Comments for The New Optimists

Comment on Clare Devereux on Food Matters by | Growing Birmingham

| Growing Birmingham — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:03:30 +0000

[...] first is the every-little-counts argument. Clare Devereux of Brighton & Hove reckons their allotments and gardens produce 0.14% of what they [...]

Comment on How self-sufficient can Birmingham be? Should we even bother trying? by Growing Birmingham: Feeding the city? | Growing Birmingham

Growing Birmingham: Feeding the city? | Growing Birmingham — Sun, 06 May 2012 09:00:22 +0000

[...] town isn’t valuable. It is. But not as a source of food for the population as a whole. Hence these ideas in this blogpost. allotments, Birmingham, data, feeding a city, [...]

Comment on How self-sufficient can Birmingham be? Should we even bother trying? by Growing Birmingham: Feeding a city? | Growing Birmingham

Growing Birmingham: Feeding a city? | Growing Birmingham — Sun, 06 May 2012 08:42:19 +0000

[...] Roughly speaking – and very roughly speaking — about 10 people can live off a hectare of land. But that depends on the hectare being highly fertile and intensively farmed. It also depends on the diet people eat too. Hence it’s a very crude figure. It’s bandied about a bit on the internet along with the caveats given here. If you want some data/stats on sustainability and food, I strongly recommend David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. Chapter 13 is onFood and Farming. If you don’t want to buy it, you can download it a hefty pdf version here. All this is not to say that food growing in a city or town isn’t valuable. It is. But not as a source of food for the population as a whole. Hence these ideas in this blogpost. [...]

Comment on Will the semantic web radically change our food supply system? by Kate Cooper

Kate Cooper — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:41:03 +0000

Since I wrote this blogpost, I went to hear Andy Street (Birmingham-born John Lewis boss, Chairman of the Birmingham & Solihull LEP) talk At Aston Business School about the John Lewis business model.

In the Q&A afterwards, I posed this to him: “What nascent or emerging technologies do you think threaten your business?”

His reply was that existing technologies would be applied to cut out great swathes of their existing supply chain, as Amazon has done to, for example, the book publishing industry; i.e. semantic web applications.

Comment on Motivated communities achieve things by Michael Hardman

Michael Hardman — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:53:37 +0000

This summaries the efforts the New Optimists has been putting together since late last year. It’s fantastic to see that others are interested in promoting, and advancing, local food in Birmingham. Until recently, I feared there weren’t enough of us in Birmingham pushing this agenda.

We have several projects at BCU, ranging from allotment-focussed studies to my ethnographic work with community growers (and illegal cultivators), which may be of some use. I’m particularly interested in the mapping of Birmingham which you’re trying to achieve, something myself and another academic were interested in some time ago but did not have the partners to push it forward.

There’s lots going on, which is a good thing! I look forward to seeing you at our forthcoming Carrot City exhibition.

Comment on Birmingham 2050: Pathways to Famine, Pathways to Feast by Kate Cooper

Kate Cooper — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 07:59:54 +0000

You’re right, Adie. Urban landscapes are places where food can be grown. Toronto and Detroit both spring to mind. And there are initiatives here in the UK, Todmorden being perhaps the most famous example. Wherever individuals and/or communities grow their own food, great social benefits happen — in health, crime, civic ownership, social cohesion, sheer fun . . . It’s a no-brainer to encourage people to grow their own food in whatever way we can.

Nonetheless, cities are not places that can grow enough food to feed their population. If the average intake per person is 2000 calories, then Birmingham’s 1M people need 2000M calories every day! The logistics of supplying it all is mind-boggling.

Comment on Birmingham 2050: Pathways to Famine, Pathways to Feast by Adie

Adie — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:38:43 +0000

You are wrong, or at least lack imagination, the Birmingham city scape is perfectly suitable for growing food. I’ve proved it on the balcony of my flat. Ok, I can’t live off it but it makes a difference and if everyone did the same, who knows. There is a lot of roof space in Birmingham…

Comment on Will the semantic web radically change our food supply system? by Kate Cooper

Kate Cooper — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:35:23 +0000

But of course!

What’s really interesting about local food production in cities — whether an apple tree in the park or a productive allotment plot or the semi-commercial production of easily grown high value crops such as rocket or (as we become more innovative in using urban heat or, as looks likely in Birmingham, build distributed energy generation systems) vertical farming becomes economically viable . . . is that diverse often non-scaleable activities such as these will impact food chains to benefit all citizens because digital technologies will increasingly become an integral part of our fungible infrastructure. Rock on, Tim Berners-Lee, eh!

Comment on Will the semantic web radically change our food supply system? by Sustaination

Sustaination — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:34:17 +0000

You know about Sustaination, right?

http://www.sustaination.co.uk

Comment on A response to “They Moved Like Fish: The Birmingham Riots of August 2011″ by clive reynolds

clive reynolds — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:06:59 +0000

Dear Peter, I am a former colleague, associate and friend of Kate Cooper – we’ve worked together over the years on innovation strategy, particularly on the Masters programmes at WMG at Warwick University. Kate discussed her response to your report with me a couple of weeks ago, and I felt there were a few points missing from what she said:

First, it would be good to associate her thinking with your section on Cloud Planning, where I think it would have the most impact.

Secondly, we used to talk in terms of creating a new ecology, and I think this would be a really valuable image, with the various key themes forming a set of food chains.

Finally, and sorry to get conceptual, but we found we had to develop a facility in seeing the linkages between Possibility Space (all that might be), Structure Space (the subset that our natural minds are good at perceiving) and Function Space (the perspective that provides mappings – including physical things with emotions – and the capability to measure). We found we had to think like this to tackle the need for New Minds – New Thinking – New Ideas – New Strategies.

Good luck with your work, I thought the report was brilliant. Clive Reynolds