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Camping in Dartmoor April 2011

When lost alone in vast expanses of space, it is somehow easier to speculate on the future, and potential social imaginaries. Dartmoor is a particularly appropriate place as it is full of anomalies. Although much of the moorlands is privately owned, we can roam across the seemingly empty desolation with few restrictions thanks to the Dartmoor Commons Act of 1985. The rugged landscape of Dartmoor is itself the result of tragic ecological apocalypse. Once it was densely forested, but over-farming upset the balance as turning forestry into fields progressively eroded the natural cover of oak trees.  Disaster awaited. Without the trees to hold together the fragile soil, the nutrients were washed away. Crops failed, livestock died and Dartmoor became the soggy barren moorlands we know today.
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With the student protests and the TUC’s ‘March for the Alternative’, coinciding with the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, protest is very much in air. Amongst activists the language has shifted from Protest to increasing use of the word ‘Revolution’. The call to Revolution in the streets invariably recalls May 68 in the political imaginary but we know that what emerged from 68 was not what the revolt supposedly aspired to. Rather than political change, 68 was primarily a cultural revolution that broke down the barriers to modernisation by overturning the traditional plinths of bourgeois culture, the nuclear family and Church, so ushering in the liberal society along with the age of atomised consumerism.
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Experiments with local food supply in 2 hi-density urban estates
Maison Radieuse, Rezé, Nantes and Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, London

soundtrack: interview with Abdel Karim Boucham, Maison Radieuse 2008

In this continued post I look at two initiatives at the downstream end of the food chain, the consumer end, through the different approaches in two community projects I have engaged with in the past few years. Both are in high density public sector housing, one at Maison Radieuse in Nantes, one of Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité D’Habitation buildings and the other at Broadwater Farm, the sprawling prefabricated 60s Modernist housing estate in Tottenham, London N17
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Experiments with local food supply in 2 hi-density urban estates
Maison Radieuse, Rezé, Nantes and Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, London

soundtrack: interview with Anne Gray, Broadwater Farm Coop 2008

The past 20 years have seen massive increases in the corporate share at both ends of our food chain – downstream at the supply end with a few supermarkets and upstream the domination of food production by agribusiness cartels. Thus today just five companies control over three quarters of the world market in cereals with one, Cargill, controlling more than than 60%; three companies control 85% of the world’s tea market; three in cocoa have 84%; and with agrochemicals, the top 10 companies own 90% of the market. So why this wholesale takeover at a time of relentless environmental campaigning and anti-capitalist activism; is it down to the power imbalances of neoliberalism, or the lack of protective legislation, or subsidies  skewed heavily in favour of the large, or are the progressive messages not getting through to the masses? Perhaps that given the complex cultural dynamics of food, the corporate marketing men are better placed to exploit mass culture whilst the sustainable and ethical food industry remains contained by its own values or is simply too disorganised at present?
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Netroots UK: day of workshops at TUC Congress House London 8 January 2011

Dave Winer the American software developer and entrepreneur noted that one weblogger is worth ten non-weblogging voters. This was a few years ago; what price today for our Tweeters and facebook mobilisers in the climate of social unrest with the return of street politics. The Labour Party has not been slow to recognise the possibilities; with netroots UK and the slogan ‘building the progressive grassroots online’ the Party brought hundreds of  young e-activists off the streets to spend a Saturday indoors at the Trade Union Congress House. We know why. Whilst formal politics seems unable to answer the questions that contemporary society is asking, the e-activist has paradoxically acquired high currency in contemporary electoral politics. Arguably the national political consciousness is no longer being shaped by the traditional media but by self-produced social media and the blogosphere.
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Workshops on reducing household energy footprint led by ecoteams
at Hackney Town Hall, Mare Street, London   4 December 2010

Those whose work involves connecting the lives of ordinary communities with ecological awareness, know full well the problematic in the social encounters involved – questioning private habits, or critically engaging the space of anyone’s home invariably implies a measure of invasion of who they are. A previous generation of environmental artists and cultural activists saw the connection between ecology and culture as a way to move the present conditions of society to another beyond capitalism, debt, consumerism and individualism. But it has been a reactive process, with phrases such as ‘ecofascist’ becoming part of our language in the process.
So to mediate on the space between cultural work and the intervention needed into the basic everyday material conditions of life inside what we each call ‘home’ we have to tread carefully. We have to examine the way the social spaces of exchange operate within domestic space and what directions they have moved towards in the digital age.
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Workshop on Urban Farming and Local Empowerment led by Nomadisch Grün
at Prinzessinnengarten, Kreuzberg, Berlin     24 to 30 September 2010

soundtrack interview with Robert  Shaw

Our workshops for Urban growers take place at Prinzessinnengarten just off the busy traffic hub of Moritzplatz in Kreutzberg, below the drone of cranes engaged in new build.  Its Berlin’s real estate land alright. By its looks, Prinzessinnengarten is certainly strange; there is an enormous amount of formal aesthetic innovation in this ‘urban garden’ which combines an economic pragmatism with a rampant grow in any way and every way you can approach:  white vinyl bags strewn around with vegetables growing out, herbs popping out of tetrapacks, stackable red plastic containers, a ‘grow or be damned’ attitude. The colours combinations aren’t too bad either, red, white, then the clean minimal lines of the café and kitchen in shipping containers. Everything here is mobile; if push comes to shove this community garden or farm can pack and go, all of which contradicts conventional notions of both community and food growing. So what brings about a phenomenon such as Prinzessinnengarten?
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