Cities
A Tale of Localization in Two Cities
After spending 30 years in Asia (mostly Bangladesh), I have recently begun spending most of my time in the small city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going from a megacity of roughly 22 million people to a city of merely 90,000, relocating from the tropics to the desert, the differences are obviously staggering. But what…
Read MoreBicycles and Localization
World Celebration Days are ways to highlight a cause, to collectively focus and bring important ideas to public attention at the community level while uniting globally behind them. Several important days were packed into the month of June. These included World Bicycle Day, followed two days later by World Environment Day, and then World Localization…
Read MoreLow-tech solutions
Most mainstream responses to climate chaos today rely heavily on high technology and big business. We rarely hear about solutions – often rooted in the past – that are localized, low-tech, and don’t advance the interests of large corporations. These are precisely the kind of technologies explored in depth on Low-Tech Magazine. What follows is…
Read MoreWhat if food were treated as a human right?
It can be difficult to imagine a world – or even a city – without hunger. It seems so endemic to the world we live in that it can appear intractable. But there are examples around the world of places that have reorganized themselves to eradicate food insecurity completely, whether it be within one community…
Read MoreLocalization and Carfree Cities
The future is local. There is a growing international movement to resist the dominant paradigms of globalization at all costs and unbridled capitalism, to restore strong local economies and tight-knit communities. But in order to have strong local economies and communities, we have to address the destructive nature of the automobile. Cars require an inordinate…
Read MoreCo-creating urban, regenerative futures
“Regenerative Futures” The phrase had been rolling around my head for a while. I felt that it pretty neatly summed up the direction I wanted to be heading with my work and life. ‘Regenerative’ – I reasoned – is the next stage after sustainability: Degeneration –> Sustainability –> Regeneration And ‘futures’ is, well, the future.…
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