"It's not very liverpool, is it?": T/transition initiatives in a post-industrial city

North, P ORCID: 0000-0001-5147-7296 (2025) "It's not very liverpool, is it?": T/transition initiatives in a post-industrial city In: Post Carbon Futures Imagining and Enacting New Worlds Through Transition Studies. Routledge,London, pp. 200-218.

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Summary

In the early days of the emergence of Transition Towns, I hosted founder Rob Hopkins in Liverpool. Hearing his ideas, I asked him how this would look in a post-industrial city with complex social problems like Liverpool, UK. "I don't know," he said, "find out and tell me." This chapter presents a case study of "transition" activism, broadly conceived, over a number of years in Liverpool, a city with a militant past that has become more conventionally successful over the past 20 years through a successful deployment of cultural production. The 2023 "Eurovision" festival in support of Ukraine is an exemplar. Less high-profile have been initiatives such as Transition Liverpool, founded in 2008 and still in operation; Low Carbon Liverpool, which brought a number of city agencies together to discuss collaborative ways to transition to a low carbon city; and an exploration of social and solidarity economies called The Human City. These initiatives suggest that it can be harder to generate a head of steam around the transition to a low carbon economy, let alone embrace ideas like degrowth, in places where conventional economic growth seems common sense and possible in the face of immediate social problems, while the climate crisis seems remote both geographically and temporally.

Item Type:	Chapter
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Transition Studies, Low Carbon, Sustainable Development
Divisions:	Faculty of Science & Engineering Faculty of Science & Engineering > School of Environmental Sciences
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2025 16:32
Last Modified:	05 Sep 2025 20:06
DOI:	10.4324/9781003509585-11
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3190753
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