A model of self-reliance

There have been pilgrimages to Totnes, seeking ‘the magic’. Aspirants marvel at the wholefood stores, acupuncture clinics and poncho-clad residents whose homes stand out in pretty blue and custard-coloured pebbledash.

As home to the UK’s first Transition initiative, launched in 2006, this Devon town has created its own currency, plants nut trees and teaches food gardening in an effort to become self-financing and withstand the ravages of climate change and the demise of cheap oil.

But please don’t deluge our over-worked staff with questions, plead notices to well-wishers inside the Transition Network’s slightly shabby head office in Totnes town centre. ‘The movement’s still growing like the clappers,’ says Transition co-founder Rob Hopkins of a phenomenon whose viral spread has so far reached four continents in as many years (see box: what are transition towns?). ‘Coping with the amount of interest and the scale of growth has been our biggest challenge.’

So popular is Mr Hopkins’ brand of community-led self-sufficiency and carbon reduction that illustrious fans have flocked to the cause. Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and climate change and a ‘keynote listener’ at last year’s Transition Towns conference, has called the movement ‘powerful’ and, says Mr Hopkins, ‘waxes lyrical about transition’ wherever he goes. Apparently Prince Charles is also ‘very enthusiastic’. Even former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan counts himself as an aficionado. And social housing providers should join them, argues Mr Hopkins.

Even the greenest of landlords, though, may need to up their game before they can join the Transition club. Cutting carbon emissions alone, as many in the sector are now doing, will not build resilience once the oil runs out, says Mr Hopkins. ‘It’s about relocalisation. We argue that that process of strengthening and rebuilding a local economy is really, really vital. For instance, not that many people know how to grow food if they had to.’ Transition, he explains, shows people how to grow their own cabbages or insulate their homes using natural materials.

The 41-year-old, who studied environmental quality and resource management in his home city of Bristol, used to teach permaculture - the design of sustainable human settlements - and his experience of community engagement is clear. Communities must wrest back power from outside developers, he says.

They should ask, ‘do we need to create our own banks, our own building companies, do we need to be buying land so that the community can become its own developer? It’s about finding as many ways as possible to cycle money back into the community rather than letting it all pour out.’
Such assets should be brought back into community ownership, he says, ‘because development is an enormous drain on communities… and it hasn’t left the community new skills, hasn’t left viable businesses in its wake, hasn’t left the community an asset that it can develop’.

Ideal partners

Here, apparently, social landlords fit right in. Mr Hopkins says housing providers are well-placed to build sustainable housing because the economy bodes ill for speculative developers. ‘So social housing providers are in this very strong position to do more than just bang out houses. They can really look at how each housing development project can strengthen and deepen the local economy. How can it be training and reskilling young people to use local materials while building to very high energy efficiency standards?’

To illustrate how this can work, he mentions a current project called Atmos, supported by Transition Town Totnes. The plan is to transform a disused local milk-processing factory into a community-owned, low-carbon mixture of affordable housing and business start-up space. TTT’s building and housing sub-group is a strong advocate of co-housing - where community dwellings share facilities including laundries and guest rooms - and contributed to the local council’s development plan from this transitional perspective, arguing that its approach was better and more community-driven than the council’s developer-led plan.

‘In a conventional development, the developers source the materials from wherever they can,’ says Mr Hopkins. ‘At the moment they come from huge distances, [use] lots of embodied energy and [the project] creates no work locally.

Whereas, for example, you can build a development on the scale of Atmos and specify that up to 50 per cent of materials used will be local - clay, lime, hemp, local timber or straw…’

The development remains in the pre-planning stage, but Mr Hopkins says TTT is now at an advanced stage of talks with both the council and vendors Dairy Crest in the hope that co-housing will win the day.

But engaging with the mainly Conservative local councillors has not been easy despite other transition towns, such as Brixton in south London, enjoying support from their local authorities. When asked who the movement’s greatest sceptic is, Mr Hopkins says: ‘Certainly within the council there are some councillors who are very outspoken climate contrarians but that hasn’t really impacted very much on us… they just think the science behind climate change is nonsense.’

However, there is scope, he says, for social housing providers to help change attitudes. ‘They can really push for higher building codes heading up towards [Code for Sustainable Homes] levels five and six, or even passive houses,’ he says. ‘They can start to base their future decisions around more realistic scenarios such as energy availability. They can work together with transition groups where they have them.’

But he is not as supportive of all the government’s initiatives, starting with eco-towns. ‘The question here is why are we building eco-towns on greenfield areas when we’ve still got lots of derelict urban areas. Could we build an eco-town using local materials that could feed and power itself where the people that lived within it didn’t have to drive to anywhere to work?’ he asks.

That’s not to say Mr Hopkins is certain his way is right. His own views on green practices are in constant flux, he admits ‘because nobody’s ever done this before’.

‘Transition is a very evolving iterative process and we’re deliberately very playful with the process or you stop being creative and imaginative with it.’

The father of four has adopted this flexibility into his own eco-living. He gave up flying three years ago and instead arranges online video conferences with groups around the world. And he has hemp and lime-plastered his own kitchen, for example, to make it warmer. But the man’s only human. ‘I like having baths sometimes when I could have had a shower.’

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