Posts by Kate Cooper
Growing Birmingham — the Forum’s first spin-off
At the very first New Optimists Forum meeting last November, the notion of encouraging and celebrating local food growing was aired.
And so a few weeks ago, the city parks boss Darren Share, Jim Parle and I met to talk about what we could do to celebrate the great stuff that’s already going on, and encourage much, much more.
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Alys Fowler, Urban Food Growing Centre in Brum — and our need for 2000,000,000 calories per day
Alys Fowler tweeted this brilliant news yesterday!
The centre will be at Winterbourne Gardens at Birmingham University, opening in September.
As someone who has challenged Sarah-Jane Watkinson to enable me, a known mint killer,
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Carrot City – 1100 this Thursday (19th) at BCU (Rm 381)
Exciting times afoot! And this week . . .
World-renown Carrot City is in Birmingham this month, running a series of events hosted by the ever-wonderful MADE and BCU — with an exhibition at Millennium Point until 6th April, and a day-seminar at BCU this Thursday.
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Semantic web, distributed energy, Growing Birmingham . . .
There’s a diagrammatic summary of Forum activities here (includes the list of all the brilliant profs and others involved), plus the April newsletter is now out.
We’ve completed the first, divergent phase of the scenarios we’ve generating about food futures for Birmingham 2050; i.e. what we’ll be eating in here in forty-odd years’ time.
As part of the next convergent phase, we’re running three more Forum events in the next couple of months:
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Motivated communities achieve things
“Motivated communities achieve things,” so says architect Professor Ruth Reed.
Indeed, they do.
One of the wonderfully cheering outcomes of the New Optimists Forum has been the outpouring of news of all sorts of community fruit’n'veg growing, and its impact.
Here’s a collation of blogposts and links about it all in this single document: Agroecology & urban farming.
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A productive green infrastructure: Our response to “Places for the Future”
The Sustainability Team at Birmingham City Council asked for a response to their supplementary planning document, Places for the Future.
So we wrote one and this is it: NewOptimists_Response_Places4TheFuture_SPDDoc. (By we, I mean the wonderfully insightful Matthew Green @policyworks wrote most of it, and yours truly tagged along.)
Today’s city leaders in the UK have never had to think about food supplies in the way their forebears did, and in the way their successors must — and that might mean feel-good
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Will the semantic web radically change our food supply system?
Chris Brewster spoke about the semantic web (see video clip) at the 1st March New Optimists Forum event. Before I watched it, I’d hardly heard of the “semantic web” and had no idea of its potential impact on what we will be eating.
Intrigued by what he’d said, I had another conversation with him yesterday. I want his take on how the semantic web might enable small-scale producers enter the current supply chain.
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Birmingham 2050: Pathways to Famine, Pathways to Feast
Eight people sat round my kitchen table on 9th February. It was a meeting on the issue of food poverty/food deserts in Birmingham, raised by Jim Parle in a video interview at an earlier Forum event.
Ellie Richards had the brief to categorise what the guys said and, where possible, draw out causal links.
She’s created two broad-brush possibilities, Pathways to Famine, and Pathways to Feast.
Both are written in the same format with the issues, trends and
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Science, technology and precision farming
When different technologies are combined, innovation often happens. As with precision farming, a topic that came up at the 1st March Forum event.
Because it was a new idea to some of the participant scientists there, I reckon it might also be new for lots of others too. Hence this blogpost.
Take satellite imaging, information technology and farmers able to locate their precise position using GPS or equivalent, and they can distribute
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