12 Transition Urbanism and The Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making

Transition Urbanism and
the Contested Politics of Ethical

Place Making
Kelvin Mason
Graduate School of the Environment, Centre for Alternative Technology, University of East
London, UK;
kelvin.mason@cat.org.uk
Mark Whitehead
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, UK;
msw@aber.ac.uk
Abstract: This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban
imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems
of care for distant places/others, and intensied regimes of (re)localisation. Transition
Culture initiatives explore how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world
and stem from a concern for a post peak-oil global future. While the radical political
openness of Transition Culture is in keeping with the vision of a more diverse polity
imagined by advocates of relational space (for instance Amin, 2004), we argue that
this openness is predicated upon an apolitical pragmatism that masks latent tensions
between an environmentally benign localism and an ethics of care at-a-distance. If a
transitional ethics of space occupies the uncertain ground between a relational and
territorial geographical imagination, the Transition Culture movement provides a rich
context within which to explore the ethical conundrums that stem from different tactics of
place-making.
Keywords: Transition Culture, ethics, relational space, progressive urbanism, subpolitics
Introduction: on World Towns and Post Peak-Oil
Place-Making
The Transition Culture
1
movement has been spreading rapidly through a range
of British and Irish villages, towns and cities over recent years. According to a
2009survey conducted by Seyfang, there were 94transition communities in the UK
and a further 40worldwide (2009:2)
2
. The movement is a response to two critical
twenty-rst century concerns: the approach of peak-oil production and the social
consequences of the decline of our petrochemical economy; and the ensuing socio-
environmental problems associated with climate change. Inspired by the practices
of permaculture, alternative energy generation, organic food production, and the
use of open-space technology to facilitate participation (see for instance Owen
1997), the Transition Culture movement is devoted to creating places that are more
locally resilient to the threats posed by declining global oil production and climate
change. At an ethical level, Transition Culture tends to stand apart from many
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progressive strands of contemporary urbanismon two fronts. First, it suggests that
caring-at-a-distance should be based not on establishing new ethically constituted
trade relations, cultural exchanges, and political compacts with places, but on
reducing the economic dependence of towns and cities on distant communities
(cf Malpass et al 2007). Second, and related to the rst point, the moral geographies
of Transition Culture emphasize the care-of-vulnerable-proximate-others as much as
distant others within its codes of place practice. Transition Culture is thus focused on
the collective provision of affordable food, healthcare, heat, education and transport
that could be jeopardized in a high-cost energy future.
In this paper we explore the formation and operation of Transition Town
Aberystwyth (TTA). The size and geography of Aberystwyth means that it constitutes
an interesting context through which to explore the place-making processes
associated with Transition Culture. Located on the west coast of Wales, but cut
off from major urban centres to its east and south by the Cambrian Mountains
and long supply routes, Aberystwyth appears to be caught between the twin
threats of climate change (particularly in relation to sea level change) and peak
oil (in terms of the rising fuel costs incurred supplying the town with its resource
needs, and the threats of off-shore drilling for oil in Cardigan Bay). It is not our
intention to provide a general account of Transition that can be unproblematically
applied to other locales. Rather, we seek to begin a critical dialogue between
Transition Culture and geographical conceptions of relational space. Ultimately, we
claim that much can be gained from a (supportive) relational critique of Transition
Culture.
We frame our relational analysis of Transition Culture in the context of
transition urbanism. Transition urbanism may be viewed as one of multiple urban
(ir)rationalities [which] are competing to ll the void left by the evaporated
logics of modernist urbanism (Dear and Flusty 1998:50). At a more prosaic level,
it refers to the application of Transition Culture principles to centres of relatively
continuous population settlement of 5000 people or more. We use the term
transition urbanism as opposed to town because it effectively captures the ways
in which urban processes (including commuting; the supply of goods; pollution)
spread beyond the tight administrative bounds of urban districts to encompass
much wider envelopes of urban interdependence. In this context, we claim that
there are important practical connections between the desires for Transition and
the nature of contemporary urbanization. At one level, as a form of (spatially)
extended social interaction and exchange (captured in the urban forms of the
suburb; commuting zones; and variegated employment/retail/recreation centres),
urbanismhas a structured coherence rooted in the pre-peak oil economy. At another
level, urbanism is suggestive of a series of political spaces that are devoted to the co-
ordinated provision of collective resources (including healthcare, public transport,
education, housing, food, water etc), which, while threatened by peak oil and
climate change, continue to provide a focus for Transition Cultures attempts to
develop low-energy systems of collective provision (see Castells 1977).
We were inspired in our study of TTA by the methodological insights offered
by various strands of participatory research (Anderson 2002); auto-ethnography
(Roseneil 1993); and scholar activism (Fuller and Askins 2007). Notwithstanding
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Transition Urbanism 495
these inuences, we primarily positioned ourselves in this research process as what
Brown (2007) has described as observant participants. To this end, we came to the
Transition Movement primarily as local participants, who happened to be observant
in a particular (academic) way: we were not participating in order to observe. We
have written about our methodology elsewhere (see Mason and Whitehead 2009),
3
and so will not go into greater detail here.
This paper begins by analyzing key Transition texts, seeking out the intellectual
antecedents and political philosophies of Transition Culture as well as the political
geography it describes. We then consider how such intellectual conceptions
translate into the practise of living and working in a Transition town. In the following
section we explore the spatial politics of Transition Culture, building on early
interpretations of the ethical geographies that underpin Transition practises (see
Bailey, Hopkins and Wilson forthcoming; North forthcoming; Trapese Collective
2008). While existing geographical analyses of Transition Cultures focus primarily
on the use of the spatial imaginaries of various strands of environmentalism, we
focus primarily on its parallels with the spatial practices of progressive urbanisms.
Reecting on international municipalism (Saunier 2002), libertarian municipalism
(Bookchin 1989, 1996), and relational urbanism (Massey 2005, 2007), analysis
reveals unarticulated spatial problematics in Transition Cultures approach to
relationally inspired ethics of space, and in its assessment of the possibilities that
exist for the practical remaking of place in a ethical fashion. The penultimate
section of this paper considers the manifestation of these spatial tensions as we
have experienced them in the development of TTA. Before concluding, we reect
critically on the politics of attempting to forge a new ethical vision of a globally
responsible but highly localized urbanism, and on our own struggles to reconcile
a commitment to a socio-environmental creed of Transition Culture with our own
intellectual commitment to a more relational review of the constitution of place and
place politics.
On Transition Culture: Origins and Political Geography
The Origins and Antecedents of Transition Culture
At one level, it is possible to trace the formative moments, and overall intent, of the
Transition Culture movement to a limited number of individuals, organizations, and
geographical locations. Ofcial accounts of Transition Culture tell the story of Rob
Hopkins, a teacher, permaculturalist and natural builder who has been instrumental
in shaping the movements mission, and delivering Transitional practices in certain
locations (see Brangwyn and Hopkins 2008; Hopkins 2008; Hopkins and Lipman
2009). These accounts describe the transformation of Hopkins permaculture course
at Kinsales further education college into a local campaign for sustainable urban
development and, following Hopkins move to Totnes, the gradual formalization
of a coherent movement for urban change in the establishment of Transition
Town Totnes (and the Transition Cultures Organization) (Hopkins 2008:122
130, 176201). While we do not wish to detract from the central role of Rob
Hopkins and other key individuals in Kinsale and Totnes in driving the original
codication of precisely what Transition Culture is about, in order to understand
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the nature of the movement it is important to recognize its varied intellectual
antecedents.
We contend that the originality of Transition Culture is not to be found in the
newness of any of its associated ideas, but in the novel ways it weaves together
interconnected strands from a range of philosophical traditions and alternative
knowledge networks (see Bailey, Hopkins and Wilson forthcoming). At one level,
Transition Culture attempts to unify a series of intellectual and political movements
that are reacting against early millennial socio-ecological threats. While often
only tacitly acknowledged within ofcial literature, Transition Culture is clearly
a part of a consolidating set of counter-global networks (Featherstone 2008). Its
counter-global credentials work at two levels: in its opposition to the emergence
of expanded systems of trade and global economic dependency (see Goldsmith
and Mander 2001); and in its resistance towards systems that remove powers of
self-determination from local communities (see Linklater 1998).
There are two eschatological threats that undergird the Transition Culture
movements concern with the expanded scale of twenty-rst century life. The rst
is the emerging threat of peak-oil production (see Heinberg 2003; Howe 2003).
According to the Transition Culture movement, the ready availability of cheap oil
has formed the basis for both the expansion of the global trade economy and
the expanded commercialization of land associated with suburbanization. It is thus
argued, as oil rst becomes more expensive to produce and then starts to run
out, that the sustainability of globalization and suburbanization will come under
threat.
4
Beyond peak philosophies, the second eschatological driver of Transition is
climate change. When combined with concerns over peak oil, climate change forms
the framework of converging catastrophes within which Transition Culture operates
(Kunstler 2005).
Notwithstanding the fact that Transition Culture is clearly a reaction against
the perceivedand interconnectedthreats of globalization, peak oil, and climate
change, as a movement it does not advocate a defeatist millenarian ethos. Indeed,
just as it synthesizes concerns as the basis for its motivational structure, it weaves
together a series of practically inspired, and ecological imbued responses to
humankinds current predicament. A unifying theme, in this context, is the principle
of (re)localization, which enables a common set of approaches to the complex
problems associated with globalization, peak oil, and climate change. At one level,
for example, (re)localization is pursued through principles of community power
and the techniques of open space/deliberative democracy, as a basis for envisioning
Transition communities that combat the processes of political alienation associated
with corporate globalism (Macy 2000; Owen 1993).
5
At another level, notions
of (re)localization have inuenced transitional thinking through a range of eco-
pragmatist traditions that emphasize the power of local communities to provide
the skills and resources they need for their survival. While broadly inspired by
bio-regionalist ideals (see McGinnis 1998; Sale 1982), the eco-pragmatisms of
Transition Culture are based on the principles of natural building (Woolley 2006);
the techniques of permaculture and forest garden food production (Whiteeld
2000); the practices of the eco-village movement (Dawson 2006); the skills
sharing strategies of the co-intelligence tradition (Atlee 2003); and the trading
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systems associated with local exchange trading schemes and credit unions (North
2006).
Finally, it is important to acknowledge the inuence of scientic concepts.
Transition Culture has taken the ecological science of resilience and utilized it as
a basis for thinking about the relationships between human communities and the
environmental systems they co-constitute (Hopkins 2008:5477). According to the
Resilience Alliance (2009), ecological resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to
tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is
controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient system can withstand shocks
and rebuild itself when necessary. As a scientic bridging concept, notions of
resilience have provided an effective way of combining the millenarian concerns of
the movement with its localized strategies of response. Strategies of (re)localization
thus appear to offer ways of establishing greater diversity in the operation of social
economies and of potentially reducing the vulnerability of locales to outside shocks.
6
The connection between Transition Cultures and the principles of resilience cast
critical light on the precise nature of the relationship between Transitioning and
the broader sustainable cities movement (see here Portney 2003; Whitehead 2003).
While it is clear that urban-based Transition Cultures are a species of sustainable
urbanism, it is also clear that Transition Culture urbanism rejects the socio-
economic optimism that has characterized weaker interpretations of sustainable
urban development (see Bernstein 2000). Consequently, while many sustainable
urban development strategies search for winwin synergies between metropolitan
economies and environmental security, resilience represents a far less sanguine
interpretation of the urban future.
What is evident from this brief review is that the Transition Culture movement
has diverse points of origin.
7
What this diversity suggests to us is that rather than
conceiving of Transition Culture as a new socio-ecological movement, it is more
helpful to describe it as a convergence space for a number of pre-existing concerns
and practices (see here Bailey et al. forthcoming; Routledge 2003). While Transition
Culture clearly has many original features, when conceived as a convergence
space it is easier to recognize the pragmatic way in which the movement has
woven together various strands of science, environmental design, psychology,
and localization traditions. Crucially, when conceptualized in this way, it is also
possible to appreciate how the movement is characterized by myriad perspectives,
worldviews, and contradictions. As detailed later in this paper, internal diversity is
a source of latent tension in relation to the geographical form and ideals of the
movement.
The Political Geography of Transition Culture
While the initial spread of Transition Culture was a spontaneous process based upon
interpersonal exchange and informal knowledge sharing, it has gradually become
a more organized process. There is a checklist of 15criteria for groups wishing
to adopt the Transition model and be recognized as part of the movement. The
criteria include: writing an understanding of peak oil and climate change into group
constitutions; four to ve people prepared to step into leadership roles as a steering
group; at least two of these leaders going on a training course in Totnes; at least
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one attending a permaculture
8
design course; minimal conicts of interests among
the leadership; a potentially strong connection to the local council; recognition
that Transition starts in your local community, rather than in your entire county or
district; commitments to network with other Transition initiatives; and to strive for
inclusivity.
As presented in the Transition Initiatives Primer, Transition geographies are
bounded and scaled. The real heart of transition is the local initiative embedded
in its own locale where the steering group inspires and organizes the local
community (Brangwyn and Hopkins 2008:15). Such initiatives are typically
with communities of up to 15000 people (2008:15). The local Transition
hub, which establishes and supports local initiatives, is based within a large
congruent/contiguous area with its own identity (e.g. a city) (2008:15). The
regional coordinating hub is a collection of existing initiatives that get together
for mutual support and coordination around activities such as sharing resources and
representing a united front to various government bodies (2008:15).
Evoking the principle of thinking globally, acting locally, the Transition Initiatives
Primer states: Its good to know that there are schemes in place that are addressing
the challenges of Peak-oil and Climate Change at the global and national levels
(Brangwyn and Hopkins 2008:7). The global schemes evoked are the Oil Depletion
Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol, and Contraction and Convergence (Christoff 2006).
Coordinated international action by nation states is judged concordant with
(re)localization even where, arguably, it fails to challenge continued economic
growth.
Political Geography in Practice: Living and Working
in a Transition Town
Aberystwyth is the largest coastal town in mid-Wales. It has a resident population
of approximately 12,000 people, with an additional 8,000students inhabiting the
town for large parts of the year. As home to a university, the National Library
of Wales, and ofces of the Welsh Assembly Government, the town is a key
administrative centre in the region. The population for the county of Ceredigion,
in which Aberystwyth is situated, is estimated at 77,200with a density of only 43
people per square kilometre, compared with an average of 141for Wales (TICA
2009). Ceredigion is predominantly agricultural, producing lamb, beef and dairy
products. The main sources of employment in the county, though, are the wholesale,
retail and repair trades, followed by education, health and social work (Ofce for
National Statistics 2004).
The TTA initiative began in April 2007, and by August more than 100 members
were signed up to an email list. Endeavouring to follow Transition guidelines, we
set up a steering group onto which we invited progressive town and county
councillor, Alun Williams. TTA has crafted a constitution and a group structure. The
nance sub-committee is composed of three steering group members, Treasurer
Albrecht Fink, Secretary Lotte Reimer, and Chloe Grifths. Having these recognized
ofcers, signatories to the TTA bank account, allows TTA to apply for formal
funding. In July 2008we applied for a 1000setting-up grant from Environment
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Wales, a Welsh Assembly Government initiated partnership involving a number of
voluntary organizations.
9
In part, TTA attracted the usual suspects, a small number of committed activists
from, particularly, Aberystwyth Peace and Justice Network (AP&JN) and Gr wp Beic
Aberystwyth (a cycling lobby group). These activists are used to working together
and collaborated in the organization of the 2006Social Forum Cymru in the town.
10
TTA members are also active in the Green Party, Friends of the Earth, and Fairtrade
Aberystwyth, each of which struggles for a scale of local participation necessary
to survive. TTA has also attracted a new constituency of participants, however.
One way to categorize these new people is to underline that they are not the
perennial political activists; they would not, in the main, consider themselves part
of the global justice movement. Apart from a new crop of individuals, moreover,
TTA has attracted institutional participation from Ymlaen Ceredigion (Ceredigions
LA21group). Communities First, the Welsh Assembly Government Programme, has
been supportive. TTA also forged a tentative link with Aberystwyth Universitys
Environment Committee.
We have formed a number of somewhat transient working groups, who have
come up with an array of ideas about food, transport, energy, housing, and skill
sharing. In the earliest days, the Transport group, incorporating Gr wp Beic, was
particularly active, conducting, for example, a citizens survey of commuter vehicle
occupancy, which featured in the local newspaper. Gr wp Beic had previously
contributed to the County Councils Master Plan for Aberystwyth. Subsequently,
a number of TTA actions have focussed on food, particularly local production. A
garden-share scheme, bringing together gardeners with no gardens and gardens
with no gardeners, was launched, partly as a response to a dearth of council
allotments. The Skills-share Group facilitated workshops on meditation, home
brewing, gardening, bike repair, herbal medicine, tool mending, Make-N-Mend,
as well as founding a regular and well attended knitting circle.
The Spatial Politics of Transition Culture
Having now established the intellectual and practical antecedents of the Transition
Culture movement, and the nature of TTA, in this section we explore emerging
grounds of critical engagement with the movement. While we begin by outlining
one of the main sources of political critique of Transition Culture, we move on to
outline the potential for critical dialogue between the movement and relationally
conceived accounts of urban space.
Trapese and the Political Critique of Transition
One of the most systematic critiques of the Transition Culture movement has been
developed by the Trapese Collective. From a position that is anti-capitalism, anti-
state and anti-hierarchy, the Trapese Collective invoked concepts of social and
climate justice to analyse the Transition Culture movement (Trapese Collective
2008). Trapese ask: a transition to where, and from what? And what models of
organizing can help us along the way? (2008:4). The central argument of The Rocky
Road to a Real Transition is that only when the rules of the game are changed can
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carbon dioxide concentrations and all the associated problems be truly tackled. . . it
really isnt possible to decouple economic growth fromcarbon emissions (2008:10
11). For the Trapese Collective then, Real transition means structural change and
not just changes in individual or community behaviour. Trapese contends that in its
attempts to be all-inclusive and non-confrontation the Transition Culture movement
has been depoliticized, and thus lacks a realistic analysis of power. Distinguishing
between environmental improvements in place and improvements to (global)
environmental systems, Trapese claims no causal relationship between the two types
of change (2008:33). It argues for recognition that there will be both creation and
resistance in any real transition, and that the Transition Town notion of the
great re-skilling should include education about the current economic and political
system. Trapese argues that the rst and most important step for Transition initiatives
should be that they are both (politically) ambitious and clear about where we
want to go.
11
Yet, even by Trapeses own ontology, we argue that this step surely
cannot precede people coming together as communities to determine that vision
for themselves (for more on the debate between the Transition Culture movement
and the Trapese Collective, see Hopkins 2009; Mason 2008; North 2009; Trainer
2009).
Transition Culture and its Spatial Politics
In this section we continue the critical analysis of Transition commenced by
the Trapese Collective by exposing the conceptual geographies that appear to
underpin the Transition Culture movement. In keeping with its apolitical ethos and
practical orientation,
12
there is little explicit discussionformally, at leastwithin
Transition Cultures of the types of ethical and ecologically inspired visions of the
organization of space within which the movement is grounded. There is, however,
an emerging body of geographical scholarship that has sought to address this
lacuna. Bailey, Hopkins and Wilson (forthcoming), for example, deploy techniques
of discourse analysis, in order to uncover, explore and critique the modes of spatial
representation that characterize the Movement. Finding clear parallels with the
spatial imaginaries of various antecedent and peer environmental groups, Bailey and
colleagues excavate three key geographical rationales that inform the movement.
First, and in keeping with its advocacy of relocalization, Transition Cultures promotes
an ethic of spatial constraint in socio-economic life (forthcoming:4). Second, and
in some sense as a palliative to the hermetic geographies of spatial constraints,
the movement relies on a model of viral networks as a basis for envisioning the
geographical spread of its principles to other places and communities (5). Third,
Bailey and colleagues suggest that the movement has been guilty of producing
a discourse of indiscriminate geographical threat in relation to peak-oil production
(8). While the idea that peak oil represents either a direct or indirect threat to
established ways of life in all communities in the world obviously provides an
important platform on which to promote the spatial spread of the movement,
as Bailey and colleagues point out, it belies the complex and highly differentiated
impact that peak-oil production (and for that matter climate change) will have
on different socio-economic systems and communities (8).
13
In a related article,
North (forthcoming) draws attention to the spatial politics that informs the varied
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localization movements that have in turn informed Transitional practices. According
to North, the spatial politics of localization is fundamentally about the reordering of
economic space.
An important part of the Transition Culture is about the re-evaluation and re-
making of urban space and political communities (variously scaled). In this context,
we nd it surprising that greater attention has not been given to the parallels that
exist between Transition Cultures approach to spatial form and relations, and those
promoted by progressive urban movements. Building on critiques and edging
geographical analyses of the Transition Culture movement, then, the remainder of
this section attempts to do two things. First, it draws a series of critical parallels
between Transition Culture and three key interpretations of urban space and
politics: Sauniers international municipalism; Bookchins libertarian municipalism; and
Masseys relational urbanism. Second, this section exposes two spatial problematics
of Transition Culture, namely: its approach to relationally inspired ethics of space;
and its overly optimist analysis of the possibilities that exist for the practical remaking
of place in a ethical fashion.
Transition Culture as a Species of International Municipalism
One of the clearest theoretical parallels we have discerned during our involvement
with Transition Culture is that between the vision of a Transition Town and
international municipalism. Pierre-Yves Saunier argues for a municipal contribution
to the social sciences (Saunier 2002:518). Reviewing the idea, putatively favoured
by various late nineteenth century socialist groups building on Proudhons ideas,
that municipalities have an indispensable part to play in the structuring of both
national and global space, Saunier acknowledges that this specic juxtaposition
of the local and the international, postulating the municipality as the basic cell in a
worldwide organization, draws our attention to the potential global signicance of
municipalism (Saunier 2002:523).
Saunier lists four universalist postulates that have underpinned and served to
promote the development of municipal connections. The rst is that the future
of the world is essentially an urban one. Hence, municipalities will face common
political and technological problems and an exchange of experience that transcends
frontiers is a meaningful activity. The second postulate is that the municipality is
the basic cell of any political structure in any human culture or civilization, A
mayor is a mayor, wherever his/her city is located (2002:521). It is also assumed
that municipalism and municipalities are apolitical. Local government is seen as
essentially technical, a pursuit of the common good with no allegiance other than
to the Municipal Party (2002:522). The fourth postulate is that municipalities are
comparable, they belong to a shared universe of rules and values in which they can
compare themselves to, or rival others (2002:522). Some municipal connections
are based upon pre-existing networks, the examples Saunier gives being the socialist
international and co-operative movements.
14
Presenting numerous examples from
European history, Saunier states: In every town and every country, stories and
lessons drawn from experiments elsewhere became a precious resource which could
help equally to subvert the status quo or strengthen it (Saunier 2002:520, emphasis
added).
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Transition Culture has clear parallels with notions of municipal internationalism.
In keeping with the scalar politics of municipal internationalism, Transition Cultures
asserts the crucial role urban communities have in shaping their own destinies and
contributing to the broader socio-ecological welfare of the planet as a whole. The
second clear line of connection is that, while prioritizing urban spaces as arenas for
integrated social change, self-mobilizing elements of civil society are cast as the key
agents of metropolitan and global change.
It is here that the relational parallels end, however, at least at this moment in
time. Currently, the Transition Culture movement is far from being an international
movement. The majority of Transition Towns and Initiatives are located in Britain and
Ireland with emergent movements in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
So, Transition Culture is currently a predominantly Anglo-Celtic phenomenon.
Notwithstanding this, the rise of the Transition Network (at a British level) and the
edgling development of the Transition Network Wales, Transition Culture appears
to be positioning itself as an international movement for municipal change and
exchange. The intense localism associated with Transition Culture may, however,
generate problems when it comes to developing effective forms of networked
municipalism.
The clearest distinction between the work of Saunier and Transition Culture,
though, are their respective approaches to the urban. Whereas Saunier positions
the urban scale as a crucial political bulwark against the disempowering processes
of State administration and globalization, Transition Culture questions the viability
of the urban scale as an arena for socio-economic change. Transition Culture
conceives of existing urban spaces, along with their associated administrative
structures, as reections of the logic of geographical development that is based
on a ready supply of cheap oil and indifference towards the threats of climate
change. In this context, Transition Culture does not assert the political power
of municipal centres to change geographical history, but rather the need to re-
scale cities in order to develop sustainable socio-ecological relations. Transition
Culture consequently seeks to re-scale urban space into networked communities
of low-energy living of approximately 15,000 people. In this, it appears to be more
a form of international localism than international municipalism. This is not an
insignicant point. If Sauniers assertion that municipalities have the strategic power
to collectively shape the socio-environmental relations of large aggregates of the
global population is correct (arguably even at a level approaching the structural
political-economic), it could serve to counter the Trapese Collectives critique of
Transition Cultures approach to structural forms of power. Without the power of
the municipal scale, however, it may be much more difcult for Transition Cultures
to shape the structural contexts of decision-making relating to peak oil and climate
change.
Libertarian Municipalism: Revealing the Neglected Other
In working actively on the development of a Transition Town we have become
aware of the intellectual succour that the Transition Culture movement takes from
another vision of the role that municipalities can play in the emergence of more
empowering political futures. In Remaking Society, Murray Bookchin argues for the
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urban as an ethical domain able to accommodate difference. According to Bookchin,
cities are a way of life for democracies, not simply a technique for managing society,
and that they should be constructed along ethical and rational lines that meet
certain ideals of justice and the good life (1989:180). In many ways Bookchins
libertarian municipalism deploys a similar scalar vision and politics to Transition
Culture. Bookchin advocates a scale of effective democratic participation based on
Aristotles conceptualization of the polis as large enough so that its citizens could
meet most of their material needs, yet not so large that they were unable to gain a
familiarity with each other and make policy decisions in open, face-to face discourse
(Bookchin 1989:180).
For Bookchin, libertarian municipalism is a manifestation of social anarchism,
which he vigorously differentiates from lifestyle anarchism (see Bookchin 1996).
15
Bookchin rejects individualism as a means towards social change, fearing it will lead
to reactionary coalitions rather than revolutionary communitarianism. Reporting
from COP15 in Copenhagen, Ben Brangwyn, a member of the Transition Network
Board of Trustees, echoes Bookchins social anarchismwhen he states: If we wait for
the politicians, itll be too little too late; if we do it as individuals, itll be too little; but
if we do it as communities, it might just be enough, just in time (Brangwyn 2009).
While acknowledging the importance of certain forms of national and international
policies and government structures in addressing the complexities of peak oil and
climate change, the open democratic style, non-hierarchical form, and exible
institutional structures associated with Transition Culture pregures eco-anarchist
visions of new forms of urban life. As noted by the Trapese Collective, however,
Transition Culture currently fails to problematize either the disempowering processes
of the state or associated scales of government. Moreover, the relational imperative
to accommodateas opposed to incorporatethe other, argued for by Bookchin,
is missing in both the practical conception of a Transition Community in place,
and also in any formal conception of global transition itself. The point of distinction
we will return to is that the Transition Culture movement fails to make relational
space for the distant other, space that could accommodate the economic necessity
of international trade for the well-being of that other, for example.
Transition Culture and the Relational Problematic
While the spatial ambiguities of Transition Culture are suggested in the work of
Saunier and Bookchin, it is Masseys path-breaking analysis of relational space that
casts them in sharpest contrast. Noting a disjunction between places seen as the
product of global ows and a politics that remains territorialized, Massey highlights
a jarring of geographical imaginations. She identies the need to build a local
politics that thinks beyond the local, arguing:
against localism but for a politics of place . . . a politics of place beyond place . . . If the
reproduction of life in a place, from its most spectacular manifestation to its daily
mundanities, is dependent upon poverty, say, or the denial of human rights elsewhere,
then should (or how should) a local politics confront this? (Massey 2007:15).
According to Massey, then, a relational ethics of place is inherently political because
it leads us to ask why a place is like it is and how it could be different: questions
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that can lead to a critique of those who have historically controlled and shaped that
place (Massey et al 2009).
It is important, at this point, to appreciate the varied nature of what counts as a
relational ethics of place, and the associated diversity that exists in the types of ethical
practise that are associated with its realization. At a very simple level a relational
ethic of place can be understood as an attempt to assess the virtue of a place
in relation to other places. This relational assessment can take three broad forms:
an evaluation of the moral acceptability of the actions of a community in relation
to the social norms and practices of other places; a discussion of the unobligated
sense of responsibility that a place may feel for aiding distant places/people with
who they have no direct connection (this is what Dobson has referred to as the
Good Samaritan model of geographical care for a common humanity (2003: 28));
and a calibration of the moral obligations that derive from the actual impacts the
decisions and actions of one place have on another (for a useful overview in this
context, see Allen 2003; Amin 2004; Massey 2005). These different, but often
co-existent, modalities of relational ethical assessment can obviously lead to very
different forms of place-building practices. Fostering an unobligated sense of care
can, for example, be connected with local place-building practices that support
multi-ethnic, class and religious interaction at a local scale. Through the instigation
of forums of interchange, more open decision-making processes, and public spaces
that promote social interaction, it is possible to envisage urban place-building
practices that generate a sense of empathy for the proximate others that can be
used to build cultures of care for distant strangers (see Amin 2006:10151017and
the broader operation of Sanctuary Cities). On the other hand, supporting more
obligation-based forms of relational ethics may promote direct cultural exchanges
with affected distant communities and deeper local understandings of the nature
of a places trade relations, investment decisions, and environmental impacts (see
Malpass et al 2007 on fairtrade urbanism).
It is our contention that despite being clearly inuenced by relationally conceived
visions of space, there is a cleavage between Transition Culture and what we
have described as directly obligated geographical care. This cleavage is a tension
grounded upon politico-ethical responses to notions of spatial dependence.
For Massey, and many other theorists of relational space, recognition of the
interdependencies that exist between different places is a pre-requisite to developing
a newethics of place (Massey 2007:13). For Massey then a relational politics of space
consequently involves recognition of the fact that places depend on other places,
people, and environments for their daily reproduction. The ethics of place that
ows from such a perspective is based upon a critical assessment of the nature
of the relations that sustain these dependencies and the effects that they have
on other places. Such a relational ethics of place thus involves an assessment of
whether the relations that enable a town or city to function are fair or exploitative,
and sustainable or unsustainable for the other places that constitute these relations.
The politics of relational space arise from such an ethical perspective to the extent
that it challenges a town or city to reformulate and reconsider injustices that may
be perpetrated within its socio-environmental footprints.
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Transition Culture conceptualizes spatial dependencies in very different ways.
Spatial dependency is approached within Transition Towns in two main forms.
Firstly, and in a local setting, Transition Culture seeks to address the ways in
which places have themselves become dependent on the spatial forms of the
petropolis (from suburbs to mega-distribution hubs; from the in-between cities of
road intersections to the out-of-town mall and edge community): emphasizing how
the internal organization and logic of urban communities (including the morning
commute, the trip to the supermarket shop, schooling, and health) assumes
affordable fuel use. Second, and at a broader spatial scale, the Transition Culture
movement seeks to study and articulate spatial interdependencies between places
(trade, energy transfers, migration). In constructing inventories of spatial relations,
however, the Transition Movements primary goal is not to use these relations as a
basis for ethical reection and reform. Instead Transition Culture constructs a moral
geography within which the very necessity of spatial relations is itself approached
as an ethical question. The preferred ethical response to a distant socio-economic
relation is thus not one of reform (in perhaps the nature of trade relations, the
distribution of environmental harm, or the exerting of political inuence), but of
disconnection. While it is clear that relational views of space may at times suggest
the severing of harmful place relations (particularly in relation to the nancing of
military actions, the support of slavery, or the destruction of pristine wilderness sites),
it is also apparent that such geographical perspectives value relations of dependence,
and their recognition, as a productive terrain of future ethical reection, empathy
building, and political action (Dobson 2003). While it is also clear that Transition
Culture does not wish, nor believe it possible, to sever all the spatial relations that
constitute a place, it does seek a strategic dislocation of a vast array of dependencies
as an ethical priority.
While the disjuncture between a relational and Transitional ethics of space have, at
times, made our involvement in the Transition Movement difcult, we have come
to see them as a productive context for discussing the nature of relational space
and the ethical practices with which it is associated. At one level, this analysis is
concerned with the relative ethical value we give to the absence and presence of
spatial relations in a world of peak oil and climate change. At another level, it is also
about the ways we consider the ethics of territorial approaches to spatial practice.
In this context, it is clear that, while territorial conceptualizations of space often
promote a degree of moral abstention at the borders edge, the territorial aspects
of Transition Culture appear to be about developing more and varied registers of
responsibility in and for place not less.
On the Spatial Tension of Transition Urbanism
As geographers schooled in the value of a relational perspective on the constitution
of space, our initial involvement in TTA was unquestionably based upon an initial
belief that Transition Culture embodied a relational ethic of urban space (see Massey
1994, 2007). At one level the relational ethos of the Transition Culture movement
emanated from a clear awareness of the distant relations upon which this place
was based. In terms of peak oil, Transition Culture seeks to clearly articulate the
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varied global relations that are supported by our contemporary petrochemical
economy (and the socio-economic costs that could ensue from a disruption to
these relations). In terms of climate change, the Transition Culture movement
recognizes the environmental relations that connect all places with processes of
global ecological change and draws explicit attention to the socio-economic impacts
of these transformations on vulnerable distant others (see here Featherstone 2003;
Featherstone, Philips and Waters 2008; Routledge 2003; Routledge, Cumbers and
Nativel 2007). At another level, the forms of political community promoted within
Transition Culture initiatives also appear to reect the structures of cosmopolitan
place-making envisaged within certain relational accounts of place. To these
ends, the open democratic style and exible political structures promoted within
Transition Culture encourage the development of an openness to the needs of
different ethnic, religious, gender and racial groups within a community (see Amin
2004). Yet, as we have worked towards the formation of a transition community
in Aberystwyth, we have started to feel less easy about the relational dynamics
and spatial ethics of Transition, and increasingly less certain of the nature of spatial
relations and their ethical dynamics. So, it is through the trials and tribulations, as
well as the joy and excitement, of our involvement in the formative and performative
dynamics of TTA that we, as observant participators, have become keenly aware
of the practical challenges facing ethical place-making. Focusing specically on
questions of relational space and politics, we want to reect on episodes from our
story of Transition.
Territorial Ethics: The Network Versus Local Autonomy
As we have discussed, our deepest sense of unease concerning the TTA process has
been its ambiguous position with regard to an ethics of spatial relations. At the
inaugural meeting of the Welsh Transition Network in Builth Wells the following
discussion emerged between a local Welsh transitioner and representatives of the
English transition Network:
Network Rep 1: It is a shame that the notion of Transition Town has really stuckI guess
its its alliterative beauty. We were actually keen from the start to try and move away from
the idea of a town or city and envisaged a kind of fractal system that connected local
urban and rural communities into a series of conduits and networks that could support
transition.
Network Rep 2: The idea of networked communities is vital if we are going to be able
to make a real difference at a political level.
Local Transitioner: I disagree! This movement needs to remain local, that is where our
energy and uniqueness are located. . . It is amazing how quickly networks and nodes can
become centers.
(Inaugural meeting of Welsh Transition Network, Builth Wells, 17November 2007,
approximation of conversation taken from notes of meeting.)
The hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) tension of relational thinking and
organization in a movement dedicated to re-localization appears to have affected
the Transition Culture movement in various ways. First, and in relation to the
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conversation recounted above, there has been the uncertainty over the formation of
transpatial networks of towns, sharing ideas, resources, skills (and exercising greater
political solidarity) and the threats that any such network could pose to the process
of local self-determination in the individual Transition community. It was pointed
out to us, for example, by a defender of the local ethos of Transition, that subsidiarity
did not mean, making decisions at the most appropriate spatial scale, but that
decision-making should be based upon the most locally viable scale.
Experiences and discussions such as these concerning Transition Towns have led
us to critically reect upon Sauniers pronouncements on the political and socially
transformative potential of international municipalisms of various kinds. As we have
stated, in keeping with Sauniers prioritization of the municipal scale, the Transition
Culture movement perceives of urban communities as appropriate scales at which
to start to build responses to and resilience towards peak oil and the threats of
climate change. The localism of Transition Culture is not only based upon the
low oil/carbon futures that are promised by local production and consumption
cultures, however, but on the ultimate power/ability of local communities to address
these problems themselves. This is why, confronted with even the relatively weak
(civic) relationality encoded within Sauniers international municipalism, a latent
resistance to a relational ethic is exposed in Transition Culture. Even if the relations
in question take the weightless form of knowledge transfer, ideas, skills, and values
they threaten certain aspects of the Transition vision. This threat is premised on
the inherent, and very real, danger that the networks of trans-spatial exchange
established to encourage and facilitate the spread of Transition Culture become
formally institutionalized into a series of obligatory points of passage, certication,
and accreditation for those communities aspiring to go into transition. In such
circumstances, it is not difcult to see how the sense of who has the power and
ability to transform an urban community moves up a scale, and people once again
wait to be told how to deal with peak oil and climate change (the State is, in a
sense, replaced by a Leviathan of networked municipalities). Notwithstanding this
criticism, it is possible that such skeins of trans-geographical interaction, exchange
and governance, are precisely the kinds of open political systems upon which
the promises of cosmopolitanism can be realized and the political dispossessions
associated with territorial forms of power redressed (Whatmore 2002).
Social Justice at a Distance: We Dont Want Your Onions!
Another way that the tension of relational thinking has affected the Transition
Culture movement is in connection to issues of social justice at a distance (and
particularly what we previously described as directly obligated care). Perhaps
the clearest expression of this issue came at the aforementioned meeting in
Builth Wells. In addition to representatives of various Transition Towns and
communities from across Wales, members of Gold Star Communitiesa Welsh
charity supporting Millennium Development Goals in Africawere also present.
The Gold Star Communities delegation, including representatives from partner
communities in Africa, was there to understand how Transition Cultures could
inuence local development in Africa (a continent where prices mean that peak
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oil has already effectively come and gone). As the meeting progressed, however,
attention increasingly turned to the impacts that Transition Culture could have
on trade relations with Africa. Rather worryingly, for us at least, it was clear that
(luxury items asideincluding coffee and chocolate), Transition Culture meant
a fundamental trimming of trade relations with Africa. Here the ethical aspects
of spatial relations were not judged on their specic form, but on their substantive
connections within oil use and climate change. In a breakout discussion group it
was noted by one transition activist that while he remained deeply concerned with
issues of socio-ecological justice in Africa, we would no longer be wanting their
onions!
Masseys analysis of the relational dynamics of cities suggests that a relationship
between two places can be dened both by material relations that physically connect
them and the cessation of such exchanges. It is, however, clear that the ethics of
responsibility and care that stem from acknowledging relational ties have most force
when actions in one place are seen to actually change the circumstances in another.
To these ends, it is clear that Transition Cultures deliberate attempt to reduce the
extent to which a place is made in relational interplay erodes the ontological grounds
upon which relational geographers attempt to forge a more cosmopolitan ethos of
space (while it does not preclude the development of non-obligated senses of distant
care to such an extent, we would claim it could also inhibit their development).
Our involvement with TTA has had two consequences for our own understandings
of relational space. First, we have become very suspicious of aggregate attempts
to sever trade or cultural relations with distant places on the basis of the moral
imperatives associated with geo-historical absolutes such as peak oil and climate
change. This said, we do believe that Transition Culture reminds us of the importance
of thinking through the full socio-ecological consequences of urban spatial relations.
While it may not always be possible to reliably assess the varied socio-economic and
environmental consequences of all spatial relations, it seems clear that an ethical
trade relation cannot be designated a moral good without an understanding of its
ecological impacts.
Second, the inherent territoriality of TTA (local food production, sustainable
transport, community-based education) has emphasized to us that not all visions of
territory are necessarily based upon anti-relational imaginaries or a geographically
narrow moral imagination and denuded sense of socio-ecological responsibility
(Amin 2004). The very desire of the Transition Culture movement to create more
territorially contained and sustainable social economies is predicated on a careful
articulation of the relational fabric of a place (from analyses of food miles to surveys
of commuting patterns). Epistemologically, then, Transition Culture is not about an
ethico-geographical assertion of the local territory as the natural condition of spatial
existence and basis for political action; it is more about the pragmatic embracing of
varied practises of re-territorialization as a necessary response to impending socio-
ecological threats. Furthermore, in its concern with the intimate details of the
territorial fabric associated with Aberystwyths social economy, TTA Aberystwyth
has generated a heightened sense of responsibility for a range of public issues,
including energy-vulnerable groups, and global environmental systems, among a
wide(r) political community.
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The Administration of Place and the Sub-Politics of Ethical
Place-Making
Another aspect of our involvement with TTA we would like to reect upon concerns
the politics of ethical place-making and remaking. In keeping with many locally
grounded, but globally sensitive approaches to place-making, TTA is committed to
a radically open and inclusive political structure (see the reections on community
economics in Gibson-Graham et al 2001). This commitment to political difference
and the voice of the other in TTA is in part based upon a resistance to the often
undemocratic, and certainly narrow, political constitution of the agents of global
neoliberalism, but also on the evident need to engage with a wide range of skills
groups in order to develop the capacities to deal with peak oil and climate change. In
working to establish TTA, however, we have noticed how a political commitment to
openness and engagement has combined with a commitment to practical solutions
to produce a stiing apolitical (and at time post-political) ethos within TTA (see
Mouffe 2005; Ranci ` ere 2007).
It is important to acknowledge that the desire to develop a distinctive vision, and
political positionality, for TTA has been evident among many group members. It is,
however, clear that unease with politicizing the movement has resulted in as much
internal division as it has facilitated open capacity building and inclusion. Through
a focus on action, not political position, TTA has lost members who have become
unsure what TTA is trying to change.
16
At the same time, it is clear that despite
the efforts of some, a notable gap has opened up between TTA and activist groups
in the town. Our involvement with TTA has led us to believe that it is crucial to
consider the relationships between open democracy and capacity building, which
are routinely associated with community-based practices of ethical place-making. It
appears to us that a commitment to inclusivity does not necessarily require a post-
political framework of all encompassing consensus. It is possible to be committed
to a highly antagonistic political vision of place, without necessarily undermining
capacity development or excluding those voices that have historically been silenced
within the deliberations associated with place-making.
It is thus important to recognize that it has not always been easy to develop an
overt politics of resistance in the TTA initiative. In part as a product of the practical,
non-partisan nature of TTA, our provisional dialogues with the local and county
council, university and businesses have been very positive encounters. Indeed,
almost without exception, all groups we have sought to forge partnerships with
in the local area have offered support for our work. Not withstanding this situation,
we have increasingly noticed that the broad support received by TTA tends to come
into question at the level of the technical procedures involved in actually changing
and transforming place. Whether it be the health and safety restrictions surrounding
our attempts to develop collective plastic gathering and recycling initiatives; the
legal problems associated with supporting the development of community hitch-
hiking and car pooling stations; or the licensing required to share locally produced
organic food with members of the public, the main resistances encountered to
place changing practices have been expressed in the faceless realms of technical
government and administration that cloak place.
17
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To provide just one detailed example of the forms of technical/administrative
resistance we have encountered, a tentative plan for an in town without my car
day fell foul of both inexible regional government bureaucracy and the limitations
of local public transport providing companies. Closing roads to trafc in Aberystwyth
for the dayor even part thereofproved impossible unless TTA could pay for the
privilege and, even more dauntingly, engage in a lengthy bureaucratic process.
Local Councillor and TTA member Alun Williams set out something of the overall
procedure in an email:
For a non-trunk road, There is a fee of 316for a special event closure and 3weeks
notice is required. The emergency services and various other bodies have to be consulted.
The County Councils Legal Dept then have to consult more widely by putting up
legal notices. Barriers would also need to be hired. . . Unfortunately Great Darkgate
Street is a trunk road and is administered by the Trunk Road Agency, not the County
Council . . . 12weeks notice is required (too long for September). The fee may also be
different. Im told they probably would not be prepared to consider a closure during the
summer months . . . Either way its a fair bit of work. Its not like you pay the money and
they do it all for you.
We do not want to suggest that the various licensing and legislative procedures
that surround our towns and cities are necessarily oppressive forces. They have, after
all, mainly been developed as part of systems of urban care and collective safety.
That said, we note that such procedures are also designed for the perpetuation
of modernity rather than any transition to sustainability. Our point is, though, that
often it is at the level of the administrative unconscious that political resistance to new
ethical visions of place-making get expressed. Such structures of place inertia enable
existing political authorities to ostensibly support progressive local initiatives without
necessarily enabling them to substantively change the socio-economic fabric of
place. Our frustrating experience with the administrative structuring of space has
led us to question whether metropolitan districts have the exibility to full Sauniers
vision of urban political leadership and innovation in the future.
The politicization of such forms of benign resistance echoes Ulrich Becks call for
new forms of subpolitical communities and actions, within which the routine, but
often overlooked, infrastructures of modernity (from road design and pavement
height, to food licensing) become objects of political action for a new range
of political actors (Beck 1999). According to Beck, the recourse to subpolitics is
necessitated by the realization that the symbolically rich political institutions
of modern life (in urban terms perhaps the city council, mayor, or regional
planning assembly) tend to protect decision-making fromreal and sustained political
contestation (Beck 1999:98). Subpolitics are then best conceived as the rebellion
of real existing individuals using the latent tensions of sub-policies (ranging from
health and safety assessments to varied technical necessities) to generate a
new politics of the city (1999:103). We propose that an effectively orchestrated
subpolitics of urban places could provide a diverse terrain upon which to develop
a politics of ethical contestation that is still inclusive and radically open to a range
of potential actors. A subpolitics of the urban promises an ethical reassessment of
the uncontested spatial logics of a place that it is possible to imagine emanating
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from anyones everyday geographical encounters. It is a politics that essentially
seeks to expose the infrastructural biases that are built into urban forms: biases that
prioritize practices of commercialization and the know-how of technological and
political elites, but which are resistant to the establishment of new urban forms. A
metropolitan sub-politics could offer an important and varied set of footholds for
international municipalisms and relational urbanisms of different kinds from which
to instigate a humble, but nonetheless profound, remaking of urban space.
Conclusion
This paper contributes to an emerging wave of positive, but critical, geographical
engagement with the Transition Culture movement. Drawing on our own
experience as observant participants within TTA, we have explored the value of
analyzing Transition Culture in the light of relationally conceived visions of urban
space. In undertaking this task we have illustrated that Transition Culture is not
only informed by progressive environmental philosophies of space, but also by
enlightened accounts of the constitution and organization of urban geographies.
While opening up this space for critical dialogue, however, we have also shown
how the inclusive localism of Transition Culture communities is actually inhibiting
the ethical prole and place-changing potential of associated initiatives.
When using the term inclusive localism we are referring to the ways in which
Transition Culture is simultaneously marked by a commitment to the relocalization
of political and economic organization, and an opening-up of local decision-
making structures to a new range of actors. At one level, we have seen that the
inherent localism of Transition Culture can have two negative consequences. First,
at a practical and political level, it tends to diminish the potential for municipal
exchange and coalition building that could support the development and growth
of the movement (countering Sauniers advocacy of municipal internationalism).
Second, it reduces the potential to develop extended registers for care for distant
others: a form of care, which ironically inspires many of the goals of the movement
(countering Masseys relational ethics of place). At another level, the inclusivity
of the Transition Culture movement has encouraged great diversity in its political
activities and the potential to foster an ethic of respect for difference and alternative
perspectives. The downside to this openness has, in our experience, been the
difculties that Transition groups have in developing oppositional forms of political
resistance that can overcome the inertias of place to ethical remaking, and avoid
being subsumed within a bland local consensus of inaction.
Our research into Transition Culture has essentially revealed a peculiar paradox
between spatial ethics and ethical place-making. In one instance, the movement is
characterized by a commitment to localismthat could undermine its broad relational
sense of care, but tends to support a strong sense of local empowerment and focus in
changing the nature of a place. At the same time, however, an ethical commitment
of inclusion towards a potentially unlimited local constituency of groups often makes
it difcult to develop the oppositional energy that is actually needed to change the
nature of a place. In these contexts, we believe that it will be become increasingly
important for the Transition Culture movement to take two courses of action in the
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future. First to attenuate its spirit of localism to ensure that spatial relations with
other places are more carefully assessed for their ethical merit, as opposed to being
bluntly rejected on the basis of all-encompassing geo-historic imperatives. Second
the movement should utilize the sub-political zones of everyday urban resistance as
an inclusive realm through which to build oppositional movements for real change
in the ethical form and fabric of places.
Acknowledgements
First we would like to acknowledge our friends and colleagues who have worked alongside
us in the activities associated with Transition Town Aberystwyth. They have encouraged
our academic reections on the project and supported us with suggestions and guidance
concerning certain aspects of the paper presented here. We would also like to thank Doreen
Massey for her careful reading of an earlier draft of this paper, and for her constructive
comments on our interpretations of theories of relational space. We would also like to
acknowledge the support offered by seminar audiences in the Geography Departments
at Kings College London, Royal Holloway, London, and York University, Toronto, and the
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, where we rst presented the
ideas outlined in this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the three reviewers who
commented on a draft of this article.
Endnotes
1
The rapid development of the Transition movement has been accompanied by an equally
rapid shift in terminology. From an early emphasis on Transition Towns there has been a
shift to Transition Initiatives, at least in part to acknowledge the diverse transitions of rural
communities and distinct city boroughs. The termTransition Movement retains currency, and
the Transition Network has become the constituted organisational hub of that movement.
Transition Culture is widely recognised as the name of Transition instigator Rob Hopkins
internet blog site. We have chosen to talk predominantly of Transition Culture because the
term best describes the realm of ethics and relationality, thus serving to differentiate the focus
of our study.
2
We note here the recent spread of Transition Cultures in USA, see Transition United States
at: http://transitionus.org/welcome-transition-us
3
We reect in greater depth on the methodological practices and tensions associated with
this approach to research in this related paper, Mason and Whitehead (2009). While deploying
a broadly dened ethnographic approach to our research, which has included keeping careful
notes of meetings and events, and recording personal reections on the Transition process
as a whole, we have not conducted in-depth interviews with participants. We felt that
the techniques of ethnography enabled us to effectively maintain our dual role as active
participants within TTA and as academic Transitioners. Throughout the ongoing research
process we have openly talked about our academic work to Transition Town participants in
the local area and sought to use our research as a basis for informing the local transition
culture.
4
In addition to a specic concern with peak oil, it is clear that Transition Culture has also
been inspired by a broader set of neo-Malthusian concerns with the coming together of a
number of peak production points (including freshwater, food, nuclear energy, coal, gas,
inter alia (see Heinberg 2007).
5
Open space technology is essentially a way of running a strategic meeting. It involves
the opening up of a theme of deliberation to whoever wishes to attend the meeting;
the careful recording of all expressed opinions; and the development of new ideas and
strategies to guide further action (see Hopkins 2008:163). Open space meetings are very
exible and are designed to deliberately encourage social interactions and the development
of co-intelligence. They often involve the breaking-up of larger groups into smaller working
groups between which people are free to move.
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6
In embracing notions of socio-ecological resilience, it is also evident that Transition Cultures
are keen to learn the lesson of socio-ecological collapse and recovery which have been
revealed by various strands of archaeology and environmental history (see Homer-Dixon
2003; Ponting 1991).
7
We have not even mentioned the use made by the Transition Movement of studies of
the psychologies of addiction as a basis to transform our current energy intensive lifestyles
(DiClemente 2003 in Hopkins 2008:235), or the role that eco-spirituality has played in the
consolidations of the movement.
8
Permaculture rst emerged in Australia in the 1970s. Its basic goal is to develop edible
ecosystems that are able to support the nutritional needs of humans, while maintaining the
ecological integrity of the growing environment and thus allow other species to ourish.
9
Much of our initial activities have concentrated on awareness raising. Our rst public event
was a showing of The End Of Suburbia (Greene 2004) in the Morlan Centre for Faith and
Culture on Thursday 14June 2007. The lm attracted an audience of well over a hundred
people and was followed by a speaker from Transition Bristol, Sarah Pugh. Albrecht Fink and
Lotte Reimer compiled a PowerPoint presentation of the TTA initiative, and the reasoning
that underpins the need for it, and presented this to local groups. On 24November 2007,
TTA had a stall in the annual Food Fayre held in Aberystwyth Arts Centre. In conjunction with
the stall, we collaborated with the Arts Centre on a free screening of The Power of Community
(Morgan 2006). Food Matters, an informational event held in the Morlan Centre on 5April
2008featured stalls, a public soapbox, and a model cow, which could be milked. A Transition
fayre, Penparcau is Green, was also staged in an outlying area of town.
10
A number remain active in groups and networks other than TTA. For example, apart from
the persistent Gr wp Beic, AP&JN and C or Gobaith, a street choir of hope, activists are
involved in Mid-Wales Climate Action and thence Rising Tide, the Camp for Climate Action,
and Climate Camp Cymru.
11
For a fascinating discussion on the contested political interpretations of Transitions, and
how these interpretations vary between gender, age and social groupings, see Brown et al
(2009).
12
Here we acknowledge Transition Cultures resonance with communitarian theories of
community as apolitical, stressing civic virtues, small groups and voluntarism (see for instance
Delanty 2003).
13
Bailey, Hopkins and Wilson claim that the slower uptake of Transition initiatives in less
economically developed communities may be a product of their economies being less reliant
on oil (forthcoming:5). It is also, of course, possible that due to the high relative costs of
oil, or weak supply structures, certain economic communities have already been through a
peak-oil scenario and developed adaptive socio-economic systems from which the Transition
Culture movement can learn (the case of Cuba, as presented in The Power of Community,
Morgan 2006, is an obvious one here).
14
Town twinning, specically in post-war Europe, is cited as a municipal contribution to
building a new Europe, more municipally connected and so less prone to the fracture of
conicts between nations.
15
Social anarchism has at its heart community, while lifestyle anarchisms subject is the
individual.
16
In 2010a Transition(s) reading group, welcoming both transitioners and other active
citizens, towns people and students, Aberystwyth residents and outlanders, was initiated
as a community forum whose driving questions are derived from the Trapese critique: a
transition to where, and from what? And what models of organising can help us along the
way?
17
We note that the location of protests such as manifestations of the Camp for Climate
Actions in the UK are not publicized because of the inevitable prohibitive response from
technical government rather than the coercive forces of the state. Similarly, the Big Green
Gathering in 2009, a noted networking space for environmental activists, was not prevented
by force but by bureaucracy.
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514 Antipode
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12 Transition Urbanism and The Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making

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