La Cravate Solidaire

-->

When your income is falling, keeping your wardrobe up to date is hardly a priority. Two young Parisians, Yann Lotode and Mademoiselle Oz, have founded La Cravate Solidaire, a non-profit, to help people give a good impression at job interviews. They take used clothing and recycle or up-cycle it: people can try on garments, which Yann alters for a better fit or to the taste of the job candidate. Oz then offers hairdressing and makeup to give the job seeker the best chance to look his or her best at their interview. http://lacravatesolidaire.org/#

Creating employment through recycling and up-cycling

--> -->

Gerald Poter gathers rags for a living, going door to door to ask for old clothes, then reselling what he can. But Poter, 27, is neither a hobo nor homeless; in fact, he`s got the best and the only job he`s had in years. A worker at an experimental company in this recession-hit area near the north-western coast of France, Poter is one of 180 employees back in the work force because of the approach taken by a company called Le Relais that seeks to make money to create jobs.

After seven years, Le Relais now takes in about $5 million a year with its labor-intensive enterprises-collecting, resorting and selling used clothing in France, Africa and Asia, recycling paper and manufacturing paint. Profit is ploughed back into the company and shared with employees. A project that grew out of a charitable commune run by Catholic priests, Le Relais (The Relay) has helped dozens of virtually unemployable people - former convicts and people out of a job from one to five years - discover usefulness to society and a long-lost sense of self-worth. And if Le Relais is far from solving France`s economic problem of 10% unemployment, which runs as high as 18% here, where the coal mines shut down years ago, it has already inspired the creation of similar companies near Toulouse, in Burgundy and in the city of Mulhouse, near the Swiss border.

``Society is flawed; the fact that there are people who are completely excluded from society is unacceptable,” says Pierre Duponchel, Le Relais` managing director, standing in a warehouse full of sorted, used clothes. …More

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.

More

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”.