Transition towns

Transition Towns refer to community-based initiatives that work towards local resilience in response to peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. These Transition Town initiatives are part of the Transition Network, a network of 1000+ community initiatives across the world, which refers to itself as “a movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world”.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.

General introduction to approach

Transition Town initiatives provide spaces for experimentation where citizens can build community resilience and pioneer alternative economic and social solutions. This includes the (re)discovery of (new combinations of) old and new skills and services to increase socio-ecological and socio-economic independence, and experimenting with permaculture design principles for urban farming and local food production, cooperative production of renewable energy, time banks and other complementary currencies Seyfang & Longhurst 2013.

The TRANSIT research project includes a number of case-studies on transition initiatives and the Transition Network as manifestations of social innovation in the sense that they explicitly engage with changing social relations, involving new ways of doing, thinking and organising. In research project TESS the Transition Black Isle (Scotland) was one of the case studies. Transition Town Halle was studied as a case study in the GLAMURS project and supported by the BASE project the cases of Transition Town Initiatives in Bristol (UK) and Peterborough (Canada) were described.

Shapes, sizes and applications

The Transition Network originated around 2006 in the United Kingdom (UK) and has since rapidly spread across the world. Longhurst (2015) indicates that in 2014 the growth of the movement led to the proliferation of 1120 transition initiatives in 43 countries (see also Feola and Nunes 2014) .

There have been many empirical studies on the Transition Network and local initiatives, ranging from urban studies and critical geography to research fields focused on degrowth and sustainability transitions (e.g. Mason, K. and Whitehead, M. 2012, Bailey et al. 2010, Hopkins 2012, Seyfang & Haxeltine 2012).

Transition Town Totnes (TTT) in the UK is the first and longest running Transition Initiative, which was launched in September 2006. It is also the location of the Transition Network who share an office building with the local Totnes initiative. TTT describes itself as “a community-led and run local charity that exists to strengthen the local economy, reduce our environmental impact, and build our resilience for a future with less cheap energy and a changing climate, (...) a collection of local volunteers with a small staff team, who come together to work on projects” . Their work “ranges from increasing low impact affordable housing, sharing skills, creating livelihoods, reducing energy costs and carbon emissions, growing our local food economy and working in partnership with other local projects” .

Transition Wekerle, launched in 2008 (re-named in 2011), was the first official Transition initiative in Hungary, and helped develop the Hungarian Transition Hub. According to its own website, Transition Wekerle “relies heavily on the cooperation of individuals, local NGOs and local institutions” and “focuses on local food, local energy and local economy in order to lighten our eco-footprint, promote active citizenship, new ways of cooperation and solidarity”. Their initiative ranges from “improving the energy efficiency of old homes through insulation, collecting fruit and vegetable donations at the local market for poverty-stricken families and promoting urban gardening by organising seed-swap events” .