THE TRANSITION TOWNS MOVEMENT

Building Resilient Neighbourhoods

The purpose of the Transition Towns movement is to build resilience in local communities to offset the effects of Peak Oil, Climate Change and Financial Instability. It is based on a model developed in Kinsale (Ireland) and promoted by the Transition Towns Trust in Totnes (UK) through their website (Insert Link), the Transition Initiatives Primer, the Kinsale 2021 Energy Descent Action Plan and the Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, a Permaculture Teacher. (Insert links)

The Transition Towns approach to building the future uses a model which in essence requires the development of action plans for all the different fields of human activity. These together form an energy descent action plan for a neighbourhood, a region, a country and ultimately the world as a whole.

For each field of activity the model suggests the following phases:

A.  Assess the Present situation.

B.  Formulate an achievable Vision for the particular field under consideration.

C.  Develop Practical Steps, in chronological order, that need to be undertaken to move towards the vision.

D.  Implement Projects that will contribute towards bringing the vision into manifestation.

Local Communities are encouraged to form a vision for their Community at some point in the future, to develop a detailed plan of action that will enable them to move in the direction of this vision and then to develop practical projects to implement this plan. Twelve key steps are identified as being of importance in the development and implementation of their Energy Descent Action Plan.

Twelve Steps of Transition.

1.      Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset. This step puts a core team in place to drive the project forward during the initial phases.

2.      Awareness Raising. This stage identifies key allies, builds crucial networks and prepares the community in general for the launch of the Transition Initiative.

3.      Laying the Foundations.  Networking with existing groups and activists; developing an inclusive approach to incorporate their previous efforts and future inputs.

4.      Organising a Great Unleashing.  At this stage a memorable, milestone event is created to move the initiative into the community at large, building a momentum to propel the initiative forward.

5.      Form Working Groups. Tapping into the collective genius of the community; establishing smaller working groups to focus on specific aspects of the process of developing an energy descent action plan.

6.      Use Open Space Forums. Highly effective group methods for running meetings based on Harrison Owen’s “Open Space Technology.

7.      Develop visible practical manifestations of the project. People need to get a sense of the whole, and to see things happening that they can go home and tell their friends and family about.

8.      Facilitate a Great Reskilling. In moving to a lower energy future and re-localisation, skills taken for granted by previous generations and indigenous communities will again become valuable assets.

9.      Build Bridges to Local, Regional and National Government. Here strategic partnerships with different levels of government are built, ensuring the ultimate success of the project.

10.    Honour the Elders. Engage with those who directly remember living in lower energy societies before the transition to the age of cheap and plentiful oil.

11.    Organic Development. Letting the process develop in its own unique way; keeping a focus on the key design criteria of building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint.

12.    Create an Energy Descent Action Plan. This sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, re-localised future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map for getting from here to there.

       

TRANSITION INITIATIVES

Transition Initiatives are an emerging and evolving approach to community-level sustainability, which are starting to appear world-wide in response to the deep-seated crisis of opportunity facing humankind and the planet at the present time.

Concerning this crisis Eckhart Tolle in his book A New Earth, quoted in the forefront of The Transition Handbook says,

 “When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn’t work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual Human – or a species – will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.

Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival – this is humanities challenge now. A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognise, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.” (A New Earth pages 20/21)

Key Assumptions

Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions:

1. Life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.
2. Our cities, settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.
3. We have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4. By unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching, while at the same time recognizing the biological limits of our planet.

Underlying Principles

One of the principle foundations of the Transition concept is permaculture. Described briefly by Graham Bell as follows, “Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.”

In addition there are six principles that distinctively define the Transition approach.

1. Visioning: this principle is based on the belief that we can only move towards something if we can imagine what it will be like when we get there. The vision we have in our mind when we set out on this work will go a long way towards determining where we will end up.
2. Inclusion: the scale of the challenge of peak oil and climate change cannot be addressed if we choose to stay within our comfort zones. The Transition approach thus seeks to facilitate a degree of dialogue and inclusion that has rarely been achieved before, and has begun to develop some innovative ways of bringing this about.
3. Awareness Raising: the media to which we are increasingly exposed continually give out double messages, which can leave one feeling perplexed, confused and powerless. We therefore need to assume no prior knowledge, and set out the case as clearly, accessibly and entertainingly as possible, giving as many people as possible the key arguments and possible ways forward in order to let them formulate there own responses.
4. Resilience: in ecology, the term resilience refers to an ecosystem’s ability to roll with the external shocks and attempted enforced changes. In the context of communities and settlements, it refers to their ability to not collapse at first sight of oil, food or money shortages, and to their ability to respond with adaptability to disturbance.
5. Psychological Insights: psychological insight confers an understanding that some of the key barriers to effective engagement are the sense of powerlessness, isolation and overwhelm that environmental issues can often generate. The Transition model uses these insights firstly through the creation of a positive vision, secondly by creating safe spaces where people can talk, digest and feel how these issues affect them, and thirdly by affirming the steps and actions that people have taken, and by designing into the process as many opportunities to celebrate successes as possible.
6. Credible and Appropriate Solutions: enabling people to explore credible solutions that can be achieved at community level, thus overcoming the inertia often engendered by ‘the two scale syndrome’ of only recognizing either what individuals can do in their own homes or what governments can do on a national scale.

 

Neighbourhoods in Transition

The concept of an energy transition poses the question of how to use the resources now available to society as a whole to create the basis of a future energy regime that will provide for people but not for profit. Environmentalists have commonly argued that a sustainable energy regime will create more jobs than the centralised fossil energy regime.

Urbanist Mark Swilling adds that a policy priority to ecological sustainability ahead of economic growth will create greater social equity even if this choice is accompanied by economic recession. The ‘consumption city’ can be, and should be, replaced by a ‘sustainable city’ in which improving living standards are decoupled from rising (and unsustainable) resource consumption. Such a city, composed of sustainable neighbourhoods     “…..generates more energy than it consumes, generates zero waste (both liquid and solid), meets most of its basic food requirements from local sources, requires little or no fossil fuels to transport people, and releases minimal amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The ‘sustainable neighbourhood’ helps to rebuild eco-systems and mitigates the risks associated with the rising costs of fossil fuels as these non renewable resources run out.” (Cape Town 2025: A City of Sustainable neighbourhoods, Sustainability Institute; Stellenbosch.)

 

Present Situation:

Transition Initiatives are now underway in approximately 1000 communities, mainly in English speaking countries.

\