Home - Village to Village Network. How to Be a Citizen Placemaker: Think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. With some temporary materials, a roadway can become a bocce ball court, and a street can become a great place / Photo: PPS Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams.
Picture the streets, the local square, the waterfront, the public market. Think about the colors, sights, smells, and sounds; imagine the sidewalk ballet in full swing, with children playing, activity spilling out of storefronts and workspaces, vendors selling food, neighborhood cultural events and festivals taking place out in the open air.
Take a minute, right now. Close your eyes, and really picture it. Now, here’s the million dollar question: in that vision, what are you doing to add to that bustle? If vibrancy is people, and citizenship is creative, it follows that the more that citizens feel they are able to contribute to their public spaces, the more vibrant their communities will be. Getting Started: How You Can Make a Place Great Right Away. Placemaking for Communities. Photos - Cheltenham Connect. CHELTENHAMCONNECTFORMALCONSTITUTIONAPRIL2010. The ecozoic city. For an exhibition that has opened in The Hague called Yes Naturally I was asked to contribute a text for the book about what nature might mean for cities, and vice versa, in the near future.
Here is an extract. The writer Thomas Berry described as the ecozoic the “reintegration of human endeavours into a larger ecological consciousness”. The ecozoic, Berry believed, would supplant the Anthropocene age, that we live in now, in which human needs take precedence over the health of the earth’s forests, oceans, and other living systems. Our species will only begin to make true progress, Berry believed, when we learn to cherish the vitality of all life-forms equally – not just our own. Berry’s ideas could be dismissed as charming, but implausible – were it not for many small signs that just such a cultural shift may be brewing underneath the shiny surface of business as usual.
Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. Or are they? Full Synopsis. Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking.
It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work. The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. The film shows how globalization breeds cultural self-rejection, competition and divisiveness; how it structurally promotes the growth of slums and urban sprawl; how it is decimating democracy. The second half of The Economics of Happiness provides not only inspiration, but practical solutions. International Society for Ecology and Culture: Promoting Locally Based Alternatives to the Global Consumer Culture.
Growing Power. Local Tools: Rental and Lending Library Software.