Creative and edible information (Photo: Transition Sagene)

The Power of Local Transition

Published in

Hope grows in the Garden

7 min readNov 20, 2017

For more than five years enthusiastic individuals have shown how simple approaches using self-organizing methods can generate sustainable transition processes for individual and local everyday life. In the “Handbook for a Sustainable Life”, “Transition Sagene” (”Omstilling Sagene)” shares its knowledge and hands-on experiences from activities like earthworm composting, repair-cafés, exchange markets, supporter gardens, plants-in-the-wild tours, seed libraries and much more.

Description of the initiative — the background

Transition Sagene was started on November 4, 2010 and is part of the worldwide network Transition Town, in Norway, Sustainable Life (Bærekraftige liv). This is a neighborhood movement that, through hands-on actions, wants to make local communities less dependent on fossil fuel and to counteract paralysis in responding to global crises that affect us locally. An important ingredient is creating solidarity between people and insuring good places to live.

We meet Aina Telhaug (AT) who tells us that Transition Sagene isn’t a membership organization in the traditional sense. From the start it introduced low threshold initiatives that were about empowering green transitions both individually and locally. Over the last five years Transition Sagene has initiated more than 100 activities and arrangements, among them, courses and film screenings. The themes that are worked with are dependent on who, at various points in time, is active. Several of these activities have received support from the Sagene District’s Green Funding. Today there are about 30 active networking and coordinating groups that meet once a month. There is a board but no leaders; various administrative tasks make their rounds. For example, the task of answering emails — the contact list grows steadily. In addition to administration, the coordinating group is responsible for the separate work groups. The following groups are currently active:

1. Food and Cultivation

2. The Seed Library

3. The Swap Market

4. The Repair Café

Food and Cultivation: Transition Sagene disposes over a garden plot in the Geitmyra School Garden. Plants are cultivated and harvested here all year round, and several of Transition Sagene’s course activities are connected to this project — for example, earthworm composting, lactic acid fermentation and the recycling of coffee grounds. A powerful visual experiment is Garden Carts for Garden Supporters (Tilhengerhagen for hagetilhengere). The Sagene District is the most concentrated residential area in Norway, and like other neighborhoods in large cities there is limited space available for locals to cultivate. The above mentioned garden carts actually originated as a protest, the folks from Transition Sagene tell us. One has to wait nearly 10 years to get a garden plot in Oslo, while cars can park more or less where they want and often for free. An old portable cart that can be hitched to a car is filled with well composted earth, fitted with it’s own irrigation system and planted with seeds and plants from a fixed garden plot. Then this cart, decorated with flowers and slogans, is moved around the district and people are encouraged to help themselves to lettuce, strawberries and the other beneficial plants that the garden cart is filled with. Usually the carts are rolled out during Sagene District Days in the beginning of May, where visitors can participate in planting. At the same time the carts function as good visual information displays, contributing to public awareness about how urban spaces are utilized.

The Sagene Community Center provides Transition Sagene with gratis space for meetings and other arrangements. In return for this, Transition Sagene oversees a work weekend where they help with planting for a new season in the district’s parks, among other places, Bjølsen Park, Gråbeinsletta and the area in front of the Sagene Community Center. In this way a barter economy is facilitated.

The Seed Library: is one of the largest projects that Transition Sagene has initiated. Working with the Torshov branch of Oslo’s Deichman Library, they opened Norway’s first seed library in 2016. Here, one is able to borrow seeds on the promise of returning new seeds to the library after the plants are harvested. In addition to borrowing seeds, Transition Sagene arranges courses. Since its inauguration, more than 300 people have borrowed seeds to cultivate at home. Nabolagshager/Neighborhood Gardens, which is one of the project’s supporters, stress that this initiative is important because it augments people’s knowledge of both sowing and harvesting seeds. Significant knowledge is imparted, both about cultivation and utilizing local resources. The project has had a contagious effect and, among other things, received a visit from the library in Trondheim, who wanted to examine the seed catalogue to learn more about how they might initiate a similar project. In March 2017 the head of the Trondheim Library system cut the ribbon on a new seed library where people ”didn’t have to bring back seeds for a year.”

The Swap Meet: arranged in cooperation with Climate Festival § 112 — ”was mobilized in connection to one of the world’s most beautiful constitutional paragraphs.” In 1992 a legal resolution was ratified declaring protection of the environment as a human right. As part of this, a Swap Meet was arranged in Kay Hall at the Sagene Community Center. It was crawling with people from every walk of life. Transition Sagene encouraged people to clean out their closets and drawers and come to barter or sell their goods. In addition to the Swap Meet, the event became an arena for creating contact with the community. Even though you are ”just passing through” the district, AT tells us, it’s important to have informal gathering places where people can meet through hands-on and/or handicraft activities. These activities attract many immigrants.

Many people find their way to the annual Swap Meet (Photo: Transition Sagene)

The Repair Café: is just such a handicraft activity — in addition to creating a social gathering place, it focuses on our consumer patterns and establishing a more sustainable lifestyle. The purpose of starting up the Repair Café was to disseminate practical knowledge and augment the importance of repairing rather than throwing things out. In addition to volunteers from the Transition Sagene network, thanks to support from Green Funding, professional craftsmen were also engaged. A number of such cafés have been arranged with focus on, for example, repairing clothes or redesigning clothes and furniture. Their popularity led Transition Sagene to seek new Green Funding in 2017 and kindled a cooperation with Restarters Oslo and Torshovdalen’s Activity Center. Restarters Oslo is a grassroots movement that ”gives new life to old electronics.” The concept is inspired by The Restart Project that is based in London. The idea of hands-on local electronics repair work has slowly spread to other countries. On June 17, 2017 Transition Sagene invited folks to the summer’s coziest day for fixing things. Who knows — maybe this could inspire the Norwegian government to do what was done by the Swedish government; they reduced the tax on all repair services — an intensive effort to change consumer habits.

These arrangements have been immensely popular, thanks to the arrangements themselves as well as articles they inspired in local newspaper Nordre Aker Budstikke, where the Sagene District has gotten its own ongoing column. This has led to many inquiries asking: ”When is it going to happen again?” Our response is: “Would you like to take part in making it happen again?” This is our way of mobilizing people. If other people ask about other activities we respond in the same way, AT tells us. “Would you like to take the responsibility to get something going?” This is how the group keeps growing, in a steady self-organizing way.

Experiences that others can learn from

We have learned that there is a synergy between the initiatives we have presented, producing a ripple effect. The people who make these arrangements happen are vital. The most important thing is to let people know that you don’t need a whole bunch of expertise to live a more sustainable life and have a good time while doing it. If you don’t know something, maybe your neighbor does. We’ve established a platform where people can physically get together, says AT. It’s also been very important for us to have fantastic cooperating partners like, for example, the Sagene community center and the library.

Future visions — from next year through 2030

As far as visions through to the year 2030, AT imagines Transition Sagene becoming more visible in the district. Everyone knows about us; there is movement in the distribution of tasks and many more people are involved. We continue to experience that it’s fine to have a nomadic existence, that is to say, that we work from and use a variety of meeting locales in the district — like the library, the community center or the activity center in Torshov Park. At the bus stop for the 37/20/54 busses we’ve put up an interesting and colorful information display for people waiting for their bus to read. The self-organizing structure works, practical examples blossom, more and more people can see the pleasure of shaping their own surroundings. This knowledge spreads and people experience that it’s fun to participate; the learning is measurable. Our work has shown it can endure over time. As an architect, AT conjures up the metaphor of a weight bearing beam in an old house that keeps the structure standing over time — this is how she thinks of Transition Sagene, as one of many important weight-bearing beams in our local community. The future is uncertain, she says, but it is important to bring forth the things that one can do something about.