News
The ‘world’s first library farm’
Some great things just go together, even if sometimes it takes a while before someone has the idea of trying the combination. That’s what Meg Backus, at the time Northern Onondaga Public Library’s (NOPL) adult programming director and public relations coordinator, proved. Backus saw empty land across the street from the library and pitched the idea of setting up a garden on the library’s land. Soon enough, 40 members were bringing “their own water, seeds, seedlings, and other growing provisions to investigate whether that land could produce.”
Co-cities and the enabling state
This great piece by Sheila Foster, From Vacancy to Decommodification: Co-Cities and the Enabling State, was part of a symposium on decommodifying urban property, held by the LPE Project (Law and Political Economy). In it, Foster shows how the commodification of property can be replaced by a community-oriented vision, and how homes and shared resources can be managed in land trusts, instead of as private property dealt on the speculative market.
A special report on the circular economy
We’ve spoken about the concept of the circular economy a few times already, but it’s definitely worth another look when a mainstay of economic discourse such as the Financial Times comes out with not only one piece but a whole report on the topic.
Southern Appalachian co-ops building new communities
The way media coverage is shared around networks often means that we end up talking a lot about larger cities, but those are not the only places where inspiring change is happening. In this excellent piece at Shareable, we discover some fantastic work being done by co-ops in the small town of Morganton, in the foothills of western North Carolina.
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