About seven months ago I was in London and went for a meeting about food and climate change. Well, meeting was actually a vague description for the huge church packed with people that I entered.
I was astonished that so many Londoners would spend their Friday evening discussing how to solve food problems, and I still remember thinking that “This would be difficult in Sweden”.
This last Friday evening proved me wrong. When the climate magazine Effekt, that I work with, together with the British Council and the internet community Ecoprofile arranged a seminar at the Ecoteque in Stockholm about how to grow food in a big city, more than 120 persons showed up.
London as an example
Two British guests – Rosie Boycott from the London Food Board and Seb Mayfield from the project Capital growth – talked about how they work to make London’s food system more sustainable and healthy, and how they help people start growing vegetables in allotments, but also in all the small forgotten spaces around our houses: balconies, windowsills and courtyards.
I felt very inspired, and hopefully I’ll start growing a little something outside my house as soon as spring comes…
Future scenarios
In the meantime an exhibition at the Ecoteque can serve as inspiration. There Urbavista – a future scenario machine has a webcam pointed at Stockholm’s main square outside the window, and shows what it could look like in the future.
Parameters such as “consumption”, “recycling”, “economic development” and “power and ownership” can be changed – and the picture of the square changes with it. From a place covered with adverts, to a green oasis with vegetable gardens everywhere. It’s all up to us.
Above it all a CO2 meter hangs as a judge: would this scenario be a sustainable one from a climate point of view?
A complicated machine
At Urbavista’s home page you can see some more photos.
This is how this amazing machine’s creators explain their idea behind it: ”If we could dismantle a city the way we dismantle a motor, and put all the pieces in front of us at the ground, we would be surprised at how many flexible parts it contains. Apart from the inhabitants and their relations we would find a variety of other complex systems. – - – Leaving the physical that we can see and touch there are a number of other elements that influence how the city looks. How much energy we use, how food, energy and goods are produced, and so on. All these systems make cities the most complicated machines we ever constructed.”
