Everything
Gardens
and other stories
Growing
Transition
Culture
Luigi Russi
Contents
1. Introduction: Travelling Without Moving
Transition, Totnes and comparison
2. Transition: A Publishing History
Beginnings and instruction manuals
Recipe books and collections of short stories
How this book differs from previous work
An invitation to the phenomenology of Transition
3. ‘Everything Gardens’, Gardens Everywhere
Food and the experience of ‘community’
What does Inner Transition do?
‘Inner work’: implicit and explicit
Alternative currencies and Transition
6. REconomy
Deeper into the REconomy project
And back into Transition
The Local Entrepreneur Forum
REconomy-type projects
Part II: The Unfolding of a Form of Life
7. Exemplars and Experimentation
Exemplars and relating differences
Exemplars and circulation
Exemplars as incubation
Exemplars as skilled performances
Conclusion
8. Insiders/Outsiders
The changing face of Inner Transition
The ‘No to Costa’ campaign
Transition and inclusivity
9. The Politics of Unfolding Experience
Peak oil as shared sensory topic
Transition as a search for orientation
Transition as ‘imaginative universal’ and living tradition
Harmonising drift and novelty inside Transition
The politics of everyday experience in Transition
Conclusion
10. Conclusion
A glimpse of Transition practices
The moving of Transition
Growing Transition culture
Notes
ebook edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by University of Plymouth Press, Endsleigh Place, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.
eISBN 978-1-84102-387-8
© University of Plymouth Press 2015
© Luigi Russi 2015
The rights of this work have been asserted by Luigi Russi and R. C. Smith in accordance with the Crown Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84102-380-9.
Publisher: Paul Honeywill
Editor: Harriet McClure
All rights reserved. No part of Everything Gardens and other Stories may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of UPP. Any person who carries out any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Praise for Everything Gardens and other stories
Russi almost achieves the impossible in providing a rich and polyvalent description of an idea on the wing. Academics might recognise a kind of phenomenology in his approach, which is more akin to smelling and tasting, than weighing and measuring. Everything Gardens explores from within, Transition as a process of incubation or the deliberative unfolding of an alternative to consumer capitalism – a pattern language for a more place-generative, ecologically recursive form of local economy. Poetic and optimistic, Russi’s book adds ‘participant permaculture’ to the social science playbook. This is a new methodology that I am sure will become part of the repertoire.
Stephen Quilley, Associate Professor of Environmental and Social Innovation, University of Waterloo, Canada
What is Transition? That is the question that is at the core of this book. How do we go about Transition? How is Transition defined? At what point is Transition perceived as complete? The difficulty of these