Transition towns

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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

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

Narrative of change

Transformative potential

Summary of relevant approaches

References