Up up and away

By Julian Broadhead

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, is unfortunately a phrase I often hear quoted about friends’ inexplicable and suspect love choices. But like all good sayings, it’s relevant because it’s true. So much is dependent on our perceptions and opinions, as individuals and a society. Luckily for us, our perceptions are not fixed but instead exist in a constant state of flux, evolving and adapting to the ever changing world around us. The result is that the unimaginable can soon become second nature.

Our attitudes to waste in modern society provide a relevant example because, in recent times, we have gone from giving little or no consideration to how we consume and dispose of goods, to a greater questioning of this behaviour and renewed emphasis on the opportunity for recycling and reuse. The latest embodiment of this is the growth of upcycling; where recycling means re-creating  the original raw material (such as paper, glass or metal), upcycling involves taking ‘waste’ and using it to create a product or material of greater quality and value. 

Driving this reassessment has been the opportunity for creativity. Where recycling is generally a specialised, industrial process, anyone can upcycle. Influential blogs such as Inhabitat are full of great ideas that you almost think you could do yourself and in fact, sites like the fantastic Instructables will show you exactly how. Nor is that all, the latest potential source of inspiration is WeUpcycle.com. Started by two students from Vienna, the original aim of the site was to profile 30 ideas in 30 days but it is proving so popular that they are now extending the life of the project by a day for every concept submitted. 

Anything can be upcycled, it just depends on your perception; I for one have been taking vast amounts of retired luxury hotel bed linen and turning it in to beautiful bags. So next time you find something you like but aren’t sure what to do with it, just try looking at what it could be rather than what it’s not.

Jolly hockey

By Anokhee Shah

The whistle goes to commence over an hour of intense focus, energy and teamwork. A few goals and miles of running later, the final whistle signals the end of our efforts. This is more than just a hockey match that I want to win on a Saturday – being part of the Harrow Hockey Club has become an integral part of my life. Today, local sports clubs play the role of a type of community that is becoming increasingly rare.

Local sports clubs are usually run and funded by their members. Many will have a club house, the popular location for after match teas, social events and drinks with friends. Welcoming reputations and busy social calendars are as important as good coaches, sports pitches and the level of play. The club will have regular training, weekly matches and teams compete at a range of standards suitable for anyone joining the club. At first, the club seems to be a random collection of people, even more so if you include supporters – look closer and there are usually two common factors – the love of the game and proximity to the club

The internet and communication technologies have flourished alongside improved transport allowing communities and common interests to surpass the limits of geographical location. In a globalised world, we have global communities and as people become more international and more mobile, so do friendships. Therefore, when I found out about the hockey club down the road from me, the whole experience came as a breath of fresh air – and filled a gap in my modern life lungs – I am proudly part of a wonderful team, part of the local community that is Harrow Hockey Club, that meets every week to play a sport we love and then catch up over teas. And if I really want, I can meet them all again and fit in even more hockey at the socials and the annual hockey tour!

Give it away

By Shane Solanki

Collectively, we’re starting to question what we value. We’ve started to realise en masse that it’s not just money that makes the world go round. From gift manifestos to transition initiatives, we’re all putting into place systems which encourage us to be nicer to each other, and the world around us. 

Transition initiatives are community-led responses to the challenges of peak oil, climate change and economic stagnation. They’re based on the assumption that we all experience a life disconnected from the land, the environment and our communities; that we’re running out of things like oil and coal; that we can use our creativity, ingenuity and adaptability to solve or current crisis; that it’s up to us to act now, not the government or “someone else”; and that “if we collectively plan and act early enough there’s every likelihood that we can create a way of living that’s significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.” Totnes in Devon, and Brixton in South London, are two examples of transition towns. Both have their own currency, redeemable in local shops and businesses, helping to reduce “food miles” while also supporting local firms.

Should we be dusting off our socks and sandals? Ask the New Economics Foundation, an independent think tank which increasingly works with partners like the UK government on issues like social policy, democracy and participation, moving towards a fair and equitable banking system, and addressing the very real prospects of climate change, rising sea levels, over-population and over-consumption.

All very well, you might ask, but what can I do about this? Grass roots movements start, effectively, in your pocket, and how you choose to spend every penny. You could be like Burning Man festival goers, forgo money, and barter or gift your way through life. You could be like No Impact Man, and decide to completely eliminate your personal impact on the environment for the next year. Perhaps you don’t need to be so intense; you could buy slightly less meat, purchase fair trade products, try and make a trip to a farmers market once a week instead of a supermarket. You could swap your car for a bike, or, like these fine fellows pictured at Ambient TV, you could make the most of your local canal network by starting a water taxi service. The fare is a conversation. Not too much of a price to pay, huh?

Free for all

By Shane Solanki, picture Briony Campbell

Did you know that 25% of our food is wasted? Perfectly good grub is either left to rot, or thrown away, discarded either by home dwellers or by retailers. Look out for the trend in supermarkets putting locks on bins to prevent food being scavenged by foxes, dumpster divers or freegans (see Street food previously on VivaCity).

But where there is waste, there is want. Take The People’s Kitchen, an initiative run by chef Steve Wilson at the Passing Clouds venue in Dalston, Hackney. Inspired by Berlin’s People’s Kitchen, the initiative seeks to tackle the problem of food waste.

Every Sunday at Passing Clouds, a freegan kitchen run by volunteers offers healthy food for donations only. Freeganism is a lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans “embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.” Donations come from volunteers, local organic food shops and homeless food charities.

Steve’s sister Eleanor Wilson, who runs Passing Clouds, explained to me that the ethos of the People’s Kitchen includes offering a day package to her local community; collecting food, cooking and eating together, learning about nutrition, having the opportunity to watch films and documentaries on prescient social issues, and to participate in an open mic jam session featuring musicians from around the world.

Eleanor is producing a ‘how to’ guide, which she intends to distribute as an open source document, initially to churches, village halls and community centres. By-products of such an initiative would include community engagement, and education about both nutrition and the environment. Imagine feeding the entire population of London, the UK, or the world – for free!

Flushed with success

By Anokhee Shah

Clean, accessible and most importantly, sustainable sanitation is a global issue. Sustainable toilet blocks should minimise consumption of local resources and continue to be maintained and used long after the builders have left. The ‘Ikotoilet’ is a toilet block that solves a long standing sanitation problem with an easily replicable model, and also contributes to important research on waste reuse.

David Kuria, an architect and founder of Ecotact, the sustainable sanitation consultancy behind the Ikotoilet, decided to improve sanitation in cities by initiating a toilet revolution. He wanted to transform public toilets from places to be avoided into attractive focal points for communities. The model is a corporate funded building, which is then self maintaining, as a toilet block as well as a place of social, economic and aesthetic value. The architecturally attractive block includes toilets, showers, sanitary bins and hand washing.  The entrance charge is used to employ full time cleaners, friendly staff who use the rainwater harvested from the toilet roof to keep the toilets clean and fresh. The building itself is no longer only a toilet block, it is a vibrant toilet mall housing small local enterprises. There are kiosks selling sodas and local snacks, electronic money transfer, shoe cleaners and even beauty salons. The toilet malls have become social hubs and are places to be proud to ‘do your business’ in either sense of the phrase.

The Ikotoilet is also taking sustainable resource use a step further by collecting liquid waste from one of the blocks. This is being used in Ecotact’s innovative collaboration with a Kenyan agricultural university, on ways to process urine on a larger scale for use as an affordable urea based organic fertiliser.

The Ikotoilets are serving over 30,000 visitors a day with 40 toilet malls across Kenya. The future will see Ikotoilets across East Africa with young sanitation entrepreneurs receiving the support to replicate this model. And with the continued university collaboration, the Iko toilets could one day be producing affordable organic fertiliser for farmers.

Niqabization of the population

by Shane Solanki

Ever since some dudes in New York started stealing power from street lights to power up home made sound systems to provide the sounds for block party street jams in the late seventies, graffiti has grown from being one of the essential five elements of hip hop to a global phenomenon registering the voice of the people. The simple political protest of scrawling your name on a wall, of marking your territory (amidst a plethora of signifiers which encourage consumption and submission to corporate interests), is one which governments have struggled to contain or understand; take Banksy’s work, once demonized and now deified worldwide. Princess Hijab is the pseudonym given to an anonymous artist who cheekily paints veils onto models on billboards in Paris, capital of the first country in the world to ban the niqab from public spaces. Other artists choose to travel the world to scrawl upon walls, making political statements which spill outside of galleries and institutions. Two of our current favorites are Seth, whose current sabbatical in India and China is pictured above, and Bluu.  

Street art can also be staged, instead of scripted; flash mobs worldwide create protest through performance. The most well celebrated of the flash mob phenomenon is Improv Everywhere, based in New York, but you’ll find examples planet wide; take My Mother’s Funeral, a performance organized in Bombay which manipulated the tendency of the Indian populace to stand, stop and stare at any kind of public spectacle on the street, to distribute messages about personal responsibility in the light of environmental awareness. In a country where the government are doing relatively nothing to stop the mountains of man made waste created every day, perhaps it’s only through public art, performance and spectacle that education can begin. Power to the people.  

All under one roof

By Julian Broadhead

Feeding the population of a major city is no mean feat, requiring production and logistical organisation on an industrial scale, and thereby extending the influence of urban centres far beyond their physical boundaries. 

Judging by the number of times  it crops up as a theme here on VivaCity though, this is clearly a situation that makes many people uneasy, prompting questions about where our food comes from, how it is produced and our relationship to it. For those concerned with such matters, the immediate solution appears to be bringing food cultivation into the urban environment and taking personal control, ranging from keeping chickens in your back garden to planting orchards in train stations.

The latest and slightly different addition to this list of food activists is particularly exciting. FARM:shop is an initiative founded by the ‘eco-social design practice’, Something and Son.  

Based in a formerly disused shop in Dalston, London, it is a farm, shop, cafe, exhibition and meeting space all rolled into one. More than all this though, FARM:shop is an experiment in urban food production, with the expressed aim of combining the best of traditional and modern techniques to grow as much food as possible in this limited space.  In practice, this means chickens on the roof and poly-tunnels for vegetables in the garden, whilst indoors there is hydroponic growing, aquaponic fish farming and mushroom cultivation.

So, could FARM:shop represent the shape of things to come? Its founders certainly think so, as this project is merely the beginning of a larger FARM:London initiative, designed to encourage the production of food (and other materials)  in the greater London area, both recreationally and commercially. For us at VivaCity, it is this ambition that makes FARM:shop so exciting and inspiring, and no doubt we will not be alone in following its progress in the coming months with some interest.

Necessity, the mother of invention

By Andy Marks

Slums, shanty towns, favelas, it is estimated that 1 billion of us now reside in these products of extreme urbanisation.

Lagos, a mega city of 16million, has three quarters of it’s residents living in slums. The city is growing at such an extraordinary pace, that by 2015, it is predicted to be the world’s third most populous city, behind only Mumbai and Tokyo.

This astonishing city is home to an astonishing place, the Olusosun rubbish dump, which is home to an astonishing community. For in the Olusosun rubbish dump, 1,000 people live, there are three cinemas, restaurants, a barber shop and a mosque.

Here, the local economy is based on the daily delivery of 3,000 tons of rubbish which is expertly filtered by hand. Here, rubber, plastics, copper aluminium, brass, zinc and more is found, sorted and sold. Here nothing is wasted and everything is a commodity. This vision of resourcefulness and extreme recycling prompted visionary architect Rem Koolhaas to say “What is now fascinating is how, with some level of self-organisation, there is a strange combination of extreme underdevelopment and development.”

What is most striking though is that beyond the human ingenuity, there is a closeness, interdependence and trust between the rubbish dump dwellers. Crime rates are low, people don’t lock away their valuables (partly as the means to do so probably don’t exist), it is self-policing with honour and dignity evident, and there is hope that people are working for a better future. Laudable, humbling, an impressive entrepreneurial spirit all at the same time.

The Olusosun rubbish dump, was documented recently by the BBC2 series Welcome To Lagos, which follows the lives of two people who live and work on the dump. One of them, Eric aka Vocal Slender, was saving money to realise his dream for studio sessions and photographs, to become a recording artist.

Is the Olusosun rubbish dump a vision of the future, when 75% of us will live in cities (by 2050), up from just over 50% today? A future where resourcefulness and ingenuity are the currency, everything must be recycled, and economies are locally based? If so human ingenuity will prevail as it has done before. 

The picture accompanying this post is by the French photo artist JR, from the Women are Heroes series, and features the slum of Kibera in Nairobi.

Fashion forward

By Dagmar Hoogland

Stylish. Sustainable. Socially Conscious.

It sounds like a winning combination, but is it possible to achieve? Following the last VivaCity piece on the gorgeous Sleeping Bags, someone else thinks it is too… Hell (oh) yes, is what Sheena Matheiken would tell you. Sheena is the founder of The Uniform Project and her mission is exactly this.

The project started in 2009 when Sheena got fed up with her career in advertising or to be more specific, with the “uninspiring demands of the advertising world” and decided it was time for something new.

She found her new challenge in fashion when she decided she was going to wear the same black dress every day for a year, and making this dress look different every day without buying any new clothes or accessories.

Pffffew, A pretty difficult task if you ask me. Not to mention the withdrawls one would have of not being able to give into that easy fix called retail therapy.

But she did it. And not only did she succeed on a personal level, the challenge was also designed to be an online fundraiser, raising money to send underprivileged kids to school.

The Uniform Project got lots of media attention all over the world and now is in it’s second year where the project is expending into a global platform combining philanthropy, fashion, sustainability and social commerce into an ongoing mission.

On their site you can choose the classic LBD (Little Black Dress for those not familiar with his term), the reversible LBD or you can buy the pattern and make one yourself. 

Another organization tapping into the issue of over-consumption in the world of fashion is TRAIDremade. 

TRAIDremade recycles, refashions and remakes textiles that would otherwise be thrown away, into beautiful bespoke garments and accessories. It is run by the UK based fashion recycling charity TRAID (Textile Recycling for Aid and International development) and raises funds to fight global poverty through its clothes recycling and environmental activities in the UK.

Their aim is to create one-off garments for the fashion conscious using 100% recycled clothes, fabrics and vintage. During the school holidays or in the evenings over the course of a school term, TRAIDremade runs workshops where you can create your own recycled collection of clothes.

If you’re up for the challenge of being fashion forward not faddy fast fashion, try it out here .