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Ten years ago this month, coworking was born in San Francisco when Brad Neuberg set up some card tables and invited people to work alongside him. There are now over 3,000 coworking spaces worldwide.
On November 6-7 in Bologna, Italy, leading scholars, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and social innovators will gather to further the discussion and movement around the urban commons.
Tucked away in the basement of Denver’s Smiley Library Branch is the Northwest Denver Toy Library. Founded in 1980, the toy library has been serving the community entirely through donations and volunteers. Last week, I sat down with Margie Herlth, who leads the operation and has been volunteering since 1996, to learn how the toy library works.
How much thought do you give to pavement? Our cities are covered with it, but it’s not exactly a hot topic of conversation—though it should be. Pavement causes all sorts of problems including the fact that water can’t soak through it and instead runs across it, collecting pollutants and biological contaminants that make their way into waterways, plants, animals, and ourselves.
What began as a childcare coop in Seoul, South Korea has grown into a cooperative, urban village and sparked a national movement of urban villages.
In 1958, three years before her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote an article called “Downtown Is for People.” In it she noted:
A bike kitchen is a place for people to repair their bikes, learn safe cycling, make bicycling more accessible, build community, and support sustainable transportation by getting more people on bikes. Most bike kitchens have tools, parts, mechanics, and a community of knowledgeable cyclists.
Portland, Oregon, a city known for having a strong D.I.Y. ethos, is no stranger to collaborative, D.I.T. (do it together) culture either. Case in point: the recent PDX Skillshare. Supported in part with a grant from Shareable, the event brought people together to exchange skills and information about martial arts, screen printing, meal planning and preparation, beekeeping, business networking, clawhammer banjo playing, and much more.
OuiShare Fest 2014 brought together 1,000 sharers from 31 countries under the big tent of the Cabaret Sauvage in Paris. On May 5, 6, and 7, we met in the middle of Parc de la Villette, by the scenic Ourcq Canal.
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Transition Streets is a toolkit for neighborhood transformation—a catalyst for action, dialogue, and community building. A project of Transition US, Transition Streets is as simple as neighbors coming together for seven meetings to explore carbon-saving and resilience-building actions in the areas of food, water, waste, energy, transportation, all the while building relationships with each other and a stronger sense of community.
Imagine going to a shop, borrowing anything you like, and returning it when you're finished. This is the idea behind SHARE: a Library of Things. Opened in late-April in Frome, a town in northeast England, the aim of SHARE is to enable people to spend less, waste less, and connect more. The first of its kind in the U.K., SHARE has already sparked interest from other communities.
Recently, Causa Justa::Just Cause (CJJC) released a report titled Development Without Displacement: Resisting Gentrification in the Bay Area. The 112-page document, prepared in collaboration with the Alameda County Public Health Department, goes beyond describing the public health implications of gentrification to proposing steps that cities like Oakland can take to stop displacement of historic residents.
What role do complementary currencies play in alleviating poverty, creating income equality, and building sustainable communities? According to John Boik PhD, a vital one. Founder of the Principled Societies Projectand author of the book Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being, Boik designed a multi-faceted framework for local democratic systems of which a complementary currency is a key element. A computer simulation model that describes the book’s proposed local-national currency system saw median and mean take-home family income more than double, income inequality nearly eliminated, and the unemployment rate drop to 1 percent over the 28-year simulation period.
Neil Thapar first encountered seed issues in law school when he worked with the Center for Food Safety against genetically-modified food. But it was a season spent working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California when he began to understand, first-hand, the importance of seeds as a foundation of our agricultural system. He explains, “When I came off the farm I said, ‘If I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be a lawyer doing things that I think are making a positive difference.’”
Saturday night in the Hongdae district of Seoul. Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs line the streets four stories high for blocks. The crowds in the street cover acres of blacktop. It's nightlife on mega-city scale.
Today, sharing economy nonprofit Peers launched a new website designed to make working in the sharing economy easier. Among the features on the new site are tools to discover and connect with work opportunities, reviews of sharing economy platforms from other independent contractors, information about earning potential, and a community forum.
A global grass roots movement has identified a very effective ingredient for building community: Fruit. Even while the price tag on organic fruit causes many to go without, it's much more abundant than we may think.
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Scoop.it!
