What are transition towns?

Transition Towns aim to increase local community resilience and build a regenerative local economy, by implementing a wide range of projects that reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and help mitigate climate change. 

Transition Towns are made up of local communities that proactively reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and help mitigate climate change, by re-localising, shifting production closer to home and creating functioning communities. These towns aim to address the issues of peak oil, climate change and economic instability by creating strong, connected, self-sufficient communities. They are fuelled by the idea that strong neighbourhood networks will help their town to weather future energy shocks.

In essence, the Transition Town model is based around communities learning to grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and even build their own homes using local materials.

An essential part of the Transition model is visioning: belief in a positive vision of the future and the work to make it real.

The Oral History Approach

Oral history is, of course a branch of history: it looks back. But looking back can itself be a form of activism, reminding us of what has been achieved but also pointing us to what more may be achieved in the future. The past may act as a warning but may also act as an inspiration.

Why create an oral history of the Transition movement? Because it seems to us that the movement is an important actor in the struggle to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce local and global inequalities (as well as encouraging local activism generally and improving people’s mental health), and thus it should be properly documented.  This documentation needs to be bottom-up, both because such an approach captures the personal stories that lie at the heart of Transition, and also because this approach aligns directly with the principles of the movement itself. At present there is almost no oral history of the movement.

While the Transition movement began in a small town in England, it has now spread to many other parts of the world, so our oral history must also reflect that. We propose that our first stage should be a network of activities taking place in the UK, France, Norway and the USA, as we are aware of oral historians wishing to embark on this work in those countries, but we intend to expand more widely in subsequent stages.

The intention is not to have professional oral historians carry out the interviews, but rather that those oral historians should train local people in Transition Towns in the skills of oral history so that the interviews can then be carried out to a high standard at a local level. The interviews should reflect the breadth of activity within each community, rather than focusing only on the leaders of projects.  While copies of the interviews will be kept and used locally, they will also be archived at a national level (in the case of the UK, hopefully at the British Library).

In order to test the model of our work, we intend to begin with a pilot project, focusing on one Transition Town within each country. This will allow us to gauge the effectiveness of our approach, so that any necessary changes may be made in advance of the scaling up of the project.

Pilot Project

For the pilot project, one Transition Town in each country will be approached and encouraged to take part. Activist volunteers will then be invited to attend 2 days of training in oral history, including principles of oral history, the methodology of oral history interviewing, use of audio recording equipment, legal and ethical issues and archiving. Those activists will then carry out at least 12 interviews, and the activists and the oral historian will also collect photos of Transition Town activity.

There will then be a third day of training, focused upon summarising interviews and sound editing. The oral historian will then work with the local people to produce timed-coded summaries of the interviews and then to select and audio-edit extracts from the interviews, organised thematically.

At the same time the oral historian will carry out sensitivity reviews of the interviews to ensure GDPR and other legal compliance, making redacted copies where necessary, ready for archiving.

Outcomes

There will be two specific outcomes, but the process of the project will itself produce another outcome, that of letting more people know about the Transition Movement and giving the opportunity for more people to become involved.

EXHIBITION

Each featured Transition Town will produce an exhibition. This will consist of listening posts to hear extracts from the interviews, along with photographs of transition activity and text panels of short transcript extracts from the interviews. Each exhibition may be accompanied by Transition activities themselves, such as the sale of local products or carrying out repairs and upcycling.

WEBSITE

A Transition Town Oral History website will be established and all the interviews and photographs from the projects in the five countries will be loaded onto that website. As well as the full interviews being available, the thematically organised extracts can also be heard, accompanied by the appropriate photographs. For this pilot project the interviews will be available only in their original languages (subtitled transcript translations may be made available at later stages of the project, possibly all into English as the lingua franca).

The website is now live and available at 

https://oralhistory.vt.domains/transition-towns/index

ARCHIVING

Copies of the interviews will be kept locally but they will also be archived nationally, as a permanent resource for future activists, historians, programme-makers and educationalists.