What is a community transition centre? What would it look like? Who would be involved? How would it survive when so many new initiatives flop?  And where would it source funding/resources from? What would it do? What would its aims be? And how will energy scarcity and climate change affect communities anyway?

This conversation is a freeform, open-type brainstorm. We're looking at how a community transition centre might assist a community or region to adapt to emerging issues like climate change, peak oil, food scarcity and social breakdown. Who wants to go first???

-- Andrew

I'm really into the idea of community transition centres. Tim introduced the Diploma group to the idea on Thursday. He also talked about the possibility of a Design Charrette, an intensive design event where we as a group could do visioning, explore different ideas and potentially come up with a design for a prototype centre.

Design Charrettes are all about intensive collaboration in order to fast-track a design. Community Charrettes, particuallarly in the case of urban planning, enable multitudes of stakeholders to have an input in the design process.

Mostly I think that it would be a whole lot of fun. As with most events, a lot is riding on the snacks.

Anyway, I posted this about Charrettes on the Diploma Sandbox.

The "what is" and "how to" of Design Charrettes

What is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette

How to... http://louisville.edu/org/sun/planning/char.html

a DIY guide to facilitation of community oriented Design Charrettes


Love to hear whose keen to try it out,

Bec

Hey there Bec and all,

the charrette does sound cool but you're  right in saying all depends on the snacks.

maybe we could have a snack charrette in advance where we work out what sorts of snacks will make a good design charrette.

seriously though i like the intensive nature of a design charrette and the creative explosions that happen when people get together.

it sounds great and i wanna be part of it.

Andrew

Hmm the snacks....

Well lets start with some organic woodfired pizza. Maybe we need a cob oven workshop at the venue the week before the charrette...

I've been thinking a little more about the Community Transition Centre idea lately and I've come up with some initial ideas:

Idea #1

• Make CTCs  linking and communication centres.


• use a whole systems approach to link and design existing elements of the community in new ways.
  
• don't reinvent the wheel- just rearrange the spokes.
  
• leverage abilities of emerging communications technologies to build community capacity.

Idea #2

• Make it really easy to get up and running.


• avoid the long planning and approvals stage of things like community gardens.
• get started in a small publicly accessable space somewhere, set up basic transition services/projects and bootstrap from there.
• support projects with long planning and approvals processes from this small but functional base.

Idea #3

• Make the definition of CTC's and their purpose very clear and very sticky.


• clear so that everyone involved knows exactly what it is and keep this purpose focused.
• sticky as in 'The Stickiness Factor' describe in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell see Wikipedia

Cheers,

Tim