Category - Project
TNO March update
Here’s the March update from the New Optimists Forum.
Lots of stuff has happened, including three important developments very recently:
- The publication of The readiness is all: What it takes to feed the city, the second of the Birmingham Scenarios Reports.
- The news that Birmingham City Council are making the expansion of district energy networks their top green priority.
- TNO spin-off Growing Birmingham has brought The Big Dig to Birmingham.
The readiness is all: What it takes to feed a city
The second of the Birmingham Scenarios Reports, The readiness is all: What it takes to feed a city is published today.
Earlier drafts were commented on by the UK’s Global Food Security Champion, Professor Tim Benton and several New Optimists scientists: Professor Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston, Dr Rosemary Collier, Professor Laura Green, Dr Rob Lillywhite and Professor David Pink — and we’re very grateful to them for their really helpful contributions.
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TNO Forum latest update published
There’s been some great stuff happening over the last couple of months, all reported in the January Forum update.
The image here is a montage of stills created from the filming of the 1st December workshop at Birmingham Leadership Foundation.
This was a thrilling beginning to create “narrativium” to populate the scenarios. We’re now writing an Arts Council bid to continue this work.
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TNO Response to the Birmingham Development Plan 2031
We’ve responded today to the draft Birmingham Development Plan 2031 — the deadline is Monday (14th January), and published a copy of it here.
The final version of the Development Plan is a hugely influential document, setting out the strategic objectives for planning permissions in the city over the next 25 years. Sure, revised every five years, but nonetheless hugely influential.
If you make a submission to this draft Plan 2031, the City Council has to respond.
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#TNOfood tweets about Birmingham Sustainability Forum
Here are the tweets using #TNOfood about the Birmingham Sustainability Forum: Tweetdec_#TNOfood_1st-11th-September-2012
Food and cities: Food self-sufficiency defies the laws of nature
I’ve written before about how self-sufficient Birmingham could be, and why we should bother about local food growing. As far as feeding a densely populated area, local food growing doesn’t.
Local food growing has great civic, social and individual benefits — it is truly wonderful, as Caroline Hutton of Martineau Gardens so eloquently says!
But, unless we develop an at-present unimagined technology whereby we can, for example, manufacture new materials as foodstuffs, food self-sufficiency for a city defies the laws of nature.
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#TNOfood & high level conclusions from the 2011 Foresight Report: The Future of Food & Farming
I thought it helpful to read high-level conclusions from last year’s Government Office for Science Foresight The Future of Food and Farming Final Report. There were two surprises in it for me.
One is this statement in the second conclusion: Nothing less is required than a redesign of the whole food system to bring sustainability to the fore. A tall if vital order.
The other is their fifth conclusion: This Report rejects food self-sufficiency as a viable option for nations to contribute to global food security . . .
The high level conclusions in full are as follows:
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#TNOfood: What we should start doing within the next 6-24 months
This group of three people are working on the final task of the evening
What are the implications of planning future food organisation for a city as large as Birmingham, where often neighbours don’t know each other, compared to a small, confined place like Todmorden? It’s a qualitatively different order of things in a big city.
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Why and how social reporting works for us
Nick Booth of Podnosh has asked me to write about the why and how of social reporting for The New Optimists. Here goes:
Having got over 80 West Midlands scientists, two thirds Professors, to answer the simple question What are you optimistic about? I published what they said in a book, launched at the British Science Festival held here in Birmingham in September 2010.
And social media allowed news of its publication to get out. As I had a non-existent marketing budget, this was neat.
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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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