Nimes Jardins Solidaire

This community garden is a paradise, enclosed by hedges, olive trees and grapevines it went on for block after block, little paths winding through varied allotments all bursting with productivity on our sunny spring visit. We’d heard that it had brought new immigrants together with established residents, in keeping with the European Urban Garden Association’s goals of cultural and social integration.

Indeed it was started by an idealistic social worker who after cultivating her own family plot in Nimes became convinced of the social benefits of organic gardening. In 1996 Muriel Gavach founded the Côté Jardins Solidaires bringing together ‘social workers and members of the peasant world to create a community garden on land belonging to the city of Nimes.’ Today it employs three community workers (equivalent to two full-time) who work collaboratively with local gardeners to provide food aid, gardening and cooking workshops, weekly community meals, social skills and budgeting, a weekly vegetarian and fully organic table d’hote (partnership with “Marigoule” cooperative, with local farmers and friends) – and runs workshops in local schools.

‘Despite an interdependent world, social links become more and more disconnected. This particularly affects big urban areas that have difficulties such as high unemployment rates, marginalisation, rejection, poverty, and criminality. At the same time, these areas are the place for social innovation and economic growth. In these big cities, even though interpersonal contacts are regular, there is no actual exchange between these city dwellers with various cultural origins, of various ages and different social categories.

‘In these cities more than anywhere else, cultural integration of people from various origins is a real debate, leading some European politicians to call “multiculturalism” a failure. Community gardens are a part of this. Coming from the movement of working-class gardens forty years ago, some of them today are places of education for meetings, exchanges, for the integration of mutual respect, while keeping the historical aspect of food self-sufficiency alive.’ (European Urban Garden Otesha).

Nemausus and Nimes Jardins Solidaire

A lucky encounter with Maria, a local community garden worker for Nimes Jardin Solidaire, allowed us to see inside the Jean Nouvel-designed social housing project Nemausus. The Solidaire’s office is run from an apartment in Nemausus, and she was busy unloading food up the stairs when I asked if we could see inside. I’d been intrigued by this astounding building ever since I first came across it studying urban design, and seeing it from the outside years later simply wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiosity. Jean Nouvel designed and oversaw the construction of Nemausus I and II between 1985 and 1987. Two separate seven-story buildings flank a grove of trees and outdoor space, one a little smaller than the other because of site constraints. Nouvel minimized construction costs by using simple industrial materials and minimal interior finishes. Built in an industrial zone in the southwest part of Nimes they were part of a program to renovate a decrepit district of 1960's public housing with Nemausus providing a radical alternative model to the usual limited, desolate programs of rent-controlled, subsidized housing.

Sleek and modern, they remain an outstanding alternative to the usual, dreary subsidized housing projects. Nouvel managed to keep the construction costs down while providing much larger apartments to the usual confined spaces in social housing. The typical apartment is defined by a 5x12 meter bay but includes the space of the terrace covered by the cantilevered balcony above. The dwelling typology has 17 different types including several different flats, duplexes and triplexes that range in size from one-bedroom flats to three bedroom triplexes. Most of the one-bedroom flats are on the top floor; however, some of the triplexes extend into this level where the top floor bedrooms have separate entry and exit. Every apartment has bi-fold metal doors opening the full width of the dwelling, and most of the multi-floor dwellings have two story high volumes while some have two-story high doors.

What I loved most about Nouvel’s design was its solution to the usual space requirements of access and cars: raised on pilotis it provides covered parking at a slightly depressed lower level freeing up the car-allotted space above for gardens; and using external stairs and horizontal walkways on the northside, covered with his maritime-inspired canopy, left more space for the apartments and the all of the southside for extensive private balconies. Simple but ingenious!   ‘To Nouvel's chagrin, the idea that savings in construction costs resulting from the industrialized building techniques and minimal interior finishes would be passed along to the tenants in the form of much more spacious, generous dwellings was never realized and apparently rentals were determined by floor area instead of building costs.’ (http://architecture.about.com)

Community gardens in every city, town and village

 

In every city, town or village we’ve visited or driven through we’ve seen community gardens, large sprawling ones that took an hour to walk around through to tiny little allotments perched alongside riverbanks and motorways. Creatively put together garden sheds and even small community cafes are common, flowers and vegetables grow side-by-side, while old and young are seen tending their patches. Urban community gardens often have the support of their cities as they’re seen as helping to create cultural links between new immigrants and established residents. Several began with the working-class garden movement forty years ago and have now evolved into spaces for education and social integration while handing down the skills of food self sufficiency.

Miraflores in Seville

Massive industrialisation that left no space for green zones and urban gardens led to the creation of Miraflores Park in 1989, explains Manuel Lara, president of the committee of the pro-educational Miraflores Park Association (Asociación Comité Pro-parque Educativo Miraflores). ‘The urban cores will continue to be built, destroying the agricultural zones as they go. But thanks to the perserverance of the citizens, 165 plots of land which are 150 metres squared will be preserved,’ says Lara…More

Lessons from failure of one of China's largest solar panel manufacturers

Suntech, a huge solar panel manufacturer in China, recently declared bankruptcy. But that doesn’t mean the solar industry is doomed - just that we have to think differently about how to get more solar power built, writes Terry Tamminen from Wuxhi. If we want to move quickly towards renewable energy then we'd do better regulating for its use than providing large subsidies to producers.

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Les Enfants du Canal in Paris

On our second day in Paris wandering through Montparnasse we came across this quirky bus covered in fantastic graphic art, peering through its windows we saw a kitchen set up, signage at the back directed us to Les Enfants du Canal, a cooperative based on the concept of "peer support" - a program of peer workers who use reflection and collaboration to look at the experience of the street as a real tool for “rehabilitation of the person, to rebuild through the approach toward each other.” Its volunteers work with people living in extreme poverty to integrate them back into wage work and the “continuity of their personal journey”.  

How will the TPPA affect our enviroment

Global climate change could affect wetlands through increased air temperature; shifts in precipitation; increased frequency of storms, droughts, and floods; increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration; and sea level rise. Connecting the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and increasing climate change are its ability to prevent governments from policies and legislation to reduce its causes, including logging and air and water pollution. So it’s not surprising that Green parties from New Zealand, Australia and Canada have joined forces to oppose the TPPA.

An international trade treaty, the TPPA is currently under negotiation by eleven Asian and Pacific-rim countries, pre-eminently the United States. Because the negotiations are being conducted in secret, what is known about the TPPA’s 26 chapters’ draft texts comes from previous international trade agreements, investigative work and leaked documents.

Most of the chapters actually have nothing to do with trade, but rather impose limits on domestic food safety, health, environment and other policies. Although its draft texts are off limits to the public, over 600 US corporate “trade advisors” – including job-offshoring corporations, global banks, agribusiness and pharmaceutical giants - have full access.

Consumer, labour, environmental and other public interest advocates want transparency in
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Te Whangai Trust new partnership with NZ Steel and finalist in 2012 Sustainable Business Network’s Social Innovation Awards

Te Whangai Charitable Trust’s experience in giving long-term unemployed a chance to rebuild their lives has been recognised again with a finalist spot in the 2012 Sustainable Business Network’s Social Innovation Awards.

The Trust, which was a finalist in the 2009 Trailblazer Not for Profit Awards and won the Waikato Not for Profit and Trailblazer Awards in 2010, runs an eco-nursery growing native New Zealand trees, shrubs and other plants, staffed by people who find it difficult to get into the labour market. It offers jobs and skills training to people in the South Auckland, Waikato and Thames-Coromandel areas who have been unemployed for more than a year or disadvantaged in the workforce through illness or circumstances. 

Te Whangai is Maori for “to nurture, adopt or nourish,” with nurturing the basis of the training and support interwoven into its Employment Placement and Flexi-Wage schemes. “Our society has failed to provide opportunities for those caught in a poverty trap,” says Adrienne Dalton who with her husband Gary developed the Trust from scratch on their dairy farm five years ago.

They initially secured funding from the Social Development Ministry as well as investing themselves, as a corporate would, under the trust’s corporate funding model, designed to develop community, government, corporate and not for profit partnerships to help resolve social and environmental issues facing communities. Adrienne says the Trust is swamped at Employment Expos by people wanting a chance to get on the Taskforce schemes, which pay $100 a week more than the unemployment benefit for 30 hours work a week. Unfortunately this scheme has been replaced by Flexi-Wage with reduced assistance.

“Their day starts at 7.30am and finishes at 3.30pm four days a week, on the fifth day we offer training for job hunting, personal skills or anything else that helps our workers, and we hire specialist trainers for this.” At the moment the Trust needs workers for a new nursery and environmental mitigation partnership with NZ Steel in Glenbrook, but is struggling to find enough drug-free workers for its first team. 

“Not all our new workers are drug and alcohol-tested before they begin their placements,” says John Walter, Environmental Advisor and Enterprise Development Manager. “So we work with CADs (Community Alcohol & Drug Services) to evaluate their needs for education and counseling. But for our corporate partnerships we need workers who are drug-free from day one.”

NZ Steel is funding the development of a nursery in Glenbrook, which will give Te Whangai an enormous opportunity to expand its services throughout the Auckland and Waikato areas where it knows there is a huge need amongst the long-term unemployed as well as those with criminal records.

“So many of our youth are disenfranchised,” says Gary Dalton. “ We need to be able to understand the real issues of poverty and the depression it often brings, what we do here works because we walk alongside them, it’s hand-ups, not handouts,” says Gary."It is about people, not money, it's about changing our community. People complain about welfare payments but nobody is prepared to do anything about it.”

“The people here have designed and built our facilities, they've used skills that haven't been recognised. It's not their disadvantages that are the problem, it's our inability to harness their abilities." These skills include mathematics, science, communications and organizational process. “We tell our workers you write your own reference here. Every job is a project that someone has to perform, it’s a self-evaluation of your own leadership skills when you take a job on.” He says team leaders are rotated weekly so everyone gets to learn to mesh individual skills and to communicate well to get the job done.

Vegetable gardens cared for by the workers also flourish on the site and are harvested daily for their communal breakfasts and lunches, which they take turns preparing, supplemented with milk from the Dalton’s ”Fonterra Champions Tight Five” dairy herd with additional rations purchased daily. “Our guys take a huge sense of achievement in what they do,” says John. “They want to be able to show their mokopuna in 50 years time what they’ve raised and planted, to be able watch plants come up from seed into big trees.”

Stephen Matthews says that after years of unemployment his previously strong work ethic was reignited at Te Whangai where he has been on the Flexi-Wage placement and is about to graduate. He was made redundant from DoC in the late 1990s and later from a job at a local Freezing Works. “I feel my age (53) is a barrier, but what being here has taught me is to roll with the punches, to get up and try again. I’ve learnt good things here that I know will make a difference to my life.”

Max Challie, also graduating, agrees saying “the best thing about working here has been connecting with the other people and our supervisors, sharing our kai, and being with each other.” Both men had some experience of plant growing but say they’ve learnt much more alongside valuable life skills, and would choose to stay on if they could.

The Trust extends benefits that are community and generational: Thames police reported a 70 percent reduction in the area’s petty crime re-offences when it began taking unemployed from the area; workers’ children visit the Trust for meals and celebrations where they see their parents employed and taking leadership roles. “By working at Te Whangai, they re-connect with their cultural values and their links with the earth. Young Maori have a huge affinity for their environment,” says Adrienne. “They lead and we follow and that’s empowering for them.”

 Te Whangai does not compete on the retail market so it sells to ratepayer and taxpayer funded environmental projects, mainly through industries, farmers, schools and others planting for compliance or conservation on a not-for-profit basis. John says it would like to provide for local and councils requirements using taxpayer monies more strategically, and so the Trust is advocating for the four well-beings – environmental, social, economic, and cultural – to be demonstrated in any project tenders, as every tree sold and planted is a contribution to their communities’ social, cultural, environmental and economic wellbeing.

He says it’s rare to see this in a tender bid even though the Local Government Act 2002 requires councils to make sustainably-based decisions, which balance the social, economic, and cultural well-being of people and communities in ways that will enhance the quality of the environment and the needs of future generations. New Zealand Post Group is sponsoring the Social Innovation Award in the 2012 NZI National Sustainable Business Network Awards. The Award is open to outstanding social enterprises, innovations or businesses that use new strategies and ideas to meet social needs of all kinds through research, collaboration, creating new ventures or working with community groups or public agencies.

The Trust has people from 17 to 63 years of age with this wide age range, from diverse cultures though predominantly Maori, mirroring the local community. Older employees see themselves and the errors of their past reflected in the youth: they mentor them and share their experiences and lost dreams, as they create new ones. It also acts as an agency for Hauraki and Pukekohe Corrections Department, with at-risk youth and probationary prisoners on site at times.

As of June this year 250 of its employees had found full time employment in the community while participating in the Te Whangai Programme. And its major environmental projects include: the planting of 15,000 trees on steep farm land at Te Mata, Coromandel Peninsula, 25,000 trees in the Hunua Reserve, 7,000 trees for the Clean Stream Initiatives in the Waikato and 35,000 trees for Glenbrook in South Auckland.

The Awards ceremony takes place on Thursday 22 November 2012 at The Cloud, Queens Wharf, Auckland, where it will be part of ‘pop-up’ Sustainable City exploring handpicked sustainable solutions from travel and business to lifestyle and fashion.

For more information go to:

http://www.tewhangai.com/

http://www.sustainablecity.org.nz/