Transition Town Initiatives. Possible Pathways Towards Urban Sustainability?

Topic of this contribution is Transition Towns movement as an example of a possible top-down and bottom-up integration in creating sustainable development at the urban level.

Transition Towns initiatives are experiments in the re-location of resources on a micro scale. The goal of Transition Towns is to build resilient communities putting in place local practices aimed at environmental, food and energy sustainability, i.e. growing vegetables in urban context, self-production of energy and the use of complementary local currency. At the same time, the movement promotes a moral and cultural renewal of society, unfettered by promises of continued economic growth. Following the theories of Beck and Giddens, Transition Town movement sets up as a new sub-political actor (it was born between 2005 and 2007 in the UK and now has more than thousands of initiatives around the world), a risk society’s offshot that build its own identity and goals from two global alarms: climate change and peak oil. In this sense, the Transition Towns can be taken as a possible ongoing model of cultural sustainability, both conceptually and in its practices, currently feasible in hundreds of specific local contexts. Our questions are: may such grassroots initiatives represent significant catalysts in the spread of sustainable lifestyles in micro contexts (such as urban neighborhoods)? And, at the same time, the circle of relations triggered by Transition initiatives can become the object of a progressive instrumental attention from the political world, supporting it in building a sustainable city? Two case studies from Italy (Bologna Transition experience) and Uk (York in Transition experience) will be presented.