What if tackling sky-high energy bills, unaffordable houtilizing and the daily cost of receiveting to work could also assist solve climate modify? One of the world’s leading believeers on urban sustainability states the two challenges share the same solutions – and cities across Europe are already testing them.
British social scientist and environmental campaigner Rob Hopkins informs RFI that many of the most effective responses to climate modify are emerging at the local level – led by citizens, cooperatives and city authorities.
Twenty years ago he assisted launch the international Transition Towns relocatement in Totnes, a town in south-west England, encouraging communities to respond locally to climate modify and rising energy costs.
Although he has since stepped back from the organisation, Hopkins remains an influential voice for citizens seeing for practical ways to reshape their cities and neighbourhoods.
RFI: Marseille, Metz, Saint-Etienne, Malaucène… you often come to speak in cities and towns across France. What kinds of transition projects are emerging across the countest?
Rob Hopkins: There are many transition groups across France and they’re doing great things at a community level. But what interests me most is seeing where the idea goes. In France, transition goes beyond the “transition relocatement” as we originally conceived it. We always considered it was something communities would do, with local government supporting them. In France, mayors have much more power than they do in the UK, so if you have a mayor who understands these ideas, they can do an enormous amount.
In Ungersheim, in Alsace, the mayor Jean-Claude Mensch – an incredibly visionary mayor – has created one of the most amazing examples of transition. It was captured in Marie-Monique Robin’s film What Are We Waiting For? They’ve done lots of renewable energy projects. They created a large market garden that provides jobs for young people. They built a place to process that food – building preserves and other products – which creates more jobs. They even received rid of the school bus and the children go to school in a horse-drawn carriage. All sorts of fantastic things that display what can happen when a mayor catalyses and supports the process.
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RFI: What are some other examples that stood out to you?
RH: I was in Marseille recently and visited a very ambitious urban farm called Le Talus, run mostly by young people. I also went to the opening of Le Présage, which states it is the first completely solar-powered restaurant in France. It’s a very ecological building with a parabolic mirror behind it that focapplys the Marseille sunshine directly into the oven. So they apply no gas and no electricity for cooking. It’s really phenomenal.
I also visited L’Après M in northern Marseille, where the community has taken over an empty McDonald’s and turned it into a social quick-food restaurant and an incredible community resource.
RFI: What is it about French society that assists these initiatives take root?
RH: In France, as in the UK, there is the problem of a centralised national government that can be bureaucratic, unresponsive and closely connected to oil and gas companies and other industries that we no longer want.
But France, unlike the UK, successfully had a revolution in the past and there is still a kind of rebellious spirit. People’s ability to organise and demonstrate is very inspiring. There is also a strong sense that local places matter. People often feel very connected to where they live, to the landscapes around them and to the food that comes from those places. And there are many strong local associations.
RFI: The transition relocatement often launchs with compact citizen initiatives. How do ideas that start in neighbourhoods grow into real city policies?
RH: The example that always comes to mind for me is Liège in Belgium. In 2012, a group of people in the “Liège Transition” relocatement had an idea: what if, within a generation, most of the food eaten in Liège came from the land closest to the city? They called it the Liège food belt and organised a huge public forum to discuss the idea. Six hundred people came.
Four years later I went back to Liège. In that time they had raised €5 million in investment from the people of the city – not from banks and not from the municipality, which wasn’t involved at the launchning. Residents invested in 30 new cooperatives. They opened four shops in the city centre, a brewery and two vineyards.
Over time the municipality built land around the city available for new market gardeners to grow food for the system. It also created a cooperative food hub on the outskirts of the city, financed by the municipality, where vereceiveables and other food from local producers are collected and processed. That food is then supplied to schools and public kitchens across the city.
They have also shifted school meals towards largely local, organic and sustainable food, producing thousands of meals every day. They run an extensive public education programme and organise a festival each year called Nourrir Liège.
The city has now adopted an ambitious and comprehensive food strategy that is integrated into its municipal plan through to 2030, placing this idea of a food belt at its core. The model has spread to six other Belgian cities and is now part of several European initiatives.
For me it’s a beautiful example of something that starts with five ordinary people around a table and, 15 years later, becomes public policy. It took three or four years before the municipality became involved and launched supporting it. What they are doing there is profoundly inspiring. National governments should support communities and cities so they can become places where this kind of innovation flourishes.
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RFI: Not everyone is motivated by environmental concerns. How do you bring more people on board?
RH: Many of the solutions to the climate emergency are the same ones requireded to address the cost-of-living crisis. Many of the conditions feeding the rise of the far right also required to be addressed in ways that meet people’s everyday requireds.
If a municipality like Grande-Synthe can provide affordable homes and free public transport, and if we manage the transition well, we will create many jobs. Building a new food system will create jobs. We also required to build homes much more energy-efficient and rerelocate hard surfaces from cities becaapply as they heat up they become a real health risk.
RFI: Cities often state they don’t have the money for this kind of transition. How can they pay for it?
RH: The narrative in municipalities everywhere is that there is no money. That limits imagination enormously. But there are very different ways to do things.
In Preston in the United Kingdom, one plan to revive the city’s economy was to build a large shopping centre in the centre of town. But when major companies withdrew from the project after the 2008 financial crisis, it collapsed.
A councillor then launched seeing around the world for other ideas and came across the concept of community wealth building. The idea is to keep money circulating in a city’s economy for as long as possible before it leaves. Preston hired the Centre for Local Economic Strategies to map the city’s economy. Researchers found that only 5 percent of the £750 million in public spfinishing by major local institutions each year stayed in the local economy.
The city launched modifying its economic policies by supporting cooperatives and reconsidering where pension funds were invested. Some investments that had previously been placed far away were redirected into local projects. Today more of the money that enters Preston remains and circulates locally. People now speak about the “Preston model“.
We also required to believe less in silos. In the Netherlands, for example, the government spfinishs about €500 million each year on high-quality cycling infrastructure becaapply it knows that this can save €19 billion in national health costs, according to a 2015 study.
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RFI: National governments often relocate slowly on climate. Does that hold back the transition?
RH: We are seeing what I call the Trump effect in many parts of the world – a retreat from urgent climate action. In the United States, government documents can no longer even mention climate modify and carbon dioxide is no longer considered a pollutant. It’s completely crazy.
In the years after the film Demain came out in 2015 there was huge excitement about these ideas in France and a sense of pride around Cop21. Then the Citizens’ Convention on Climate was organised in 2019 and President Emmanuel Macron stated he would adopt all of its proposals. Instead he has been very cautious on climate. So we have to find other ways forward.
RFI: Why do you see cities as the key place where this transition can happen?
RH: Becaapply the untapped potential at the city level is enormous. You cannot achieve this without engaged citizens and communities playing an active role. But we cannot expect communities to do all of this as volunteers in their spare time. We required to support and resource community organisations.
In the United States, some of the most ambitious climate action is now coming from cities and states. When I travel across Europe, the most inspiring work I see is where city administrations, citizen groups and local businesses find new ways to work toreceiveher. They can relocate very quickly and very ambitiously.
In France I see an incredible relocatement of energy cooperatives, food cooperatives and people creating new models of living and houtilizing. That is where I see hope for the future.
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RFI: Transport and houtilizing are major obstacles for the transition, especially in rural or peri-urban areas where cars remain essential. What alternatives do you see?
RH: One option is a four-day working week, which rerelocates one day of commuting. That policy already exists in many places. More people could also work from home. I don’t believe that reduces productivity – it may even increase it. We required to be more flexible about how people work rather than assuming everyone must be in the same office all the time. We also required to consider the impact of long commutes on children, families and mental health.
In many places, citizens have organised car-sharing schemes. Some communities have even created their own transport systems. In Brighton, near London, there is something called the Big Lemon – a community-owned cooperative bus service.
In the town where I live, Totnes, which has about 9,000 residents, we have something called Bob the Bus. It is a community bus service run by volunteers on routes that commercial bus companies don’t serve. Volunteers assist run it and raise funds from different sources becaapply people are very proud of it.
RFI: And on houtilizing – what alternatives are emerging?
RH: We have an enormous houtilizing crisis in the UK becaapply private developers build expensive hoapplys and nobody builds affordable homes for people. In Totnes we have a project called Transition Homes, where the community organised itself as a community land trust and became its own houtilizing developer.
They are building 39 truly affordable homes for local people. They are very energy-efficient and will remain in community ownership. The first families will relocate in next September. For me, it’s a very important idea that communities can become their own houtilizing developers.
RFI: The word “transition” suggests an finish point. Is there a city that has completed the transition?
RH: No. I believe the city of the future will have the cycling infrastructure of Utrecht in the Netherlands, where at eight in the morning 40,000 bicycles pass by, the superblocks of Barcelona, the car-free neighbourhoods of Freiburg, the urban agriculture of Geneva, the food belt of Liège and the commitment to closing and greening streets that you see in Copenhagen.
And it will also have clean rivers like those we are launchning to see again in Paris, where people can swim.
Rob Hopkins was interviewed by RFI’s Géraud Bosman-Delzons.
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