Practical. Thinking.
Can community ownership of energy generation crack the conundrum of behaviour change? A look at the Scottish Island of Eigg gives us reasons to be optimistic. A constant refrain among commentators on climate change is that individuals and organisations find it difficult to change their behaviour, and to live in a way that consumes less [...]
How do you bring a town together when there’s a busy main road running through the middle, and many of the people who live there work somewhere else? For three years Incredible Edible Todmorden has been changing the look and reputation of a small market town by planting fruit and vegetables in public spaces, from [...]
Where there’s muck there’s brass goes the saying, but in Wakefield they could add that where there’s muck there’s fish, vegetables, wildlife and a training project for long term unemployed people. The ABLE project is a social enterprise based on 34 acres of Yorkshire Water land at Caldervale sewage works. The former landfill site combines [...]
Walk into the Greenhouse and you wouldn’t imagine it was once a local eyesore. The former Shaftesbury House workers’ lodgings in Beeston Hill, south Leeds, is now a showpiece for sustainable living. It’s an example of what can be done with a building that could easily have been demolished and replaced with a boring development of [...]
Each year, British shops throw away around 1.4 million tonnes of food. Yet at least 10 million people in the UK live in poverty and have difficulty affording a healthy diet. FareShare is an organisation that believes the food waste and food poverty demonstrated in these statistics are two of the most urgent issues facing [...]
Thanks to pig intestines, manure, used cooking oil and a host of other unpleasant waste products, the Swedish city of Kristianstad is no longer using any fossil fuels to heat its homes and businesses. Just 20 years ago, the 80,000 people who live in Kristianstad were completely reliant on oil and gas to see them [...]
Given the wealth of half-baked think tank reports out there, it’s always a pleasure to read something by someone who knows what they’re talking about. On that basis Michael Ward’s new report for the Smith Institute, Rebalancing the Economy: Prospects for the North is an important milestone. Admittedly I’m not unbiased here. I’ve worked with [...]
In recent weeks two contrasting visions of city life have caught the attention. The one that’s grabbed the headlines has been that of economist Ed Glaeser, whose book The Triumph of the City sells the city as glitz and wealth, of entrepreneurship and energy. The other vision looks to the Old World. The Academy of [...]
For proof of how a strong sense of identity can benefit a place, look no further than the Forest of Bowland, 300 square miles of beautiful rural landscape in Lancashire and north Yorkshire. Six years ago, a survey found that even local tourism officers would describe the area as being ‘close to the Yorkshire Dales’ [...]
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