permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

On Tuesday, October 28, 2003, at 12:17 AM, georg parlow wrote:

>  i bet my ass that "the neighbourhood
> residents" are far from 100% of all residents in the affected area. 
> propably
> less than 10%. and even within those few % of activists, there will be 
> a few
> ringleaders (mostly male,

When City Repair does its most visible work, a project called 
Intersection repair, the 4 homeowners or renters on each corner of the 
intersection need to be committed to work on the project (i.e. 100% of 
the most directly affected residents). All neighbors on the adjoining 
blocks are consulted, and there is a process for input from any 
neighbors within a certain radius. On the weekend that the project is 
done, over 50 people--often several times as many--show up to work on 
the intersection, and the vast majority live within a few houses of the 
intersection.

The staff of City Repair--the folks who do the organizing--are 6 women 
and 3 men. The founder is male, but when I've worked with them, the 
women are just as vocal and active as Mark Lakeman is, and he's 
outstanding at distributing power.

These people are a good model, I think.
http:// www.cityrepair.org

Toby
http://www.patternliteracy.com