Were you all lined up at Walmart this morning bright and early to get your hands on all those toyz? Yeah, me neither. But in honor of this great consumer holiday, here is a little video food for thought about an idea harkened Carrotmob. Sponsored by this new social activism group in SF called Virgance, the project aims to use collective consumption to influence business. Not a brand new idea, sure, but by staging real events where tons of people meet up and buy things all at once, Carrotmob increases awareness of the cause while building evidence for this new stragegy. Watch and learn:
Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.
Pretty interesting idea. Whereas I have my own softspot for buy nothing day, I think today's marketplace begs a more complex solution than blanket embargos. It's okay to support the businesses that you think are doing things right. In fact, we really depend on it.
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
11.28.2008
11.14.2008
Just Food
A week ago, Friday night was the usual Art Murmur Festivities in Oakland and I attended. The opening for the group show "Food Justice" at Rock Paper Scissors was a particular draw, for me anyway, and judging from the usual horde-sized turnout I'd say the topic seems to crowd some other people's minds too.
Maybe it's just California, but the whole foodsystems-MichaelPollan-Urban-local-slowfood thing has started to infiltrate pretty much...everything. It seems that nothing is safe from the consideration of where and how your food is grown. Especially in the design world, people whose job it is to produce and promote aesthetics are now pulling on the ideas of locality and seasonality for the substance of their work. See also: Slow Food Nation. The boundaries between design and action are more blurred today than ever before, as innovation has become the battleground for the shaping of our society's future. Call me postmodern, but I see design, economics and science so intertwined at this historic juncture that it is sometimes difficult to tell the three apart. And I'm all aboard this smushsmash of issues. Of course the exhibit at RPS seemed only too timely and so I headed over for a closer look.
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The show touched on all facets of our local East Bay alternative food production rockstars: People's Grocery, ForageOakland, the Secret Cafe and CitySlicker Farms Backyard Garden Project. Rock Paper Scissors contributes more regularly to this movement by providing a pickup point for the people's grocery Grub Box program.
ForageOakland contributed maps of the North Oakland Neighborhood documenting the location of found fruits and edibles. And SecretCafe, a house turned sometimes restaurant, displayed an archived collection of menus: each illustrated carefully and beautifully and hung about for all to see.
The real centerpiece of the show, however, belonged to the Backyard Gardeners, who as part of RPS's Community Collaboration Project used Holga cameras to document each other, their surroundings and the gardens they've sewn in an attempt to bring real food to their neighborhood.
For those who know it, West Oakland's unique situation within the food justice struggle demonstrates the severe reality of inaccessibility to quality foods in low-income neighborhoods. From People's Grocery,
There is only one supermarket to serve over 25,000 people...With a short supply of full-service grocery stores, many residents depend on over 40 convenience stores for their food shopping. These convenience stores carry mostly canned, processed, and poor quality foodstuffs and promote the consumption of candy, chips, liquor, and cigarettes. A 1998 community food assessment of West Oakland showed that only three of these convenience stores offered a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables (Farfarn-Ramirez, 1998). Prices at convenience stores were found to range between 30%-100% higher than prices in supermarkets.
Though some indirectly, each of the contributors to the exhibit address the issues surrounding our food systems in their own way. Some point to the abundance of foods in the urban landscape ready for the picking. Others illuminate the intimacy and sociality lost by the factory farming and sterilization of commercial food commodities. The juxtaposition of each of the components paints a truthful, critical and most of all hopeful picture of emergent views on food justice. The show stays up throughout the month of November, but more importantly I'd encourage anyone with free space to curate a show like this one. Different to your own place and the facets of food justice prominent in your own community, but present. Because I promise you it's present. I'd venture that if you go looking, you're likely to find some pretty remarkable folks at work doing similarly radical food justice work in your own city. You won't even have to look very hard.
9.17.2008
Free Parking!
What to do when your city is lacking green space? When you've got all the spirit of an urban designer coursing through your veins and no clue how to satisfy her? While all the world is your stage? I think I may have the ticket.
Park(ing) Day, a one-day global event through which activists, artists, treehuggers--in a word, people--takeover metered parking spots and temporarily transform them into urban greenspace. They use bicycles usually, to haul plants and parkbenches and rolls of verdant sod through city streets where they literally park, for two hour chunks at a time, or as long as someone feeds the meter, and declare public space. The project takes place in TONS of cities all over the United States and internationally, with local variations depending on its ambassador and by the looks of things in 2007, warrants our undying praise and affection.
The project was founded by the San Francisco based art and activism collaborative REBAR and coordinated through the Trust for Public Land, an national nonprofit working to conserve public greenspace. The latter's website offers a list of participating cities, sometimes with corresponding maps denoting where the proposed park is to appear on Friday. They also provided instructions for obtaining permission and getting started with your own Park(ing) Day Park. I'd suggest visiting both websites for the full gamut of information surrounding what to do if you'd like to park come Friday. They've even made a How-To Manual. How can you say no? The whole effort is volunteer, which is pretty remarkable considering the scope and ambition of the concept. And in case you're having trouble picturing the thing, here is a visual:
and another:
Get out there! If Kenosha, WI can manage to be a part of this, I think you probably can too.
Park(ing) Day, a one-day global event through which activists, artists, treehuggers--in a word, people--takeover metered parking spots and temporarily transform them into urban greenspace. They use bicycles usually, to haul plants and parkbenches and rolls of verdant sod through city streets where they literally park, for two hour chunks at a time, or as long as someone feeds the meter, and declare public space. The project takes place in TONS of cities all over the United States and internationally, with local variations depending on its ambassador and by the looks of things in 2007, warrants our undying praise and affection.
The project was founded by the San Francisco based art and activism collaborative REBAR and coordinated through the Trust for Public Land, an national nonprofit working to conserve public greenspace. The latter's website offers a list of participating cities, sometimes with corresponding maps denoting where the proposed park is to appear on Friday. They also provided instructions for obtaining permission and getting started with your own Park(ing) Day Park. I'd suggest visiting both websites for the full gamut of information surrounding what to do if you'd like to park come Friday. They've even made a How-To Manual. How can you say no? The whole effort is volunteer, which is pretty remarkable considering the scope and ambition of the concept. And in case you're having trouble picturing the thing, here is a visual:
and another:
Get out there! If Kenosha, WI can manage to be a part of this, I think you probably can too.
7.20.2008
Carfree, The Way to Be
Sometimes it's really a shame that teleporting is not yet a reality. Sometimes, I really wish that jetsetting weren't just an annoying habit of the inordinately wealthy and actually something you could do by say, clicking your heels and wishing. Because sometimes small timers can't really get there when the getting is expensive and the there is far away.
Have I lost you yet? Are you still there? Ahoy! I'm talking about the Towards Carfree Cities conference in PDX a couple weeks ago and how I didn't get to go because I live over here in Philadelphia, directly on the opposite side of the universe, and I'm bummed now that I've gotten a glimpse of the festivities. The website for TCC sports a mission statement that reads thus:
Lucky for us, there is a nice guy named Jon who runs a little podcast out of San Francisco. Usually he only publishes a podcast once a month but in light of his attendance of the aforementioned CarFree conference in Portland, he's been putting up several of the sessions he attended, unabridged! So far I've listened to a discussion about the bike movement in San Francisco entitled "The Battle For San Francisco" including panelists Chris Carlsson, author of Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, Dave Snyder of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's Leah Shahum, and CSU professor Jason Henderson. Their session follows SF's biking timeline from the origins of Critical Mass through the success of the SFBC today, highlighting the power of strong membership, the politics of urban mobility and the struggle to influence urban land use. They even touch on the issue of Congestion Pricing, an urban planning idea that has been proposed for the bay area and is already in place in London, which I am eager to know more about.
Just perusing the program schedule, I would have been psyched to see almost every panel offered. And some of the programs are available as slideshows here. Even simply seeing these ideas as topics of discussion renews my excitement for and commitment to the dream of the carfree city. And central to this conference, and the ideas circling through it, is the notion of a united carfree movement. That is--public transit, pedestrian and cyclist routes working threefold to reduce the use of automobiles in urban areas. A crucial detail they stress is that Carfree does not seek to totally eliminate the use of the automobile. Rather, by strengthening alternative means of transit, they hope to reach a more sustainable balance wherein cars are used when they need to be used in a way that is more deliberate and less default. So thanks to Jon for getting this information all the way over here to my ears. In a way, it is a lot like teleporting, only real.
Have I lost you yet? Are you still there? Ahoy! I'm talking about the Towards Carfree Cities conference in PDX a couple weeks ago and how I didn't get to go because I live over here in Philadelphia, directly on the opposite side of the universe, and I'm bummed now that I've gotten a glimpse of the festivities. The website for TCC sports a mission statement that reads thus:
This year’s Towards Carfree Cities conference theme is intended to promote discussion of urban livability, mixed-use development, local agriculture, pedestrianization, strong neighborhoods, accessible public space, and sustainable transportation. The conference program unites diverse interests, from city planners to developers to environmental activists to transportation service providers, around the common goal of reducing communities’ dependence on automobiles.It seems like representatives of just about everything relevant in urban theory teamed up to talk about carfree living over several days and I didn't even know about it. Boo.
Lucky for us, there is a nice guy named Jon who runs a little podcast out of San Francisco. Usually he only publishes a podcast once a month but in light of his attendance of the aforementioned CarFree conference in Portland, he's been putting up several of the sessions he attended, unabridged! So far I've listened to a discussion about the bike movement in San Francisco entitled "The Battle For San Francisco" including panelists Chris Carlsson, author of Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, Dave Snyder of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's Leah Shahum, and CSU professor Jason Henderson. Their session follows SF's biking timeline from the origins of Critical Mass through the success of the SFBC today, highlighting the power of strong membership, the politics of urban mobility and the struggle to influence urban land use. They even touch on the issue of Congestion Pricing, an urban planning idea that has been proposed for the bay area and is already in place in London, which I am eager to know more about.
Just perusing the program schedule, I would have been psyched to see almost every panel offered. And some of the programs are available as slideshows here. Even simply seeing these ideas as topics of discussion renews my excitement for and commitment to the dream of the carfree city. And central to this conference, and the ideas circling through it, is the notion of a united carfree movement. That is--public transit, pedestrian and cyclist routes working threefold to reduce the use of automobiles in urban areas. A crucial detail they stress is that Carfree does not seek to totally eliminate the use of the automobile. Rather, by strengthening alternative means of transit, they hope to reach a more sustainable balance wherein cars are used when they need to be used in a way that is more deliberate and less default. So thanks to Jon for getting this information all the way over here to my ears. In a way, it is a lot like teleporting, only real.
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