---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Schumacher Center for a New Economics < [email protected]> Date: Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 11:27 PM Subject: The Small, the Various, and the Personal To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> view this email in your browser <https://mailchi.mp/centerforneweconomics.org/small-various-personal?e=639a116680> <https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=639e258349&e=639a116680> *“When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.” ― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities* Dear Michel Bauwens, 2021 is sure to generate a contagious celebration of neighborhoods and of the small, locally-owned businesses that shape those communities. The events of 2020 have demonstrated how fragile yet vital these businesses are. Their style, diversity, and idiosyncrasies create the unique character of our respective Main Streets. Their storefronts and products reflect regional tastes and aesthetics; they provide places to gather, share information, and practice the art of citizenship. They offer our youth their first jobs. They sponsor play groups, diversity training workshops, children’s choruses, and food pantries – not tackling the big national problems, but certainly making headway on the small, stubborn, local ones. Shopkeepers and restauranteurs reinvented their operations and menus as the virus spread, pivoting quickly to curbside pickup and outdoor dining to continue serving their communities even during a pandemic. *Jane Jacobs* Jane Jacobs, keen observer of city life and re-imaginer of economic theory, saw in this very diversity the seeds for revitalization and growth. She bemoaned the outcomes of conventional planning in which old buildings are replaced with uniform high-rises that separate living spaces from the animated traffic of commerce. She cheered the messiness and inconvenience of towns that lead residents to cross streets and duck into shops, engaging in unplanned meetings and conversations that act like petri dishes for new enterprises and ideas. Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. ― Jane Jacobs, *The Death and Life of Great American Cities* Local economies may not be the most efficient economies, but they are the richest. They engage citizens not just as consumers, but rather as multi-faceted human beings. The result is a daily life constructed not around superfluous *stuff*, but connection to the people, stories, and landscapes that make a community. *Downtown Great Barrington, MA during a previous year's Holiday Stroll hosted by the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce.* For forty years the Schumacher Center has innovated programs that encourage citizen support for local businesses and local economies. Local currencies <https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=85ffdf8104&e=639a116680> keep the wealth of a region circulating in the locality, identifying and uplifting home-grown enterprises embedded in their communities and strengthening local supply chains. Face-to-face transactions mediated by paper currency bring users to town where they meet shopkeepers and recognize the many ways their lives intertwine as parents, board members, theater enthusiasts, hospital volunteers, trail hikers, and more. Community land trusts <https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=5b07e339a3&e=639a116680> (CLTs) provide low-cost access to manufacturing sites, retail space, and productive farmland, as well as workforce housing. CLTs are catchers’ mitts for donated land, putting it under permanent community control and offering 98-year leases for uses determined in collaboration with the donor, such as designation as an apple orchard, food processing plant, or local bookstore. CLTs give citizens a way to foster development while allowing new enterprises to build equity in buildings and other improvements to the land. Community Supported Industry <https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=bc85999b85&e=639a116680> (CSI) brings together the business community with retired professionals, local officials, social investors, non-profit leaders, and youth to explore what leakages are occurring in the local economy to determine how, working together, they can build new import-replacement businesses to fill those gaps. In this way, new enterprises grow organically out of knowledge of the workforce, raw materials, cultural preferences, and appropriate scale of the community, rather than by wooing a large corporation to the area to fulfill these needs. Join us in 2021 and every day in hearty celebration and loyal patronage of our small businesses. Your annual donation to the Schumacher Center helps us continue our advocacy. 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