In cities across the world grassroots initiatives organize alternative forms of provisioning, e.g. food sharing networks, energy cooperatives and repair cafés. Some of these are recognized by local governments as engines in sustainability transitions. In this talk, I will discuss different ways that local governments interact with, and use, such grassroots initiatives, drawing from case studies in Berlin and Gothenburg. An argument will be made for that we need to reconsider what municipal infrastructure should entail, i.e. not only the traditional infrastructure for transport and waste but also new infrastructure for repairing and sharing.
About the speaker
Karin Bradley is Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and justice aspects of transitions. She has been the co-director of the eight-year research programme Mistra Sustainable Consumption – from niche to mainstream that engages researchers from different disciplines as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She has had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.
Her publications include “Community repair in the circular economy: Fixing more than stuff” (2022, with Ola Persson), “In search of sufficiency politics: The case of Sweden” (2021, with Åsa Callmer) and “Planning for sharing: Providing Infrastructure for citizens to be makers and sharers” (2017, with Anna Hult).
About the series
Shareable is partnering with Tufts University on this special series hosted by Professor Julian Agyeman (Co-chair of Shareable’s Board) and Cities@Tufts. Initially designed for Tufts students, faculty, and alumni, the colloquium has been opened up to the public with the support of Shareable and Barr Foundation.
Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice.
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Transcription
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0:00:07.9 Karin Bradley: What we today see, the activities in terms of these repair spaces, reuse, food sharing, different ways of minimizing material consumption and increasing sort of circularity, that is something that municipalities are starting to pick up and perhaps in the future seeing as part of their role.
0:00:33.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.
0:01:08.1 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Professor Karin Bradley, Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
0:01:51.4 Julian Agyeman: Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and the justice aspects of transitions. She’s been the co-director of the eight-year research program, MISTRA Sustainable Consumption from niche to mainstream, that engages researchers from different disciplines, as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She’s had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.
0:02:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Publications that she’s responsible for include Community Repair in the Circular Economy, Fixing More than Stuff, In Search of Sufficiency Politics, The Case of Sweden, and Planning for Sharing, Providing Infrastructure for Citizens to be Makers and Sharers. Karin’s talk today is how local government can use Grassroots Initiatives for sustainability transitions. Karin, a Zoom-tastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.
0:03:00.0 Karin Bradley: Thank you so much for that introduction, and I’m very happy to be here. I’m working at KTH in the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and the research that I’m going to talk about today is very much in the context of Sweden, and more specifically drawing on cases in Gothenburg, but also in Berlin. And I understand that you are all from very different contexts than many are in the US, so the conditions might differ slightly, but hopefully you can relate to some of this, and that’s also something we can discuss at the end.
0:03:35.5 Karin Bradley: So this is the title, and the work is part of a larger project called Grassroots Initiatives for Energy Transition that I’m working on together with colleagues from University of Uppsala and Linnaeus University and another colleague at KTH and one at Gothenburg, and we’re doing several sort of papers and done years of field work, but I will present one little piece of this, and it’s, as I said, it’s ongoing work, so I’m very open to comments and questions and suggestions for sort of the analysis. And our focus here is on Grassroots Initiatives in the areas of energy transport, food repair, and reuse. And I should say that it’s Grassroots Initiatives that somehow are active in doing sort of practices in terms of then themselves expanding infrastructure for cycling, for instance, through play streets, or in terms of food sharing, etcetera.
0:04:38.8 Karin Bradley: So it’s not sort of campaign organizations necessarily, more like traditional environmental organizations. And a little bit of background to what we’re doing is the need for, when we talk about sustainability transitions and circular economy, etcetera there is more and more awareness that even if we do circle and reuse and recycle material, there’s still so long way to go. Currently, there’s a quite recent study on the circularity in the context of Sweden, that pointed out that only 3.4% of the economy is actually what you could call circular.
0:05:22.4 Karin Bradley: So it’s really still based very much on virgin material. And a similar sort of study on the EU level said around 9%. So with that said, there is also a need to reduce sort of levels of material consumption. Therefore, this kind of interest also in sharing and reusing. And I think this is taken from the story of Tufts, this sort of building on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where really the emphasis should be on using what you have or borrowing rather than buying new when we talk about sustainable consumption.
0:06:02.0 Karin Bradley: And I think this kind of perspective has really come to influence and be quite a core part of transport policy, at least in the context of Scandinavia, but also more and more in the EU with this, some of you might be familiar with this, but this avoid, shift, improve kind of logic and hierarchy, where the first step is really try to avoid the need for traveling and then shifting to more sustainable forms of transport.
0:06:29.8 Karin Bradley: And then if not possible, then improve. So electrification, for instance. So I think that is really has come into the sort of, yeah, planning procedures and the way we think in terms of urban planning. Whereas if you relate that to material consumption, it’s much more politically sensitive, and it’s…
0:06:52.7 Karin Bradley: Yeah, considered as more somehow political to plan for or try to encourage less material use of resources. Whereas we can see many Grassroots engaged in different ways of sharing, swapping and making use of the existing. So that’s the background of, so what can be learned from Grassroots Initiatives and how can also local governments work with the learn from or use the work of Grassroots Initiatives. So that’s the kind of the main question, but also more of a maybe analytical question, how may this be conceptualized? And I’ll come to a one way that we are currently thinking about this in terms of different kind of modes.
0:07:39.2 Karin Bradley: You can say modes of governing, in a sense, Grassroots Initiatives. And here the focus then is, as I said, on the Grassroots Initiatives working on practices. And here the focus is on cycling, food, repair and reuse. We don’t have in this work, we left out the energy because there are slightly different conditions there. Yes. And it’s based on interviews with the Grassroots Initiatives in these two cities and also with interviews with public officials and also different intermediary organizations.
0:08:14.0 Karin Bradley: Yes. And I should also say that we are of course not the first ones in history that have been thinking about different ways that local governments relate to Grassroots Initiatives or civil society organizations. Just pointing on at some work that we are building on and relating to is the work of Yuri Konkrite-Paligan and colleagues that have explored different ways of municipal governance of sharing economy organizations. But they relate not only our focuses on Grassroots Initiatives and they have a wider frame in terms of sharing economy, also including commercial sharing economy actors.
0:08:56.2 Karin Bradley: Another one that we have also built or been inspired by is La Forge et al. And they’ve looked at Grassroots Initiatives in the field of food and how local authorities in different ways relate in terms of they use the concept co-opting, collaborating, containing and contesting in turn and how this may affect the scaling of Grassroots Initiatives. Yes. And then to what we see as modes, what we have seen from our material is basically these six different modes. And I should say this is really from the lenses of the local governments.
0:09:41.5 Karin Bradley: So this is not so much the lens from the Grassroots Initiatives, but rather how the local governments see what they can do or not do in terms of working with or building on the work of Grassroots Initiatives. And these six modes, I’ll go into each one of them and give a few examples. We see that there is also a from overlooking or mainly ignoring the Grassroots Initiatives to the what you can call it like municipal replication, basically where the municipality steps in and takes over the kind of activities of that Grassroots Initiatives have been organizing.
0:10:21.2 Karin Bradley: There is also a sort of this can be analyzed in terms of autonomy because there’s larger kind of autonomy where the Grassroots are being overlooked, but at the same time, they don’t have as much maybe potential for scaling. Okay, so what do we mean then by these different modes? So overlooking could be examples of the food sharing, for instance, primarily I would say the food sharing organizations that we have looked at or we have studied in Gothenburg could be examples of the municipality kind of ignoring and what they’re doing, letting them be basically letting have their activities and not going there and controlling and saying that this is not complying with the this and this whatever food safety laws, etcetera.
0:11:14.7 Karin Bradley: But let them basically do whatever they do, whereas in the food sharing sort of seen in Berlin, it’s been a little bit different, where it was maybe a bit more overlooked in its early phase, but there has been quite a lot of sort of crackdowns on food sharing. And also, meaning that that those engaged in food sharing are actually then responsible for cases of food poisoning, etcetera, which has meant that it’s become more difficult and less attractive to be engaged, particularly to host these fridges, etcetera.
0:11:58.8 Karin Bradley: And I suppose some of you or many of you might be or familiar with this, but the food sharing organizations will look that basically have they gather food leftover food or food from grocery stores, from restaurants, from hotels, etcetera. And sometimes they have this, they store the food in fridges or freezers that are somehow different collection points in the city, and then people can come and basically receive the leftover food for free.
0:12:29.5 Karin Bradley: And this is really, I would say it gathers people with very different sort of socioeconomic backgrounds and very different kind of rationales also where some are very into environmental issues or to gift economy, ideological reasons, whereas others are really there for getting a meal. Yes, and the second mode then a governance sort of mode is what we call sanctioning, and this can be in the case, there’s one quite well-known, a community garden in Berlin, Prinzessinnengarten, that was firstly initiated very bottom up, more or less as a guerilla garden. And where the first phase would maybe then be overlooking, but later on they were provided with another space. And also now they exist in two different locations, but they have been now sanctioned. So basically giving permits that, okay, you can continue with your operations. And this is a quote illustrating that. So that could be then a second mode. A third that we looked into and think we have identified is how local governments are adjusting their bureaucracies in relation to Grassroots Initiatives.
0:13:53.1 Karin Bradley: And this can be, for instance, in Berlin, the cases of play streets, where these were firstly initiated from local residents that saw a need for having more car free spaces where kids and others could use the streets for playing and cycling and just hanging out. So it started as basically a kind of takeover of streets in several different places and temporary sort of events. And then the local sort of government saw that, okay, this really, yeah, this fills a need and decided to somehow support this, but in the sense of making it easy for neighborhoods to file for. So basically organizing a sort of a bureaucracy, a template of how this is how make, transform a car street to a play street and informing about this possibility, etcetera.
0:14:47.9 Karin Bradley: And in the map, you can see how basically from zero now 100 play streets in Berlin. And I think this is not unique for Berlin. You can see that in many other places in the world as well. But what we mean is specifically then the way of doing administration and bureaucracy simpler for these kinds of initiatives. The fourth mode then is what we call, we haven’t really decided actually we’re gonna call it coordinating or making visible or something like that. But it’s basically when local governments support, you can say Grassroots Initiatives in the sense of making them visible for larger population, more or less. And this can be illustrated through the example of Smarta Kartan, which translates to the Smart Map.
0:15:49.6 Karin Bradley: And this was a collaboration between a collaborative economy organization, a sort of, you can say Grassroots Initiative in the city of Gothenburg that together decided, or this NGO contacted the city of Gothenburg and asked if they could do this together somehow. So now they have basically mapped different places in the city where you can share, borrow, swap, etcetera. Rather than buying new. And I know that this also very much relates to the work of shareable and map jamming work and really highlighting what’s out there since an identified problem for many sort of Grassroots sharing organizations is that there is a tendency of these sort of activities and practices being primarily maybe visible and known for the people engaged somehow that in sort of certain circles or so, but how do you make them visible for people that are newcomers to the city that are not into environmental stuff or sharing or living on in post-capitalist ways or so.
0:17:01.9 Karin Bradley: So in that sense, this is making them more accessible. And the interesting thing I think also with the Smart Map is that it was built on kind of an open source platform. So it has been multiplied now and used by several other cities around in Sweden. And then it’s been a collaboration so that the city has its kind of logo and this is an official kind of local government information as well. So somehow also, yeah, using this in their work to promote more, whatever, sustainable living, etcetera. And this is something we also saw in Berlin that the local government there has done a both an electronic, but also physical maps highlighting where and then showing where these kind of Grassroots Initiatives have their operations and opening hours or whatever.
0:17:53.3 Karin Bradley: Okay. And then the fifth mode is what we call partnering. And this is then a form where the Grassroots kind of initiative is being used by the local government in the sense that it could be in terms of public procurement, for instance. We see cases where local governments, for instance, buy services, for instance, food to their events from community gardens, etcetera. And this is a case from Berlin where the local, this AEFC is a local cycling organization where they started to gather cargo bikes and electric cargo bikes that could be used by several people.
0:18:37.4 Karin Bradley: And then the local government picked up on this. So they’ve organized these kind of fleets, open fleets of cargo bikes that people can use. So in that way, it’s a form of, yeah, partnership between this cycling organization and the local government. Yes. And then the sixth mode we call municipal replication. And this is instances then where local governments have somehow observed or seen activities that grassroots organizations are doing that they see that there is a need for, or that they think that they could do as well. It’s not necessarily taking over sort of grassroots activities, but it could be basically copying. So in one of the cases we’ve looked at is the so-called Fixoteken, which are like DIY repair spaces.
0:19:37.3 Karin Bradley: So basically the existence of like repair cafes, for instance, or these repair, open repair workshops, that are often run by grassroots groups in different areas, some of them might be more stable, others can be like pop up, etcetera. So basically, the local government and the city had observed this kind of trend, you can say, and basically decided we should do that. We should set up a number of DIY repair spaces where you also have the Fixoteken is not only repair, but there are also spaces where you can swap things. So they have a swap corner where you can leave things you don’t need and you can take things. And they also organize workshops and have lots of different types of sort of activities. But it was, it started like a pilot project where they set up in five different locations around in Gothenburg where the municipality was then the owner, the operator, and they had paid staff, municipal staff on these sites. And with fixed opening hours, etcetera. And it turned out to be very successful, you can say, very much used in these different areas. But the idea was that somehow, should the municipality continue to run these operations or should they do it together with some other entity, etcetera.
0:21:03.2 Karin Bradley: What happened was that one, after the pilot project, one was turned into being run by sort of a nonprofit, whereas the others were taken over by the municipal, one of the largest municipal housing companies in Gothenburg. So now they’re currently, that’s where the development is taking place. So that’s in a sense also the local government and they are opened to anyone, not only the residents in the houses, that the municipal housing company owns, but open to everyone. So in the container, that’s one of the sort of outdoor spaces of the Fixoteken an area called Hammarkullen. And they’ve also become very much appreciated in terms of social spaces and places that can be used nighttime for other types of activities like studying circles, etcetera. And a similar thing we could also see in Berlin was the, you can say reuse mall, called NochMall. So Noch means like enough in German. So it’s playing with words that is run by the municipal waste company. So it’s really a, it’s a huge place where they have basically it’s like secondhand stores, there are lots of reuse stuff, but they also have repair workshops, maker activities, lots of different workshops related to reuse, remake, etcetera. That’s also now first run as a kind of pilot project, but the idea is that it should be sustained more or less by itself, but again run by the municipality.
0:22:55.7 Karin Bradley: Yes, and the quote you have there is basically from, it’s from the city of Gothenburg, how they are illustrating how they’re thinking about what could be their role. Maybe it’s operating these spaces, maybe it’s more like paying the rent and having them and working together with others that would come and do activities, but somehow they are experimenting with the mandate and what can be the future role of the municipality. Yes, another example of this municipal replication that is quite striking is this, it’s called Fritidsbanken, it’s basically like a sports library where you can come and use sports equipment for a number of weeks. And this is run, it was set up, it was started in a small place in the countryside actually in Sweden a few years ago, or no not a few, but 2013 actually. But now it’s multiplied to 100 of these sports libraries and it started out as a Grassroots Initiative and in collaboration with a sort of local church, and now 90% of them are run by municipalities. So I think that’s also a clear example of the municipality kind of observing this and stepping in and taking over.
0:24:19.5 Karin Bradley: Yes. Okay, so coming to conclusions and sort of analysis of this, we can see that in our cases, the cities in city administrations in Gothenburg and Berlin, overall, I would say, see grassroots initiatives as assets for spearheading sustainable practices and see that they can somehow use or work with them. But we can also see that there is a kind of a balance, as I said initially, between supporting or what you might call it, grassroots initiatives in scaling and also restricting their autonomy. And this is how, in a way, how you can think about this in terms of these six different modes that I mentioned, where you have in this grassroots initiatives operating here, you often don’t reach beyond the critical niche.
0:25:20.9 Karin Bradley: It’s people really engaged in say community gardening or so on that would find the place and be active. Whereas here we have the coordinating or making visible is about making it more accessible to more people, etcetera. To the staff where you, the municipality steps in, multiplies, sets up similar kind of operations in different districts, etcetera. And make it very accessible. But at the same time, you maybe you lose some of the, I can say the engagement and maybe lose some of the criticality and the yeah, maybe the little bit of the soul of the Grassroots Initiative. So in that sense, there is a kind of attention in terms of autonomy here where you can perhaps think that maybe it’s somewhere in terms of coordinating or partnering where you really have a good possibility for grassroots to be able to do their operations being in one way supported but not entirely reliant on, the municipality because being very reliant on the municipality means also a certain sort of, perhaps vulnerability.
0:26:35.8 Karin Bradley: Yes. And, but what we have seen so far is that if these Grassroots Initiative and their practices are to read a broader population, some degree of municipal involvement is probably needed. And I think this also is a question too that we could perhaps come back to, because I know there is the context in different sort of cities, in the world, can be very different. Where to what extent you can trust the local government or not, and to what extent you also expect their support. Where I think particularly in the context of Sweden, Scandinavia, there is, quite long tradition of some form of government support to different NGOs and grassroots initiatives. Whereas we could see in the context of Berlin, maybe a stronger tradition of being, wanting to be autonomous and not even if they would be given funding, some wouldn’t take it.
0:27:37.8 Karin Bradley: Yes. And some final reflections on this also relating it to history, that that what is currently seen as the responsibility of the municipality hasn’t been that forever. So I think it’s interesting to point out that, say the infrastructure for cycling, say bike paths, etcetera, that that was something that grassroots initiatives of different forms pushed for and enacted them themselves some decades ago. And also what we now see as municipalities and cities all over the world are providing some form of bike sharing system, for instance, often in collaboration with commercial companies. But that was also something being pushed from grassroot initiatives early on. And this is an example already in the ’60s from Amsterdam, where it was supposedly first bike sharing system that was run by grassroots groups where you had, there were some white painted bikes, but this now has become the mandate and the role of the municipality.
0:28:47.3 Karin Bradley: And, so how can this then inform or what can be learned from this in terms of policy for local governments, local authorities today? I think our argument here is that what we today see the activities in terms of this repair space, this reuse food sharing different forms of ways of minimizing material consumption and increasing circularity, that that is something that municipalities are starting to pick up and perhaps in the future seeing as part of their role. And this in a similar way, like if you think about libraries, I know also this is different in different contexts, but is in the context of Scandinavia, it’s the municipality providing libraries. That’s a basic service for people. And this is something they also must do. And that wasn’t the case a number of decades ago.
0:29:50.9 Karin Bradley: And now you could think of a similar way, like two libraries or spaces where you can fix things if that’s going to be more and more important in the future. Maybe that’s also an infrastructure that’s somehow the municipality needs to, yeah, provide the citizens with, and this, it comes from the, one of the reports of this Fixoteken spaces where they point out that these are current locations, but also in some of their, the interview material, they’re pointing to, yeah, maybe it should be in, not every but in districts all over basically, the city. And something we’ve seen now is that many municipalities all over in Sweden are experimenting with this repair spaces or reuse centers, reuse malls, etcetera. That was basically what I had planned to say and I’m very eager to hear your comments and thoughts.
0:30:54.3 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Karin. What a fascinating talk. I love the typology really clear and I think makes a lot of sense. We got a lot of questions. I could ask you questions, but I’m gonna save mine till the end. But first one, grassroots initiatives are very important to quickly test new social ideas. Have you also looked at how cities can inspire more grassroots initiatives to happen? I’ve seen great examples in Montreal in the past, and as somebody who spent a year on sabbatical in Montreal. Yeah, Montreal is probably the premier example in North America. But Karin, what do you think?
0:31:31.9 Karin Bradley: Yeah, that’s a good point. And probably there is a lot of that going on as well. But we haven’t really, in our sort of material, we haven’t seen the local governments saying that themselves, that we are somehow providing whatever seed funding or doing events for new ones, because that’s what I got from the comment. But rather that they are arranging lots of matchmaking events and inviting the ones that do exist. But yeah, I think that’s a relevant comment that you could maybe find also actively looking and encouraging nuances to develop. Yeah.
0:32:16.4 Julian Agyeman: I see Samian… Have you got anything to add there? Samian…
0:32:21.4 Samian: Yeah… Do you hear me well?
0:32:22.2 Julian Agyeman: We got you. Yeah.
0:32:23.0 Samian: Yeah. Perfect. I was in Montreal for a study trip about grassroots initiatives and there you could see a lot of collaboration between the city that would fund a lot of local associations to inspire more grassroots initiatives to come together. And there was one thing that I really enjoyed. It was called in French Le feux de poésie. Which is basically a festival about potential projects where they would actually create an event and a space where people could just come together and create like a local stand, right? Where you could then present your ideas and then people could come sign up to join the project, for example. And then the association and the city would find ways to finance that or to help them to test it. So that was, for example, one of the things that I found very inspiring. I put the link in there in the chats, but yeah, you don’t see that much, right? Cities being very proactive on creating the right supporting programs and so on to inspire more of those. So that’s why I was quite curious in that sense. Thanks for the presentation. It was very interesting.
0:33:19.2 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks. Question from Mike Boyle. Did you look into how the electioneering cycle does not impede the GI initiatives, e.g., New power in party, funding for GI dries up?
0:33:34.1 Karin Bradley: Oh, the political cycles?
0:33:37.5 Julian Agyeman: Yeah.
0:33:38.0 Karin Bradley: Yes. Okay, that’s a very good also comment. We did Gothenburg, we saw just a little bit of that and particularly a kind of a fear of that. And maybe didn’t have so much to do with the sort of shift in politics, but rather shift in guidelines from one of the big supporting organizations that in turn get their funding from the state that had changed their requirements. So suddenly operations like the bike, kitchen, etcetera, that had received a lot of funding and support, couldn’t get any because they didn’t fit the requirements anymore. So in that sense, they felt that, okay, it would have been better if we weren’t even relying on that support. So, yes, whereas in Berlin, we didn’t encounter that, but I think it’s definitely something that is relevant. And particularly, I think maybe in cities where there is a tendency to, that go back and forth politically. Maybe in previous sort of research, I’ve looked at the city of Malmö that has had a very stable sort of political structure for years and years.
0:34:47.7 Karin Bradley: And they pointed to that fact as really one of their success factors, that they know that they can, also the public servants know that they can trust that, okay, this way we’re working, we’ll could be able to continue, that it won’t change every, in our case, every sort of fourth year. Yeah.
0:35:08.4 Julian Agyeman: Great. There’s a question from Alex and Alex is saying, what implications… Oh, there’s so many questions coming in, my chat is just jumping. What implications does your research have for those of us operating GIs?
0:35:23.7 Karin Bradley: Yes, yes, that’s a good question. That’s actually, we’re working on another paper, part of this project as well, where we look at more from the grassroots perspective. So what kind of strategies are relevant to use, depending on what kind of goals you have also? To what extent do you wanna spread your practice by numbers? Or to what extent do you wanna spread it by, say, ideology or by thought and trying to pinpoint at what could then be relevant strategies? Yeah. But trying yet to say something simple, what we could see, I think, was that the grassroots initiatives that somehow managed to balance maybe a critical or maybe tone in their practice, but still being open and visible and welcoming and not, okay, let me say like this. There were certain grassroots initiatives that were in a little bit like locations that were difficult to find that really people felt, okay, I really need to be of this kind of political orientation, ideological this way, dressed like that, in order to dare to even go in here.
0:36:40.6 Karin Bradley: That was often a bit of a problem if you wanted some kind of more being on that government map or being or, receiving some kind of funding. It doesn’t mean that you have to be entirely like mainstream, but somehow trying to actively open up for broader groups than the ones already engaged. I think that was something we saw those had easier to somehow, yeah, get more stable operations, yeah.
0:37:10.0 Julian Agyeman: Right. Inger Treichler, perhaps she’s from Berlin. She asks, can you remind us in what time period you were conducting your research in Berlin?
0:37:21.0 Karin Bradley: Yes, we were there during, actually during, actually during the pandemic, to some extent, and also just after that. So 2020, or was it 2021? Yeah.
0:37:33.4 Julian Agyeman: Karin O’Donohue asks, what quality and amount of data do GI’s need to collect as evidence to share with local stakeholders for additional and sustainable resources that will enable the activity to scale? Do you want to ask Karin your question?
0:37:55.5 S5: Thank you, Julian. Hello, Karin, and everybody.
0:38:00.1 Karin Bradley: Hello.
0:38:00.2 S5: Hi. So I work with an organisation called ChangeX, whereby we bring proven innovations from all over the world to local communities, and then give them the option to self-identify which one they want to replicate and we provide the funding and the resources for them to do it. And one of the things that our platform allows both the grassroots initiative, as well as the innovator behind it, be it the repair cafe originator, plus the scaled repair cafes, is to collect data in terms of how many beneficiaries, what the impact was, changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, all the user generated content, etcetera.
0:38:45.1 S5: And so both groups have found that very helpful, either for their own funding proposals or to make the argument to a local municipality or whatnot to say, this isn’t just something that should be bolted on, it’s something that should be built in to the area’s planning. But not everybody, not every community activist or community leader or community group is skilled in the area of data collection or data reporting or whatnot. So I’m just wondering, we work with communities all over the world, South America, Europe, North America, soon to be Australia, Japan, all over. So they’re quite different. But broadly speaking, what quality of data do you feel the stakeholders require in order to listen to what the GIs need to say?
0:39:36.1 Karin Bradley: Yeah, okay, I see your point. Yes, I would say in the case of Sweden, there are a lot of these government programmes that are very much focused on reduction of CO2. So you’d have to, in that case, be able to somehow quantify the effects from your operation in terms of CO2 reductions, which for some of these organisations was very difficult. And even not…
0:40:03.0 Karin Bradley: That’s not necessarily their main focus. And particularly, I remember, some of the bike kitchen in Gothenburg feeling that’s our, what we’re doing, it’s so much more about, yeah, reuse and building empowerment and learning how to, yeah, be more autonomous in terms of not relying on cars, etcetera, which of course relates to CO2. But anyhow, that’s what they had to do sometimes. So yeah, I think that’s, but we did not see any, that’s super interesting with your organization that somehow aiding with this, because we did not encounter that. What we did encounter though was intermediary organizations that were in different ways helping with funding, but also making booklets or guides and popularizing.
0:40:53.5 Karin Bradley: So if you want to set up a, say, bike kitchen or a toy library or whatever it is, this is what you should think of. And that’s something, because often the actual GIs themselves didn’t necessarily have the interest in doing this, spreading their work. They sometimes just wanted to do their own little, the thing rather than the spreading. So it was more about that type of not so much maybe data, but rather, yeah, I would say handbooks, guidebooks. Yeah.
0:41:24.7 Julian Agyeman: Question from Mike Boyle, very important question. Did you look into the difficulties caused by government silos and no department being responsible for the GI initiative? And he says, again, he’s got loads of examples on this, but I think this really gets to the core, doesn’t it? These GI initiatives are not siloed, governments are. How did that work?
0:41:46.3 Karin Bradley: Yes. Yeah. That’s something we very much encountered, particularly in the context of Gothenburg, where several of the GIs and also the municipal officials pointed out that there is often the situation that that sharing organizations will look that they didn’t fit into the exactly to the silos because the whole administrative system was built on, you’d have the administration for sports and culture, you would have environmental and you would have waste or maybe transport, infrastructure, etcetera. And many of these cut across. And that meant that if they applied for permits or funding or whatever it was, it often ended up in nobody’s responsibility.
0:42:29.5 Karin Bradley: But that was something that they also very consciously have worked with in the city in Gothenburg to change and change the guidelines. And they even did attempts, I think it’s fascinating, they realized that this was a problem. So they made, they cooperated with a GI, asked them, so now you apply for funding and we’ll see how this goes in order to learn how, where that application went up. So they tested in a way their own system and then tried to change it.
0:43:00.7 Julian Agyeman: I’m gonna throw in a couple of questions here, Karin. First, having worked in local government, albeit in the ’80s and early ’90s and in the UK and working in an environmental health department, these were people who, environmental health officers, very protective over their professional status. They’d only in the last 20 years got in the late ’80s, like professional status. How is it working with those… It’s a silo question. These people who can’t get out of their box, did you have any experience of those people? It seems the quotes that you gave us from the civil servant in Gothenburg, that person got it, that person understood. But I could see a lot of people who might be supportive, but feel this is totally outside of my skill set.
0:43:49.8 Karin Bradley: Yeah. Yes. I would say that’s maybe to some extent specific for the local authorities we’ve studied. Gothenburg really has a quite strong tradition of civil society organization and the grassroots movements. And almost, I think all of the public officials we interviewed were very interested in trying to develop how they could support these kinds of initiatives in different ways. And also many of them have some kind of, there’s maybe sustainability strategist or something like that, which is, I think not so maybe, yeah, a role that entails that you can do quite a lot of different things and they are creating their own roles quite a lot. And also I should say that it’s also, it should be noted that previously, some years ago, there was the head of the environmental administration in the city of Gothenburg consciously had as a strategy to employ activists and make so, which you can discuss in different ways, but actually get people that are active in the grassroots to work for the local government.
0:45:05.7 Karin Bradley: So many of these actually knew each other or had worked, some of the municipal officials had worked in grassroots organizations before or knew several people there. So it was really intertwined. Yeah. In Berlin, it wasn’t really the same way what we could see, but not what you’re describing, this is my role and I don’t get what this is. We didn’t really see that, but I guess for sure that exists, but maybe not the ones we encountered. Yeah.
0:45:32.5 Julian Agyeman: You mentioned a word way back in the beginning of your presentation. That word is trust. You enjoy in Sweden and in Germany and quite a lot of other nations in Europe, a reasonably high level of trust in government. We don’t enjoy that in the United States. I think I read somewhere that levels of trust in government in the US are some of the lowest in the industrialized world. Do you have any suggestions? How do we work on these generative projects in a state of mistrust or distrust?
0:46:08.5 Karin Bradley: Oh, yeah. Yes, that’s a challenging, I think, question, because I think what you pointed, that I think our whole analysis is basically in the context of there is quite a lot of trust between GIs and local governments. Yes. So how do you do that?
0:46:29.6 Julian Agyeman: It’s a really… I don’t expect an answer, but it is a real problem and I’m sure many people in this room and others that will see the video will be asking that question.
0:46:41.3 Karin Bradley: Yes. But what we could see, those that did not so much, maybe not trust or did not, their ideas did not align maybe with local governments, they would try to pursue strategies where they were not dependent on any type of funding from the local government or any premises or anything like that, or not even handling any money. That was something, a strategy we could observe. They would prefer having very small scale activities and be autonomous, but maybe then not having so much impact, but still being more in a way small scale, but resilient.
0:47:22.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much for a fantastic presentation. Can we give a great round of applause for Karin, please.
0:47:34.9 Karin Bradley: Thank you so much and great to be here and thank you for all very good questions and comments.
0:47:42.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graph recording or to register for free tickets to our upcoming lectures. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song. The graphic recording was created by Anke Dregnatx Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding and outreach support provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge can reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show. Here’s a final thought.
0:48:43.6 Karin Bradley: Really, the emphasis should be on using what you have or borrowing rather than buying new when we talk about sustainable consumption.
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