Last year's Shareable article about Gothenburg as a Sharing City featured Grow Gothenburg, which had just been initiated at the time. In order to learn how this project is coming along, we talked to Jonathan Naraine, one of the people at The Foodprint Lab who started the project.
Wolfgang Hoeschele , Shareable: How did this project get started?
Jonathan Naraine, The Footprint Lab: Doing urban farming tours around the city, we found that there were a lot of interested people, but not enough places for them to grow plants. So we wanted to enable more sharing of spaces — either green spaces, or gray spaces. In 2016, collaborating with the city of Gothenburg, we created an interactive map of local urban farming. We realized that the city has municipal land to offer for gardeners, but there is so much more land in private ownership. So we had the idea, let's make it easy for more people to share land.
How good is the fit between the land offered and the needs of the people looking for land?
We have had good matches by happenstance. Last year, we helped facilitate establishing a student farm near Chalmers University. For example, a student who was living close to the Chalmers campus happened to find us, she was just curious what's happening in Gothenburg. Within a couple of weeks, she met the group, they needed new people. She and then many more people found the community garden, when they had been on the verge of no longer functioning.
A commercial grower had been looking for space for many years, going back and forth searching for places. Then through our platform, she found municipal land that suited her very well, and she started a CSA there. This spring, we had a project with a big property owner, matching three different sites via the website. Many people have been selected to start new community gardens and commercial farms. This creates a win-win situation for the property owners by creating social and green meeting places on unused land, and people who want to farm get access to land with less investment costs.
A panel from Alan Moore’s If Einstein’s Right, from 24 Panels. Photograph: Image Comics
Comics legend Alan Moore, who announced he was “pretty much done” with the medium two years ago, is making a brief foray out of retirement to point an excoriating finger at Boris Johnson over the Grenfell Tower fire.
Moore, the author of the seminal graphic novels Watchmen and V for Vendetta, is one of 24 contributors to a forthcoming comic anthology, 24 Panels, which is designed to raise money for those affected by the fire that broke out in London’s 24-storey Grenfell Tower last year, killing 72 people. An illustrated poem, his comic, “If Einstein’s Right …”, touches on fragmentary moments from different lives and features a mug-shot image of Boris Johnson.
“That same year a Bullingdon club clown / swears that he’ll leave fire services alone, / Then, three years later, cuts them to the bone, / Says, ‘Get stuffed’ as ten stations are closed down,” writes Moore. “And twenty-seven engines fade from view. / He also shall endure forevermore. / His treacheries caught in time’s amber, for / Disgrace and shame are both eternal, too.”
Kieron Gillen, the Eisner award-nominated curator of the project, called the contribution, which is illustrated by Moore’s wife Melinda Gebbie, “one of the most politically charged pieces in the book”.
Today we are publishing a new EFF white paper, The Cautious Path to Strategic Advantage: How Militaries Should Plan for AI . This paper analyzes the risks and implications of military AI projects in the wake of Google's decision to discontinue AI assistance to the US military's drone program and adopt AI ethics principles that preclude many forms of military work. The key audiences for this paper are military planners and defense contractors, who may find the objections to military...
The Citizen Lab: Defending Civil Society with RiskIQ PassiveTotal®
About Citizen Lab
Civil society groups such as journalists, humanitarians, and activists face the same level of threat from targeted digital espionage as major companies and governments but have fewer resources to defend themselves. The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary research group based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, is their guardian.
The Citizen Lab researches the intersection of information security, human rights, and global affairs. A core part of their mission is investigating the prevalence and impact of digital espionage operations against civil society groups and providing communities with information that they can use to raise awareness and improve their defenses.
Frack Off Guides Pack 1: Start a community group in your area
