elmqvist 2012)

If you buy the idea that we need to be building social-ecological resilience, then city planning still has a long way to go towards definition or understanding of social-ecological resilience that moves beyond recovery and rebuilding following disturbance.

Additionally, resilience needs to be linked to sustainability so that the resilience we are trying to plan and design for actually helps us move towards desired future sustainable systems states, and not undesirable ones. Current resilience planning and management efforts may just as likely be locking our urban systems into undesirable trajectories, away from sustainability.

For example, after Superstorm Sandy hit New York City and the New Jersey coastline, there was much discussion about large technical infrastructure solutions for dealing with expected future storm surge and coastal flooding: for example, closeable sea gates at the narrow section of the entrance to New York harbor.

But the sea gates proposed to deal with these serious threats to the social-ecological system of New York, if implemented, could lock the city into energetically, resource, and economically unsustainable long-term maintenance costs that also have serious ecological side effects.

Sea gate proposed in the report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” from the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency

Spurred by the recognition that we have to plan and design ways to avoid the level of devastation that Superstorm Sandy inflicted on the New York City region when faced with future storms, the Rebuild by Design program was initiated to articulate visions for climate change resilience in the New York City region.

The fundamental idea of “rebuilding” is not necessarily antithetical to resilience, but it underlines the focus within governments at national and more local levels to think about resilience to extreme events from a primarily technical and infrastructural level.

To be fair, improving social-ecological resilience is difficult, and when thinking about a very large and complex system like New York City, we can forgive some path dependency, or inertia, in the discourse and design innovations.

Still, we have to remain vigilant about the way we use resilience as a concept and a planning and management priority lest our best intentions lead us towards more unsustainable futures, despite perhaps achieving some measure of “resilience”.

Resilience of what? To what? And for whom?

Resilience is understood as the ability to adhere to or lock-in a specific pathway. The generalizability of this concept means it can be applied in multiple kinds of systems. It also means that resilience can both help us achieve desired future states, as well as lock institutions, political structures, ecosystems, or cities into undesired, unsustainable system states.

For example, though we rarely read about it in our scientific discourse, corruption and organized crime are incredibly resilient, and yet most would agree are not part of our visions for sustainable futures.

At the same time, given the often enormous inequities in our cities, we need to be thinking about resilient of what, to what, and perhaps especially, for whom?

For example, though the installation of a sea gate in the New York harbor might improve resilience to storm surge and flooding for some Manhattan and Brooklyn residents, it could have negative effects in other areas, such as decreasing resilience for residents and ecosystems in Staten Island, New Jersey, or Long Island.

Urban resilience planning and management has to take seriously a combined social-ecological perspective so that outcomes contribute to equity, as well as human well-being and ecological integrity.

Dense urbanity?

Sustainable city initiatives are often those that maximize efficiency, minimize energy, and reduce redundancy and material use. Yet, redundancy is one of the hallmarks of a resilience system. Sustainability goals and resilience goals, if not examined carefully can be completely at odds with each other.

One conundrum that scholars and planners have not taken seriously is the problem of urban density.

In the sustainability discourse dense urban centers are the key to a sustainable future, and yet, the more dense our urban settlements, the more socially and economically vulnerable they may be to disturbance whether it is coastal flooding, disease outbreaks, political unrest, or economic disturbances.

The tight connectivity within dense urban systems - dense in population, but also infrastructure, social ties, and biogeochemical and economic flows - can contribute to resilience, or increase vulnerability.

We must be careful not to assume density is positive or negative, but carefully consider, probably on a case-by-case basis, how urban planning, governance, and management for both resilience and sustainable futures can ensure resilience goals that overlap and support sustainability goals.

Harnessing resilience

Understanding urban resilience and urban sustainability as two concepts that promote a plurality and diversity of solutions to social-ecological problems implies that urban planning needs to take on-board yet new metaphors and paradigms to further transform cities (Wilkinson 2012).

Resilience can reinforce both sustainable and unsustainable developmental pathways. Harnessing resilience to reinforce system dynamics that promote sustainability is key to achieving future desired sustainability states.

Coda: if you want to get involved

Resilience researchers Gary Peterson and Daniel Ospina are asking for the resilience research community to participate in defining the important questions for the next wave of resilience research.

They have created a Google based survey to ask a broad community of researchers and practitioners interested in resilience what research areas they believe are key for advancing resilience research.

You can participate in the forum by clicking here. Additionally, the Resilience Alliance is launching a new resilience online network in fall 2014.

You can find out more information here.

___________________________________________________________

Timon McPhearson is Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology at The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center in New York City where he teaches urban ecology, sustainability and resilience. Using New York City as a case study, he conducts theoretical and field-based empirical research on urban biodiversity and ecosystem services in order to better understand how to protect, manage, and restore critical ecosystem functions and services in urban systems.

This article first appeared on The Nature of Cities website. To view it in its natural habitat please click here.

4 Ways to Take Green Cities to the Next Level

Chicago's Bloomingdale Trail greenway (J Tagarao Flickr)

by Jad Daley, GreenBiz.com: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/07/21/4-ways-build-resilient-cities

 

The last few years have offered cities a sobering climate change wake-up call.

 

Superstorm Sandy seemed to bring future coastal flood risks into resolution by slamming the nation’s most populated region. 

 

Yet data released in March in Nature Climate Change suggest that rapid glacier melt could push sea level rise far beyond anything previously imagined - potentially as much as 23 feet under a full melt scenario.
Future heat risks are more widespread and can be projected with high confidence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites heat-related deaths as already the nation’s most significant weather-related mortality.

But this vulnerability could get much worse - researchers from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University recently used climate scenarios from the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to project a tenfold increase in heat-related deaths in the eastern states by mid-century.

There is also the imperative for cities, already the most carbon-efficient places for people to live, to become even more energy efficient as our nation’s population continues to skew urban. Cities need to capture potential carbon reductions from transportation, buildings and infrastructure such as wastewater management if our country is to reach its long-term emissions reduction goals.

Each challenge has myriad facets that must be addressed, but they all share one common solution: bringing nature and nature-based “green infrastructure” into our cities at scale.

Imagine if our cities were more like forests. Connected by green pathways for safe movement. Cooled with shade and evapotranspiration. Naturally absorptive of rainfall, turning this resource into drinking water and clean rivers. Protected from storms by the bend of trees and the natural sponge effect of marshes.

This opportunity to “connect, cool, absorb and protect” with green infrastructure is being made real by cities all across America and the world at an accelerating rate.

Recent shining examples include collaborative efforts to deploy wetlands and oyster reefs in New York City after Superstorm Sandy, massive tree planting and “green alley” initiatives in cities such as Los Angeles, and the widespread recapture of abandoned rail corridors to provide safe routes for biking and walking across metro regions such as Chicago and Seattle.

These urban greening efforts lessen climate vulnerability and carbon emissions in equal measure.
The Trust for Public Land is working to secure funding for Colden Avenue Pocket Park, which would provide open space for this densely populated neighborhood of South Los Angeles. (Credit: Trust for the Public Land)
My organization, the Trust for Public Land, is involved in many of these city-scale efforts through our Climate-Smart Cities Program.

Through these experiences, we have identified some critical success factors to advancing complex green infrastructure efforts at multiple scales:

Build a complete team from the start

The skills and resources needed for green infrastructure success cross many organizational boundaries - public and private, for-profit and non-profit, thinkers and doers.

Cities and metro regions need to assemble collaborative efforts that engage federal, state, municipal, academic, corporate, non-profit and community-based players in durable partnerships that operate from shared information and priorities, and align partner resources all the way to the project level.

Translate climate science for green infrastructure

While there is abundant science previewing future climate risks, more scenario-related research and other applied science is needed to examine how green infrastructure interventions might lessen these risks.

This includes a sober look backward at the actual performance of green infrastructure in recent extreme events and scenario modeling that lets cities see the potential net effect of different green infrastructure solutions.

One recent example was a study led by the Georgia Institute of Technology that modeled potential heat island reduction under green infrastructure scenarios for three diverse cities, illuminating both the scale of potential impact and which interventions might be most effective in these different settings.

Leverage the power of Geographic Information Systems

While written plans and strategies for resilience are important, actual green infrastructure implementation happens out on the urban landscape.

Spatial planning and decision support using GIS translates resilience concepts and data into real places on the ground - letting all actors know where investments in green infrastructure will lead to resilience, and how much impact we can expect.

The power of GIS is truly unlocked when it is made accessible to all partners via an Internet “portal” that lets even community groups with little in-house technical capacity evaluate potential actions and align work with other players.

Apps can be a powerful tool to make spatial information such as heat and flood risk available to citizens in simple terms - ESRI’s Climate Resilience App Challenge is providing a great example of what is possible in this arena.

Design resilience across sectors

Urban resilience solutions must look across built infrastructure, green infrastructure and community-based adaptations rooted in social change. Heat risks offer a great example. Cities can build heat shelters to protect vulnerable populations during extreme events.

Shade trees and high albedo surfaces can be deployed to significantly lower air temperatures - as much as 10 degrees inside a home for a strategically sited tree.

Education and enhanced social networks can heighten collaboration, such as organizing check-ins for elderly residents living alone and helping arrange transportation to heat shelters.

Each approach - built, green and social - offers a powerful solution. But bringing all of these tools together in the most vulnerable neighborhoods? Now that is resilience built to last.

What will crystallize all of these best practices into common practice is the development of partnership templates and tools that link into a replicable model.

You can see my organization’s version of a replicable Climate-Smart Cities approach, being advanced in partnership with New York, Los Angeles, Chattanooga and other cities, through this short video. Many excellent models led by others also exist.

Federal efforts such as the White House’s Climate Data Initiative and State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience are lining up resources to flow into such efforts.

Cities are also networking nationally through the Conference of Mayors and globally through efforts such as C40 to speed replication and shared learning. Philanthropic investment in urban resilience is at an all-time high.

Now is the time for all the players, public and private, to come together behind model approaches that capture this moment of potential synergy.

Jad Daley is the director of The Trust for Public Land’s Climate Conservation Program and holds the endowed position of Martha Wyckoff Fellow. 

Daley coordinates The Trust for Public Land’s development of climate-smart cities through green infrastructure and strategic “resilient landscape” conservation targeted to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Read more from Jad Daley.

Inequality and its Impact on the Resilience of Societies

Regions of Latin America (Wikipedia)

by George Nicholson, e-Turbo News: http://www.eturbonews.com/48253/inequality-and-its-impact-resilience-societies

George Nicholson is the Director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction. Any correspondence or feedback should be sent to feedback@acs-aec.org.

We are all familiar with the proverb “Give a man a fish, and you will feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

While the origin of the saying is largely unknown, it is generally attributed to Mosheh ben Maimo, otherwise known as Maimonides, one of the most prolific scholars of the Middle Ages.

The context in which we examine this statement is in respect to the issue of equality and by extension self-determination, as it applies to vulnerability or its obverse, resilience, to the effects of natural hazards within the Latin American and Caribbean region.

Research has shown that disaster related experiences are shaped in important ways by the same issues of stratification and inequality that influence person’s lives during non-disaster periods.

Disasters are recognized as arising from the confluence of disaster agents, vulnerable built environments and vulnerable population. Vulnerability as a concept itself has gone through several different evolutions within formal disaster discourse leading the recognition of its social aspects.

More importantly with the shift from the purely physical to the social and political realms, it is widely held that vulnerability is in part socially produced, or influenced, reflecting the fact that failures in development processes, lead to increased risk among certain groups.

The social causation framework for assessment of impact presents the perspective that repeated and cumulative shocks from events erode attempts made by persons to accumulate resources and become more resilient. Some groups may return to their pre-disaster status, albeit with some difficulty, while some groups may never recover.

The multidisciplinary approach towards hazards seeks to explore disaster vulnerability as a function of both the physical place as well as the social conditions that expose some social groups to the potential for greater harm when a disaster strikes and also limit their ability to cope.

Important therefore, is identifying and analyzing the factors that help make differing social units more resilient, that is, able to avoid or withstand the impact of a hazard and further rapidly recovering from that which they have experienced.

It is against this backdrop that we seek to examine inequality. Generally speaking, inequality is defined as a situation in which some people have more rights or better opportunities than others.

We go further in making reference to the power relationships within the community that seek to include or exclude certain actors.

We examine here the context of the Latin American and Caribbean experience, which is one of significant income disparity between differing groups, poor social structures with respect to family life and high rural urban migration and its attendant ill effects on the foregoing.

Income disparity

Much has been said about the issues of inequality in the Latin American and Caribbean region. In fact while inequality in income distribution is a pervasive phenomenon across the world, our region has the unenviable title of being the most inequitable.

Some statistics are used here to illustrate the point. Roughly one out of every three inhabitants of the region is poor, that is, not having sufficient income to satisfy basic needs, while one in eight, even if they spend all their income earned, are not able to meet their basic nutritional requirements.

Within the context of these disturbing figures, we must recognize that there is also disparity in income level inequality when we look at the sub-regions.

Poverty rates in the Central American countries are exceeded only by Haiti; 70% of persons in the region’s two poorest countries, Haiti and Honduras, live in poverty, while in two of the richest, Barbados and Chile, only 12% live in poverty.

Large upper middle income countries like Brazil and Mexico have poverty rates which are slightly below the region’s average, no doubt a factor of their large populations; half of the region’s poor live between these two countries.

While vulnerability has often been associated with poverty, it also stands apart. In recognizing that poverty is a dynamic state, more so in the aftermath of a natural hazard, we must also accept the intertwining of vulnerability and poverty in our assessments.

Family structure and gender

Gender is a significant dimension of vulnerability as it is intrinsically linked to other factors associated with socio-economic well-being. Women are largely marginalized within the region, being more likely than men to be unemployed.

No reference to gender can be made without mentioning the increase in “female-headed” households in the region and by extension its association with poverty.

Matri-focal families, that is, a single parent family consisting of a mother and her children are disproportionately represented in the region. On average, 35% of all households in the Caribbean are headed by women with the proportion of female-headed households being as high as 44% in Barbados and 42% in Antigua and Barbuda.

In these households the number of children depending on the mother averages between three and five. Startlingly, the proportion of these families is rising as the highest rates of non-marital childbearing occur in Latin America (55-74%).

This has an unmistakable impact on issues concerning vulnerability as these types of households comprise the largest percentage within the poorest cohort.

Urbanization

Many of the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone a fast process of urbanization and internal rural to urban migration with very little regulation and a paucity of social services to support the increased population.

Migration of poor households to urban areas has caused the acquisition of housing in areas characterized by non-existent public infrastructure- physical and social, unsafe dwellings and overcrowding.

These factors create fertile ground for a disaster, as the impact of a natural hazard brings disproportionate impacts on these informal settlements. The unfortunate case within the region is that it is increasingly difficult to regularize unplanned communities, because of the attendant political and power relationships within them and those that support them externally.

Conclusion

The context in which inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized people or communities is apparent suggests that a multipronged approach to disaster risk reduction and poverty reduction is required if we are to reduce the overall impact of an event.

Attention must be given to improving the economic and social wellbeing of communities if we are to reduce sensitivity of poor households to disasters. Economic development strategy and physical planning, as well as risk management strategies must be sensitive to the needs of the poor living in hazardous areas.

The political change needed in the approach to disaster management requires that improving a person’s ability to respond to and cope with a disaster event must be placed on equal footing with the process to encourage economic development.

In the shift in approach from disaster response to disaster risk reduction, one position should remain foremost, that is, all disasters are local. In recognition of the need for effective management, the failure of the traditional top-down management approach becomes more evident.

Historically, this approach has been unsuccessful in addressing the needs of communities considered vulnerable. It must be recognized that in the face of recurrence of many small events vis-à-vis the large national tragedy, communities are the best judges of their own vulnerabilities and are best able to make decisions regarding their own wellbeing.

This necessarily involves a new strategy, one which directly involves the so-called marginalized people in the planning and implementation of mitigation measures.

Social stratification constitutes the means by which power privilege and access to resources are distributed within societies.

Understanding social inequality and its effects is therefore important to understanding the impact of disaster on societies and by extension the mechanism for the development of community-based resilience.

Research on the effects of disasters worldwide shows that communities resent the traditional approach by agents of the government: one which views them as problem areas rather than allies in the attempt to develop resilience and to respond and recover from disasters.

Risk reduction strategies should be focused on reducing economic vulnerability while simultaneously seeking to capitalize the social capacities of marginal communities.

Although vulnerable, we must not make the mistake of ignoring the reality that marginal communities can also be resilient. The onus then lies on those of us within the disaster risk reduction arena to encourage nations to provide appropriate forms of support that can transform at-risk groups from being potential victims to active agents within the disaster risk reduction process.