buy nothing day

I spent most of yesterday in meetings that had a lot to do with sustainability and how it can be achieved through good planning and design. The discussions related to a particular development project I am working on as a transport planning consultant. Working for developers sometimes makes me squirm, because my view of an appropriate design solution is not always aligned with that of the client paying my bills; but in this case, the match is a good one.

What is even more satisfying is that the people who attended yesterday's meetings (people who are not involved in the project but have an indirect stake in its outcome) are generally supportive and are keen to see it succeed. As a result, they asked incisive questions and offered constructive criticism. They are concerned about its potential impacts - not only on themselves, but on culture and the environment, on social structures and on economic livelihoods - and they are looking for reassurance that the broader challenges will be considered and addressed, and that the potential positive spinoffs will be realised. The best kind of meeting.

In discussion afterwards with a colleague who also attended, our conversation turned to questions about why sustainability is such a Big Deal. It's all about greed, she suggested. If we lived simpler lifestyles that met our physical, emotional and spiritual needs, we would automatically be living sustainably. My colleague had clearly been thinking of spiritual matters, as she had been out the previous night to hear Tenzin Palmo, a Tibetan nun who secluded herself in a remote cave 13 000 feet up in the Himalayas for 12 years of Buddhist meditation. I'm not advocating cutting ourselves off from the material world, but if we were more aware of ourselves and our social interactions, we would know what to do, and we might even do it.

So here's something to do. On Saturday, 24 November, buy nothing. Join international Buy Nothing Day as a reminder of our wasteful, consumptive lifestyles. It’s about reminding ourselves to really think about what we are buying‚ why we are buying it‚ and whether we really need it at all. Consuming at the level we do is unsustainable and is directly responsible for many of the world's environmental and economic problems. Waste, pollution, climate change, and many other topical and important issues are all fueled by consumerism.

I'll leave the last word to A.A. Milne, writing about Winnie-the-Pooh and the episode In which Christopher Robin leads an expotition to the North Pole:

"I think," said Christopher Robin, "that we ought to eat all our provisions now, so that we shan't have so much to carry."

"Eat all our what?" said Pooh.

"All that we've brought," said Piglet, getting to work.

"That's a good idea," said Pooh, and he got to work too.

"Have you all got something?" asked Christopher Robin with his mouth full.

"All except me, said Eeyore. "As usual." He looked around at them in his melancholy way. "I suppose none of you are sitting on a thistle by any chance?"

"I believe I am," said Pooh. "Ow!" He got up, and looked behind him. "Yes, I was. I thought so."

"Thank you, Pooh. If you've quite finished with it." He moved across to Pooh's place, and began to eat.

"It doesn't do them any Good, you know, sitting on them," he went on, as he looked up munching. "Takes all the Life out of them. Remember that another time, all of you. A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference."

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerism

http://www.ecoplan.org/ibnd/ib_index.htm

http://www.verdant.net/society.htm

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption.asp

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0111_040112_consumerism.html

the other side of Riebeek Kasteel

While farmers and residents of Riebeek Kasteel are engaged in a public battle over pesticide health problems, a quiet revolution is taking place offscreen. This is an interaction of a different kind among not only farmers and townsfolk, but other community groups and the local prison.

I wrote in August this year about a community garden and food kitchen for the children of Riebeek Kasteel's poorer township. That programme is expanding, in a number of ways. While the programme is still struggling to obtain funding, the local Goedgedacht Agricultural Resource Centre has donated a water tank, Riebeek Cellars has offered to pump water to the garden to store in the tank, and the Department of Agriculture has provided fencing to keep the garden secure.

Getting all this set up and running takes labour, and that's where the prison comes in. Bridget Doyle, from the garden project, told me that the local police recognise the importance of projects such as this from the perspective of crime prevention, and they have been bringing together existing groups that are involved in community development, to create a coordinated plan so that they all can benefit from shared resources and reduced duplication of effort. One of these groups is from the prison.

Correctional Services runs the Group of Hope, which keeps inmates at this prison busy with activities like sewing, cooking and singing. As the community garden has been receiving weekly food donations from Malmesbury businesses Shoprite Checkers, Fruit & Veg, and For da Belly (a bakery), Bridget now has an arrangement to take the food to the prison, where the Group of Hope cooks it, and the cooked food is taken to the Saturday morning soup kitchen.

Not only that, but part of the land leased by the community garden has been set aside for the Group of Hope to set up their own garden to provide feedstock for their kitchen, and twice a week four inmates provide labour for the community garden while they work on theirs.

Others brought together by the police coordinator are the Valley Empowerment Project, the Women's Forum, a community worker from the ACVV, a government social worker, and the Riebeek Kasteel Steel Band Project.

The Steel Band, run by David Wickham for a number of years now, provides an opportunity for local children to develop music skills and confidence. The band also provides opportunities for the children to perform at local events such as the annual Olive Festival, and occasionally in Cape Town.

Riebeek Valley sprawl

Riebeek Kasteel has been getting a bit of press coverage over the past few months, with a volley of letters to the editor last week. The small farming town, about an hour outside of Cape Town, is witnessing a court battle between a farmer and the residents living next to his vineyards.

Residents are claiming that the farmer is not following health and safety requirements when he sprays his crops, and are experiencing health problems from pesticides drifting in the wind. The farmer says he's following prescribed procedures.

The issue is not as straightforward as that, but it's a classic case of conflict between urban and rural land uses. The town's main attraction is its location: nestled in a valley filled with vineyards and olive groves, away from bigger urban areas. This has fuelled expansion of the town into agriculturual land at the same time as the farmers are experiencing a boom in demand for their olives and grapes.

On the face of it, Riebeek Kasteel presents a model of the ideal relationship between town and country. Physical expansion of the town onto productive farmland clearly has negative impacts, but what interests me here is the interaction and symbiosis between the two.

The biggest sign of the town's tourist boom is the annual olive festival, but there are smaller markets throughout the year, a steady escalation of property prices, and new businesses opening all the time that are not aiming at the traditional small-town market. Farmers are taking advantage of this new market for agricultural products by opening retail outlets and selling products at weekend markets. Townspeople benefit - in theory, at least - with more jobs.

There is no clear urban edge - either in planning or on the ground - and many vacant plots within the town are used to grow crops, adding to the sense that the town is integrated with the farmland. (The irony, in light of the current controversy, is that there was a time when farmers would spray the entire town with pesticides, believing they were doing everyone a favour.)

Urban sprawl is often facilitated by an economic weakening of farms on the urban fringe. In the case of Riebeek Kasteel, both the town and surrounding farms are thriving, producing a strong dynamic between them. On the fringes of larger urban areas, this strong relationship might create a useful check on sprawl, more effectively than a tightly controlled urban edge.

It will be interesting to see how land development plays out in the Riebeek Valley. Most recent growth in Riebeek Kasteel has been outward, rather than on vacant plots within the town. In the neighbouring town of Riebeek West, there has been a stronger focus on infilling rather than outward sprawl, and some of the recent housing projects have been at densities higher than one might expect in a rural town. This may have more to do with the intentions of the owners of surrounding farms than with strong planning, but as land values increase within the towns, the farmers may feel the urge to sell. Let's hope that a healthy urban-rural symbiosis will keep temptation at bay.

in bed with folly and wisdom

The Michael Oak Waldorf School Fair was held under sunny Cape Town skies and the guiding theme of Earthsense, this past weekend. A new experience for visitors this year was Grandma's Fever Bed: installation art created by Grade 8 children, under the guidance of Tossie van Tonder, using mainly discarded car tyres and computer parts - powerful symbols of contradiction between modern life's dependencies and the need to preserve our environment.

Explaining the thinking behind the installation, Tossie writes in the school's newsletter:

The installation aims to show the under belly of what surrounds our community - in a manner that portrays the irony inherent in our relationship with our most valued objects of movement and knowledge. Working with these materials has showed me the tenacity of the teenagers, their stamina to confront, engage and creatively design themselves into a fearless partnership with objects and their meaning in our lives.

[...]

This way we face concepts we reluctantly continue with, and simultaneously deny, at the cost of our ethos as a school. Creativity has many facets, and by bringing the creative desire into our home we dismantle our fears. There is nothing more abject than an object that has outlived its usefulness but has not yet been recycled.

Set under the embracing canopy of a large tree on the school grounds, the installation provided a theatre for the children to engage with the bed:

This performance installation hints at the merging of modern technology and ancient wisdom. The essence of this fusion lies embedded in the seed. What is a seed? The energetic blueprint for what is to come, or only a thought? Is there a seed in desire? A seed senses when to start growing. What soil is needed for a particular seed?

pie in the sky

Bringing the farm to the people - high time. A number of concepts for vertical farming have been popping up, but this is the first I've seen that combines farming with apartments. Some might ask, "Why?" I would ask, "Why not?" My fear is that the answer will be, "It's not financially viable."

cultural heritage and transportation

Today is Heritage Day in South Africa. Most countries, whether or not they dedicate a public holiday to it, celebrate cultural heritage in one way or another. It might be poorly defined, subjected to endless arguments, considered differently by groups in society who feel they should be identified as different from others, and even co-opted to political ends. But most people seem to assume that it somehow defines who we are, and is therefore worth preserving. What is not fully recognized in the planning fraternity though, is the range of ways in which transportation and the built environment affect culture in its present incarnations.

Many countries, including South Africa, use environmental impact assessments - or some similar mechanism - to check that planned changes to transportation infrastructure don't adversely affect cultural heritage resources. This is usually considered to mean that built heritage features such as historically significant buildings or other human artifacts should not be compromised.

Transportation corridor design and construction can affect these resources in a number of ways. In the 2003 Draft Cultural Heritage Work Plan for the planned extension of Highway 407 in Ontario, it was noted that "[t]he effects may include displacement through removal or demolition and/or disruption by the introduction of physical, visual, audible or atmospheric elements that are not in keeping with the character of the cultural heritage resources, and/or their setting."

While it is notoriously difficult to quantify some of these impacts, they are at least reasonably tangible. Things start to get a little more interesting when we consider that "[a]ggregations of individual cultural features usually form areas of homogenous character such as a rural area, a village, a streetscape, etc. The attributes for built heritage features are derived from historical associations and/or architectural or engineering qualities." And it's even more challenging to incorporate the role of memory in cultural heritage, something that has recently entered the heritage debate in South Africa.

All of this is no doubt important, but it's missing a crucial element in the consideration of transportation's impact on cultural heritage: the present.

It is true that present lifesyle is partially considered in environmental assessments. Ontario's Environmental Assessment Act defines "environment" to include "...cultural conditions that influence the life of humans or a community." So, for example, if a new road will force relocation of households, or a new dam will wipe out the livelihoods of a community, these are registered as impacts that must be considered.

The cultural conditions of community life should, however, be defined more broadly than is generally done for environmental assessments. At a workshop of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Project on Environmentally Sustainable Transportation, held in Ottawa in 2000, John Adams noted in his paper "The Social Implications of Hypermobility":

It is transport - and communications - that connect everything in society to everything else. The length, strength, quality and complexity of the connecting strands, and the patterns into which they are woven, are the physical manifestation of the social fabric - a metaphor for the myriad ways in which people and institutions relate to each other.

The OECD project looked at two alternative scenarios that countries could aim for in their policies and planning practices: Business as Usual (BAU) and Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). As defined by OECD, BAU is simply an extrapolation of past trends, while EST is "transportation that does not endanger public health or ecosystems and that meets needs for access consistent with (a) use of renewable resources that are below their rates of regeneration, and (b) use of non-renewable resources below the rates of development of renewable substitutes." Adams suggested that the BAU scenario would make countries richer (measured by GDP), but poorer by most other social and environmental indicators. "BAU countries will be:

• more polarised (greater disparity between rich and poor);
• more dispersed (more suburban sprawl);
• more anonymous and less convivial (fewer people will know their neighbours);
• less child-friendly (children's freedoms will be further curtailed by parental fears);
• less culturally distinctive (the McCulture will be further advanced);
• more dangerous for those not in cars (more metal in motion);
• fatter and less fit (less exercise built into daily routines);
• more crime ridden (less social cohesion and more fear of crime);
• subject to a more Orwellian style of policing (more CCTV surveillance); and
• less democratic (the majority will have less influence over the decisions that govern their lives)."

In other words, the way we approach transport planning has a significant impact on cultural heritage in the here and now. It's not something removed from present reality. Present reality is already evolving under the hands of planners, engineers, developers and politicians, so the question is not whether society should change the way it is culturally defined, but how.

Darling rocks

Rocking the Daisies returns to the town of Darling in the Western Cape next weekend (28 to 30 September), and the festival organisers are reducing the event's environmental impact in a number of ways. One is to use hemp fabric for official festival clothing. The benefits of hemp, according to the festival website:

Hemp offers so many solutions to the challenges our continent faces on a daily and longer-term basis. Emerging farmers can grow hemp without having to buy the pesticides, chemical fertiliser and herbicides and use much less water than most other conventional crops require. At harvest time they can use the entire plant with zero waste, the fibre being the primary product, the essential fatty acid and protein rich seeds for nutrition/fuel and the byproduct of the stalk for housing. The green leaves are left in the field and ploughed back into the soil, replacing valuable nitrogen and leaving the soil fertile for the next rotational crop to be planted.

They are also collecting used cooking oil from restaurants at the festival, converting it to biodiesel, and using that to power a generator for the restaurants. How cool is that? Other strategies are outlined on the festival website.

film festival in Cape Town

The architect africa film festival is still on in Cape Town, with screenings until Thursday 6 September. Fascinating stuff not only on architecture, but also planning and community issues. From the 1927 science fiction Metropolis to the 2004 End of Suburbia and more recent documentaries from Nigeria, Venezuela and Tanzania, the festival is a smorgasbord of commentary on the relationship between society and the infrastructure that supports it. At Cinema Nouveau in Cavendish Square.

what is normal?

One of the shortcomings of transporation planning (usually) is that it is focused on normal traffic conditions: a typical weekday when there is nothing unusual happening, schools are in session and it is not a public holiday. This is not a bad approach from the point of view that it is a waste of resources to design roads, parking lots and other infrastructure to be big enough that traffic moves smoothly and everyone can park easily during the few days when traffic is really heavy, like in the shopping buildup to Christmas.

Unfortunately, it misses the fundamental point that a lot of problems related to getting around are a result of abnormal conditions, like when a traffic accident is blocking the road, or severe weather is slowing traffic. Some traffic authorities recognize and deal with this, like efforts in Toronto to reduce the impact of road incidents on provincial highways by identifying accidents quickly with real-time speed monitoring and CCTV cameras, and using electronic variable-message signs to warn drivers in advance of trouble spots. But rarely have I seen other transport modes given the same consideration when their normal routes are disrupted.

When I am in walking mode, what really makes my blood boil is the way road maintenance or construction inconveniences pedestrians. This is another "unusual" condition that is often ignored. Whether it's lack of regulation or lack of enforcement, cities don't always apply appropriate standards for making sure that pedestrians have safe passage during construction activity. I am thrilled that Telkom's fixed-line telecommunications competitor in South Africa, Neotel, is coming onto the scene; but they are digging up sidewalks in the CBD and leaving gaping holes, mounds of dirt and pipes lying everywhere.

On my route from Cape Town station to the office in Greenpoint, one section of sidewalk has been dug up for burying cables at least four times in the past year, and on at least two occasions the mounds of dirt have forced pedestrians to walk on the road over a period of several weeks. One day, all four corners of an intersection were dug up, leaving no refuge for pedestrians waiting to cross. And this is on a road chosen by the Western Cape Provincial Government as a walking bus route to improve security for people walking to and from the station, because it is one of the busier pedestrian routes in the CBD.

This is not the way to promote walking and cycling, either as travel modes in their own right, or for access to public transport. Sidewalks need to be clear of obstructions and hazards, curbside lanes need to be kept clear for cyclists, and drains need to be maintained so that they actually drain the rainwater. It's not rocket science, but it does require coordination between municipal departments - something that is in short supply in many cities.

forget Eskom - meet Fabio Rosa

Nearly ten years ago my family and I spent nearly a week in a small rural village - a cluster of homesteads, really - in Transkei, near Idutywa. Eskom had just trundled through in 1997, rolling out the national electricity grid, so every home had a connection and at least a lightbulb. Some had electric fridges and stoves and other appliances. The house we stayed in, a wonderful 8-room structure built around 1960 with sun-baked mud bricks, had a single incandescent lightbulb. At the request of our host, I added some wiring to increase the number of rooms with electric light.

Fort Malan is a traditional village, or "location", that had previously seen little change. There were very few jobs in the immediate area. The nearest were in the village of Mnandi, an hour's walk away, or the town of Idutywa, which could be reached by tortuous car or taxi journey over heavily rutted gravel roads. Residents of the location had livestock and grew crops like mealies, pumpkins, beans and marrows on land allocated to them by the location's headman. Rainwater was used for drinking, and river water was brought up the hill for other uses by plastic barrels on women's heads, donkeys' backs or in wheelbarrows.

Most residents of the location who had jobs with significant income would have been migrant labourers spending months away from home, working on mines or big-city jobs. Some of the money earned would have filtered back to the location in one way or another, but the largely subsistence economy required very little cash. What cash did arrive would be circulated in the location through local jobs such as shepherding or purchase of crops or livestock. Certainly it was not an easy life, as gathering fuel and water and certain foods required regular trips that could be strenuous and time-consuming, but there was stability in a community that shared skills and resources and an understanding of the common good.

Eskom's grid changed that. Suddenly life could be made easier by keeping food cold longer (which meant fewer trips to town); cooking on an electric stove (no more gathering wood or buying paraffin); reading by good light (a better education). All this requires cash, and cash means jobs. People complained to me that there were no jobs, and I would guess that there were fewer complaints before Eskom brought its promise of a better life. I am not suggesting that these villagers should not have electricity, but bringing the grid to deep rural villages is not the way to do it.

There is a model for providing the rural poor with electricity and appropriate technologies in a way that is affordable, without subsidies. Many of the 2 billion people worldwide living without electricity could enjoy reliable, productive and clean energy by switching from kerosene, paraffin, wood or coal to distributed solar-powered electrical systems; but there are obstacles such as mistrust of solar technology, the high cost of solar panels and the disinterest of big business (and of national electricity utilities). What Eskom did in the late 1990s in Transkei and rural South Africa does not make economic sense; it was driven by political objectives, without which the grid expansion would not have taken place.

Working in a similar rural situation, entrepreneur Fabio Rosa spent years developing a business model to provide solar power to low-income households in Brazil. Aware of the social obstacles, he started by addressing the human challenges before deciding on the most appropriate technologies. He needed to build trust and develop relationships with local champions who could spread the word and manage aspects of the business. Then he came up with a package of electricity supply and appliances that meet real needs, so that households can have light, play music, watch TV, pump water, irrigate fields and recharge cell phones.

The key is that he doesn't sell these kits, he rents them out. Buying a solar panel means paying for 25 years' worth of electricity upfront, and low-income households certainly cannot afford to do that. Fabio can provide the services that families need (on a for-profit basis) at monthly rates that are equivalent to what some households were already spending on other energy sources. And he provides employment for local businesses who install and maintain the systems.

Unlike Eskom's approach, which creates expectations without providing the means to fulfill them, Fabio also started developing 12-volt refrigerators, power saws, power drills and a thermal solar water heater. Technologies suited to the needs of his customers and their solar power sources. That's what I would call a sustainable business model.

Just for good measure, here's a more recent example (this one in Nepal) of cheap, small-scale, homegrown technologies and why they fall under the radar of mass media.