“Når du køber uøkologisk mel, kan du være nogenlunde sikker på, at kornsorten er uinteressant, at dyrkningen var en belastning for naturen, og at forarbejdningen er foregået på en kvalitetesforringende måde” says Danish chef of New Nordic Cuisine and baker extraordinaire Claus Meyer, which in English would mean something to the extent of

“When you buy non-ecologically grown flour, you can be pretty sure that the crop is uninteresting, the cultivation a burden on nature and that its preparation has decreased quality”

Which makes me think of the common sense that we often deny when we are choosing clothes in shops and I’ll second Claus Meyer on the general note and say that

“When you buy a t-shirt for under £10, you can be pretty sure that it wont last you long, the crop is cultivated at nature’s expense, the manufacturing includes unethical practices (dare I say childlabour, long working hours, little or no protection agains chemicals, no education or health care facilities), the transportation long, and it feeding into a supply chain of unhealthy management practice, that leave very few people along the way proud of what they have done” -then think about a t-shirt for £2!?

Its really common sense, if you go out of denial for a minute and think about what needs to be paid for, lets do the reverse engineering:

Sales: The shop, including rent, utilities, maintenance, interior; shop personal, salaries, training, health care; brand development and advertising; (this doesn’t apply to the little stalls); import, freight, stock management, outsourcing quality control and supplier management,..

Production: Sales, export management, contract pitching and client proposals; production facilities, machinery, rent, utilities; production personal, salary, training and possibly healthcare; material sourcing, stock management quality control, supplier and supply management; import, freight or possibly just transportation,..

Preparation: Preparing of the crop into material: facilities, machinery, rent, utilities, staff, salaries, training, supply chain management, quality control,..

Crop farming: Seeds, nurturing, harvesting; farming labour: salaries, training, possibly healthcare; landownership, tools and machinery; pitching for buyers and business management,..

These are just the basic stages that I can imagine off the top of my head, I’m sure that there are many more expenses and stages, but the point is: how much is left for each one of these people to deliver their goods and services? With the danger of being moralistic, but with no intention to judge: If you allow common sense, would you then buy this t-shirt?

The American business professor Pietra Rivoli of Georgetown University has written a narrative, educating and entertaining detective story meets personal contemplation about the state of the world, called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy”.
The book is non-judgemental support to the common sense for anyone interested in ethical aspects or call it the consequences of consumer society.
The New York Fashion Institute of Technology describes the work: “In The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, business professor Pietra Rivoli takes the reader on a fascinating around-the-world adventure to reveal the life story of her six-dollar T-shirt. Traveling from a West Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory, and from trade negotiations in Washington to a used clothing market in Africa, Rivoli examines international trade through the life story of this simple product. Combining a compelling story with substantive scholarship, Rivoli shows that both globalization’s critics and its cheerleaders have oversimplified the world of international trade.”
A synopsis of the book is available for free via executiveforum here

What is that we do, when we acquire objects and products?

It seems our buying decisions reflect our priorities of the time, be it “I don’t care”, “I just needed this that or the other quickly”, “I was skint” or at the other end of the spectre “I always dreamt of..” or “I’ve really saved up for..” it expresses a prioritisation or relation to objects and desires at the given time. Regardless of which of the above may be the deciding factor for a purchase, once bought, we own it and thus have the power over its further destiny.
Though we might dispose of it and it, at best, is a “Lebensabschnittspartner”, we have invited it to take part in our life for that time and it is likely to shape our activities, perception or means of expression.
Shortly, the things we surround ourselves with frame our lives.

Example:
- If this is a house or flat we intend to live in, that is the object, it will shape our notion of home, refuge from the world, sense of belonging,..
- Should it be a transportation device, it will influence our perceived mobility, convenience and likely our definition of home turf. Already the choice vehicle category, whether bicycle, car, motorcycle or truck will prescribe the routes and distances readily available. Not seldomly the choice of moving vehicle is related directly to the idea of freedom (public transportation representing the freedom of ownership and maintenance; a car being the freedom to go wherever one wishes, whenever one wishes; a bicycle implicates the freedom of the fresh air etc);
- Something as simple as duvet-covers are touching one’s skin –one self- for a third of the day on average, and is likely to be strongly connected to one’s feeling of relaxation, safety and recovery;
- The choice of tools and home office equipment determines which activities, repairs and maintenance one can perform single-handedly and for which service providers, builders and other specialists will be required;
- Clothes serve purposes of social acceptability, temperature, covering and taboo, and are reflection of how one wishes to be perceived by society. Some cocoon, others exhibit themselves through their choices of clothes, most of us probably do a bit of both, differently weighed at different times of lives.

Our relationship with things is not a simple system of cause and effect, but rather a circle of cause becoming the effect becoming the cause and the effect. Thus, the above reasoning also goes the other way around. And I would argue that these calculations intuitively take place when we make up our mind about an object.
Summarising, things also have to do with sense of belonging, freedom, mobility, safety, recovery, resilience and social expectancies and thus, many buying decisions are made up of decisions about lifestyle, quality of life and LIFE itself.

What we buy,
what we consume,
is what we invite into our lives

Walled Kitchen Garden project in Havering-Atte-Bower covered in The Ecologist the 11th of November 2011:

The only way is Essex: the community breathing new life into a disused country estate
by Laura Sevier

In Romford, Essex, villagers are getting their hands dirty transforming a historic walled garden at Bedfords Park

If you listen carefully to the lyrics of Imogen Heap’s new song ‘Neglected Spaces’ you might hear the sound of smashing glass and references to bat’s sonar rays. ‘I’ll look after you if you look after me,’ she whispers hauntingly.

The quirky multi-instrumentalist singer was inspired to write the song as part of a wider project to help restore an abandoned walled garden near her home in Romford, Essex. For years she jogged past the four metre high walls without knowing what was behind them. Then she learnt about the garden’s 200-year history. In its Georgian heyday it was a thriving kitchen garden that even grew pineapples in greenhouses. But over the last decade the garden, which Imogen says is ‘the size of a football pitch,’ has been badly neglected.

‘I wrote into the song what I felt the garden wanted before we got there. For people to believe in its relevance again,’ she says. ‘These manmade structures for people to work and live in are completely useless and redundant in the loss of human interaction.’
After visiting the garden with her partner Thomas Ermacora, who heads up regeneration design charity Clear Village.org they decided to step in and help various locals bring the garden back to its former glory.
‘Being in the garden, I hear it almost sigh in relief with the news of this fresh enthusiasm,’ says Imogen. ‘As if it’s been calling out to anyone who might catch it from dust, to fall in love with it again.’ Imogen is no stranger to nature-based projects. Last year, she and Thomas created a compilation film called ‘Love the Earth’ by asking her fans to contribute nature themed film footage. The film was screened at the Albert Hall to her original score.

A secret garden comes to life

The day I go to visit the walled garden, an autumn dampness hangs in the air. It’s late afternoon and the light is fading. The garden hides within a forbidden area of Bedfords Park, a former country estate that has been owned by Havering Council since 1933. The tranquil park has panoramic views of London and Kent and is now a wildlife reserve complete with a visitor centre, captive red deer and Giant Redwood trees.
I’m with Thomas who has offered to show me round the garden. He collects the keys from the visitor centre (the locks have to regularly be changed because of the threat of vandalism and theft). The path to the garden is lined by rows of ancient trees shedding their leaves. It’s a pretty scene. But when I see the garden I’m shocked. What remains of the outhouses are covered in graffiti. None of the greenhouses have any glass in them. There are huge clumps of nettles and weeds everywhere and much of the garden is cordoned off with red and white plastic tape (health and safety) looking like something out of a crime scene.
Surveying the mess, you get a vague sense of what the garden must have been like in its hey day but you need to use a lot of imagination. Thomas told me how the council took over the garden to use it as a nursery for the local parks but also to grow food for disadvantaged communities. You can see various traces of its legacy – a concrete nursery, a broken polytunnel. But for various reasons the council abandoned the site 10 years ago. ‘The place became a disgrace,’ says Thomas. ‘It was a liability. There were water leaks, the walls were falling down. The place was targeted by thieves who took copper, glass and bricks.’

Thomas and Imogen are not the first people to try and rescue the garden. Both are keen to stress the project is a collaboration, a combined effort between various groups. Local gardening group the Friends of Bedfords Park do what they can to help the garden, the original soldier being Lois Amos who almost single handedly kept the garden alive for the last eight years. She also applied for a Big Lottery Local Food Grant. ‘It didn’t get beyond the first stage because the Friends were not a legal entity,’ says Thomas, which is where his organisation has now become strongly involved. Through the charitable status of Clear Village, he has reapplied for a lottery grant for £250,000 and recently filed the second stage application.

He sees the role of Clear Village as a ‘catalyst organisation’. Not everyone was happy with his efforts to step in and get involved – it took him a year to convince local stakeholders to become partners. ‘The village politics were messy. It was a delicate situation, but once there was a general consensus we found a way to create steps towards incremental change’ he says.
Most recently Thomas organised a ‘Garden Angels’ outdoor workshop in September to help stage ‘a context which would showcase how the garden could be revitalized collaboratively,’ says Thomas.
Imogen lent her social media network to attract volunteers. ‘We needed some hands on action to move the garden’s story forward and I knew I could count on a few brave creative hearts to dive into this strange request,’ says Imogen. The request, posted on her blog page attracted some 50 volunteers although many could not come on the set dates.

A community comes together

Thomas, with the help of the Clear Village team curated the events of the week. Some locals, including Lois, joined the group. They cleared the decks for planting, did a load of weeding (some weeds were five feet tall) particularly around old Essex apple varieties that had been planted a few months previously. They also co-designed a hexagonal, temporary bamboo structure for winter planting of cabbage, kale, turnips and other winter greens.
Thomas has a background in urban design in France, and has worked mostly with creative or strategic projects to grow awareness on sustainability, even trying himself as a slow food inspired restaurateur in Paris. He was keen to give the ‘Garden Angels’ a fun, learning experience.
‘They wanted to continue to toil, to clear, build, sing and talk even after we were finished for the day. They couldn’t get enough,’ he says. ‘One said: “it’s the best thing that’s happened in the village.” It brings people together, it’s fun and it’s open to the world.’

Besides the obvious advantages of growing food for the local community, Thomas shares a wider vision for the garden. He points out that growing food binds the community together, and can provide good physical and learning exercises for young and old and locals and visitors via a proposed learning centre. Workshops could range from growing vegetables to biomimicry design.
But looking around I can see that these actions, though positive only make a small dent in the overall picture. So much depends on funding. He’ll hear back in early 2012 if the lottery grant been successful or not.

Whatever happens he will still organise thematic co-creative workshops (or ‘labs’ as he calls them, on subjects from traditional building to organic gardening) to make gradual progress on the premises. And if they do get funding the garden will still rely on volunteers. Thomas stresses that Clear Village takes no real fee in the process and is not budgeted into the grant to the exception of hire of a project manager for the collaborative regeneration. However, it seems that volunteers are easy enough to find.
Some of the ‘Garden Angels’ plan to return to the garden ‘to keep it from going back to weed heaven,’ says Imogen.Any tips for anyone who stumbles upon a similar abandoned garden? ‘Don’t give up,’ advises Thomas. ‘Gardens can be our mini Edens that make the “big society” idea – not the political one but the conceptual one – actually happen.’

For more information or if you want to get involved email garden@clear-village.org or go to www.clear-village.org

Laura Sevier is a freelance journalist

Nothing.

A part from that guerrilla ethnography is focused on the one aspect that
former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forgot in his much discussed press statement about the known unknowns…

What he said during a press briefing on 12 February, 2002, was

There are known knowns: there are things we know that we know;
There are known unknowns, that is to say that there are things we now know that we don’t know;
But there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we do not know, we don’t know.

Now logically, when you have two components –“known” and “unknown”- there are going to be four and not only three combination possibilities. The one that Mr Rumsfeld is leaving out –probably wisely- on this occasion, is the unknown known.

However the unknown knowns of our societies are much more complex and intriguing than any known known, known unknown or unknown unknown the defense intelligence was ever able to map out.

The unknown known is essential to the functioning of our societies. They are the hidden treasures of our skillset and can either be congenital or acquired. Either way, they have been internalised to a such extent, that we don’t recognise them as an ability.

So, if they are unknown, how do we know?

Our unknown knowns are based on personal experiences and cultural value systems. The latter simply meaning the stories that are told in our communities about our communities. Whilst we live with those stories, individual experience is inevitably added, we take ownership over them and internalise them. This becomes the core of the unknown known.

From there, the unknown knowns spread into all aspects of life; on a societal level, it forms our moral sensitivity in the sense that we know what is right and wrong; on an economic level, it helps us to set priorities; socio-psychologically, it informs us of your role within a community.

More pragmatically, it is also the knowledge about how an island in the ocean kept self-sufficient with fresh water during WWII; its to know which plant grow better on which parts of the land; its why some people connect with some and not others; in short its an advanced sensibility for the cultural, economic and environmental facets of the community and how they interact and at best cross pollinate.

What Donald Rumsfeld didn’t call the unknown knowns back in 2002 is what we could categorise as the embedded knowledge of a community.

The embedded knowledge is luckily little use for military strategists, but it is present in every community. Its vital to any regeneration, development and vision building. It is this embedded knowledge of unknown knowns that guerrilla ethnography in its nature is designed to allure and ignite, share with the whole community and integrate with global expertise to co-vision the future of the all inhabitants.

Change has become this weird self-sustaining phenomenon, where we all know we principally should fly less, eat vegetarian, invest in renewable energies, grow-our-own for food resilience or grow something else for biodiversity and really push a more equal distribution of resources worldwide.
We also know that we should exercise regularly, eat 5-a-day, listen more than talking, smile to our neighbours,..
We all know that we should be good. We all know that we need to do something worthy. Still little happens!

NO WONDER!
Being good and worthy is hardly what makes the most of humans getting up in the morning, let alone change anything.
Where is the fun? Where is the joy? What’s in it for me?

CLEAR VILLAGE Trustee Alice Holmberg contemplates whether the human brain is still operating at the village scale, which was published in the TL Magazine Istanbul Special for the Human Cities Festival in Istanbul during the Istanbul Design Week.

Is the human brain still functioning at the village scale?

Human evolution does not roll itself out at broadband speed. On the contrary, it seems to have all the time in the world and takes ages to implement even the smallest change and many scientists across the board classify our neural structures still as a “stone-age brain”.
What happens to this brain and the consequences of our behavioural patterns, once it operates in an urban landscape, at 50Gbps and has its performance measured in created economical growth?

Observing how humans form and engage in communities, we propose that the brain still operates on the village scale. Consider this:
Firstly, the size of our social networks: If facebook can serve as an indicator of social activity, the average is about 170 friends and only rarely more than 500;
Secondly, the city-amenities paradox: Described as the human urge for repetition and optimisation which plays out when we locate “our bakery”; the “best route to work”; “nicest restaurant”; prioritise cultural activities or simply sign up for a sports club. This means that instead of being constantly floated with the complexity of choice, we select a number of places, which define our community.

These are only two of several features, which suggest that our brain isn’t a contemporary capitalistic urban beast that processes vast amounts of equal information, but something more selective that develops at a hesitant pace. Maybe the urban planning developments we undertake would result in more liveable spaces if the village scale was everyone’s scale.

Download a digital version of the whole magazine here

Ist geiz geil?
Ist weniger mehr?
Muss der postmoderne Mensch sein Vermögen noch materialisieren? Postmodernismus, Postkolonialismus, Poststrukturalismus, Postsozialismus – aber leben wir auch schon in einer postmateriellen Gesellschaft?

Wer weiß schon, wo seine Bekleidung hergestellt wurde? Wen interessiert das wirklich? Warum wird fast unsere ganze Bekleidung enmal halb um die Erde transportiert, ohne dass man es ihr ansieht? Wie stehen Identität und Bekleidung zueinander? Gibt es adäquate Bekleidung für die Global Players?

Die Kollektion Kosmopilot reflektiert diese Fragen und gibt einen Antwort mit dem globalen Produkt als ausdrucksvolles Hybrid. Fließende Seide, bestickte Wolle, Perlen, Baumwolle und Schmuck aus Bangladesh finden sich in einem europäischen Kontext und dessen Formsprache wieder.
So drücken die Bekleidungsstücke eine globale Identität aus, die sie in sich tragen und bieten sich den globalen Dorf-Bewohnern an.