That fantastic adventure
By Duncan Crowley, Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (CE3C) at Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) and DINÂMIA’CET-IUL, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, Lisbon. The article was written for the UrbanA Community of Practice and is accompanied by a selection of images.
Waking up with the singing birdies, drinking water directly from the town’s rivers, eating abundant fruit and nuts from urban street trees, passing the local library you helped build as a child and remembering all those wonderful moments since, with Rojava’s tekmîl women, the hip hop crew from São Paulo’s Eco neighbourhood favela, Marvila’s goat farmers in Lisbon, that wild and wonderful punk rocker who became her city’s first woman mayor.
How odd it hasn’t always been this way though! Back in the time when ice caps were melting, forests burning down, millions of refugees fleeing unjust bloody wars, governments declaring climate emergency. Back when nobody knew their neighbours, when people were too afraid to venture out into their own streets for fear of attack, when soaring rents drove people from the homes their families had lived in for centuries. Back when eviction threats drove the desperate few to commit the ultimate act. When and where had it all go so wrong?
But, how great that strange and fantastic adventure started to unfold, that oddly named “UrbanA Community of Practice”, when an academic process started giving back more than it took, when citizens explored what it meant to create sustainable and just communities and cities. That process that allowed for everyone and anyone to re-connect with people and place and to let a wildly optimistic collective dream unfold, to learn how to respond together to global climate breakdown, to build a regenerative world, from the bottom up, from the local to the global: communities, streets, neighbourhoods, regions, cities, Bioregions. As Peter Pan said “Everything’s possible if you wish hard enough”, funny how that “UrbanA Community of Practice” was what it took to spark the magic, to enable people to participate in the most fantastic of adventures.
