The Challenge will allow the experiences of people living and working in communities that take part to be shared publicly, along with the quantitative data on carbon and energy savings. The information will be used to offer continuous learning and improvement, and the lessons learned will be made available to other communities across the country. The learning will also inform government's wider delivery plans on energy and climate change.
The Brixton pound is the latest local currency to be launched under the umbrella of the Transition Town Network, a rapidly growing global movement that urges local communities to "respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of peak oil and climate change".
"The Brixton pounds could be a catalyst for both interaction and exclusion. Will it be seen by the black community as white, middle-class liberals doing their stuff? It could act as a wedge between the communities if not done right. Community cohesion is about creating shared spaces and values . The Brixton pounds scheme will need the black community to buy into it, or else it will be seen as a white pursuit."
Once the proud home of America's mighty car industry, Detroit now faces meltdown. Tomorrow, the bosses of Ford, Chrysler and GM will make their final plea for a $25bn government bailout to save their firms, the legacy of Motor City - and nearly 2m jobs.
Transition Cities Conference 2008
A gathering of those who have been testing the Transition model in the cities, an Open Space conference to draw together and share ideas and insights, tools and techniques, exploring what works and what doesn’t in urban Transition. Programme.pdf
What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?
Steve Bloom: Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi
A unique portrait of the small traders of Nairobi. .... a place where slick advertising has made few inroads and shopping malls and supermarkets remain a rarity. Businessmen and women paint their own hoardings and signs, or call in friends who happen to be handy with a paintbrush.
Laurie Green: Let's Do Theology: Resources for Contextual Theology
...a classic text for contextual and urban theologians
Stephen Graham: Disrupted Cities
Infrastructure failure is a major factor in the lives of cities. This book explores the implications of this vulnerability through war, hurricanes, blackouts and sewerage failure.
Anthony Cartwright: Heartland
A passionate, page-turning story about grass-roots politics, football and the far right in a multicultural, working class town .
Jane Bicknell, David Satterthwaite: Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges
A wide-ranging and detailed body of information identifying and assessing risk, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in urban cities in low- and middle-income countries.
David Owen: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of "extreme compactness," New York "is the greenest community in the United States."
R. Horsley: Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All
A reexamination of the economics of the Bible and its clarion call for economic justice for all.
Jim Krane: Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City
In the 1950s, with a few thousand souls scraping a living in a waterless desert by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India, Dubai was as poor as any village in Somalia or Sudan. Today freewheeling Dubai is everything the Arab world isn't.
Glenna Lang: Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of the Death and Life of Great American Cities
Accessible account of the inspiring story of the woman whose passion and dedication revolutionised the way we think about cities.
Anthony Flint: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City
Documents the struggle in fascinating detail.
Michael Sorkin: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
offers a testing ground for speculation about the way in which the city can be newly imagined and designed, to deal with pressing issues such as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, security and surveillance, the place of history, and the future of the 'neighbourhood'.
Joe Moran: On Roads: A Hidden History
'On Roads is a book that makes motorways safe for people .... explaining them in terms – historical, aesthetic, anthropological, political – not usually considered on Top Gear.' Owen Hatherley
Seyla Benhabib, Judith Resnik: Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender
....uniquely situates gender in the context of ongoing, urgent conversations about globalization, citizenship, and the meaning of borders
Setha M. Low: On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
How the physical form of the plaza encodes the social, political, and economic relations within the city.
Manuel Castells: Communication Power
Manuel Castells analyses the transformation of the global media industry by this revolution in communication technologies, proposing a new theory of power in the information age based on the management of communication networks
Anna Minton: Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City
This passionate and vivid polemic shows us the face of Britain today, revealing the untested urban planning that is transforming not only our cities, but the nature of public space, of citizenship and of trust.
Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World
The rise of China, India and the Asian tigers means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively western. The west will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.
Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture and Design
Reflections about space and place, and how they reflect and affect religious experience provide a challenge and an urgent necessity for theology. This is particularly important if religious practitioners are to become aware of how theology is given expression in the existential spatiality of life.
Elaine Graham & Stephen Lowe: What Makes a Good City?: Public Theology and the Urban Church
Essential reading three years on from Faithful Cities.
Nissa Finney: Sleepwalking to Segregation?: Challenging Myths About Race and Migration
"If you want to know what has really been happening in Britain in terms of ethnic segregation, how many ghettos exist, or whether immigration is a threat to social solidarity, this is the book to read." --Danny Dorling
Terry Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.
Owen Hatherley: Militant Modernism
'Hatherley’s championing of constructivism is grounded in the moral rectitude he discerns in it, as well as in a kind of aesthetic delight.' Jonathan Meades
Martin Wainwright: Leeds: Shaping the City
an authoritative and objective assessment of the redevelopment and regeneration of Leeds.
Elaine Graham: Words Made Flesh: Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology
Considers topics as diverse as science fiction, gender, consumerism, cyberspace and urban regeneration with the fundamental conviction that theology as 'talk about God-in-the-world' is always practical and public - and that it begins and ends in the complexities of the human condition: where words become flesh.
J.W. Rogerson & J.J. Vincent: The City in Biblical Perspective
...explores the archaeological and social backgrounds to cities in the biblical world and draws out the implications of the deliberate ambiguities in the biblical text [and] and asks whether and how the Bible can provide resources for the city today, in a world in which the majority of earth's burgeoning population is located in cities.
Scott, Baker and Graham (eds.): Remoralizing Britain?: Social, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour
Drawing together for the first time theorists from a range of disciplines and commitments, this interdisciplinary collection offers a reckoning of this New Labour decade.
Andreas Huyssen ed.: Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age
...brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities.
Tristram Hunt: The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
A vital biography of the key victoran urban socilogist.
Ched Myers: Binding the Strongest Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
20th anniversary edition of mould breaking commentary. New preface and introduction by Sam Wells.
