Town & Country Planning, December 2007
I was teaching early last year at Schumacher College, the wonderful haven of the alternative in south Devon, when I got a visit from an enthusiastic and competent-sounding young man called Rob Hopkins.
He had already organised a massive report in Kinsale, in southern Ireland, about how to make the region carbon-neutral, and was hoping to put some of those ideas into effect in Mainland Britain.
He wanted to see me to talk through some of the details of launching a new currency, and I say what I always say on these occasions – keep it simple, but be ambitious, and a great deal of less helpful anecdotage. I was impressed with him but, the world being what it is, I didn’t really expect to hear from him again.
In fact, the currency is now up and running as part of an innovative project which launched only a year ago, called Transition Town Totnes, bringing together a range of like-minded people and linked organisations in joint projects to inoculate Totnes against a future of global warming and banking uncertainty.
There are now groups covering ‘re-skilling’, revitalising the local food economy, bringing local landowners on board, organising renewable energy, and the Totnes Pound launched in May and now has more than 60 local businesses involved – none of them Tesco or the local Morrisons or their equivalents.
But the most extraordinary evidence of success is Rob’s ability to inspire. Totnes Town Council and chamber of commerce are both backing the project. But there are also now more than 30 other Transition Towns around the world, with a hundred or so more in the pipeline, all linked together and learning from each other.
I know one UK town (which I’ll leave nameless) where local town council campaigners fought an election on a platform of becoming a Transition Town, and then had to scrabble around finding out what on earth it was when they won.
What gives the whole idea its energy is this element of shared local discussion, building a shared agenda, and the ability to start from something small and achievable. This is also the idea behind some of the successful high street revitalisation in North America, under the auspices of a highly successful campaign group called Main Street USA.
There is a very long way to go, of course, even in an alternative place like Totnes. Most people who live there probably haven’t yet run across the Transition Towns idea, though they may have heard about Totnes Pounds in the local press.
But something is in the air. There is an air of plush success about the high street, every shop beautifully painted and not an empty property (or a Starbucks) to be seen. But if we face a combined energy and banking crisis, as we may, then the basic thought and infrastructure than can keep Totnes alive is now almost in place.
The business of imagining new kinds of money, and then using them to keep local spending power circulating locally, has gone a little quieter recently. I used to write a column about it in this very magazine, but rather ran out of things to say.
But once more, something is in the air. The regional currencies in Germany are beginning to make a serious impact. The highly successful Berkshares project in western Massachussets, on which the Totnes Pound is based, has three local banks and nearly 300 businesses involved.
There is even an ambitious new smartcard-based currency called qoin about to launch in Amsterdam.
Unusually, these projects are emerging during a period of relative economic success. If the downturn comes, we can expect them to become very important indeed, and the first serious British Transition City will not be very far away.
But, when and if they do, they will be building on a new pattern of change, which is being used by a range of new actors in localism, including my own organisation, the New Economics Foundation and Bioregional, the people behind the BedZed development, building local economic change on a bedrock of local visioning and an active group of locals making things happen.
If it works, then it will do so because they have taken on a little of Ebenezer Howard’s attitude to government: “If you wait for them, you will be as old as Methusalah”.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Authenticity. www.david-boyle.co.uk. More about Transition Towns at www.transitiontowns.org/totnes