[P2P-F] Fwd: The Small, the Various, and the Personal

Mon Dec 28 15:42:33 CET 2020

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Schumacher Center for a New Economics <
schumacher at centerforneweconomics.org>
Date: Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 11:27 PM
Subject: The Small, the Various, and the Personal
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>

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*“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.

Wishing all health in the New Year,

Staff of the Schumacher Center

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