 Comfortable, maybe even in bed with a nice coffee or tea, and Tim will talk to us about local resilience and happy fruguleness. What do we need for a happy life and from where and what and how? And please go on, Tim. Yeah, hello. Good morning. Good morning. Local resilience and happy fruguleness of frugality. I want to talk about that a little, and I want to start with a small overview. So first, what is my background, where I'm coming from, and why this topic? Then I'll define the words, the vocabulary, how are these connected, resilience and frugality, why local, why is that important, and the subsidiary principle in a very specific case, or a very special case, and then two examples. One's architecture, and the other one is city as a community. And finally, I'll come back to it being local or why it might not have to be local. So we might have another layer that is very important. So my background. I always like being outside and never get over climbing trees, but I always felt connected to nature. So for me, it's been, I've been conscious for a long time that the bases are alive. So I think and talk about ecological topics a lot, and my job is connected to that. So I really like handiwork, and I became a carpenter, learned how to make massive wood furniture. And then I studied architecture, which is what I'm still doing. And I'm still working with these questions, the topics. So why is this? Why this topic? I talked about it a little. So ecology has always been interesting to me, and also the social aspects of it. You cannot really separate that. So we live by taking a lot of things from nature, or we use a lot of things that come from nature. And the difficulty, as we all know, is that we are destroying a lot. And so the question is how can we change that? And the second point, cooperatively and solidarity, and that just, egoistically, this is about working together. And also this is not always working as it should or as we would like. Humans are social beings, and we live together and have to... We need each other. We need cooperation. And I think we need to get back to that. Energy and resources, of course, are another topic that we have to solve somehow within our planetary borders. And of course this is way too much, both for me and also for a talk like this. But this is the motivation behind me holding this talk. So local resilience. The resilience, most of you will probably know it. Because it's known by distribution in the last decade. So it's kind of a buzzword, resiliency and sustainability. And basically it comes from psychology. And that means how resilient are you against crises? And in the context of equality, this is used a lot as well. And the local resilience, I mean, is how... So I use this term by describing how well a local community can weather a crisis. And how well they can come out of a crisis again. And not only a community, but also a locality. So when there's an extreme event like infrastructure collapse, or when there is food missing, stuff like that. And what is happening when there is extreme weather? And we can expect that that will happen in an increasingly increased pace. And then we have of course a few ways of handling this. And I'll get back to that later. And of course what we can do about it is social connections and diversity. And these are terms that will come up again and again. Happy frugality, of course. Something I want to talk about more in just a moment. That's also almost in there. So self-sufficiency, low technical complexity, those are just tools for resilience. And the connection and internal interconnectedness, that's the social component. So that's similarly a tool for increased resiliency. So the humble frugality of sufficiency, that's also just a password more or less. But it's also self-explanatory. And it means that you find a simpleness in your life and are happy with less. You're not collecting as many things. You have a bigger focus on enjoyment, on slowness. And in there, and that's the happy part about it, that you find value in this. So you're not filling up your life with a lot of things that you think you have to do or want to do or want to consume. And this is why I termed it freedom from having too much, having too many things. And peace and quiet. So a short story that illustrates it well. So it's an anecdote for the lowering of working moral, no, not moral. Ethics of work ethics. It's a short story, but I'll just keep it even shorter. It's about a fisher village, a touristic place, and a tourist needs this fisher in a boat. And the fisher is just sleeping in his small dinghy. And he takes photos of him. And then they start talking. And the tourist says, well, well, that's fine. You'll get a lot of fish. And the fisher in the beginning doesn't say much. Well, yeah, no, I don't know. And the tourist says, yeah, but it's great weather. Just go out, get fish. Are you sick or something? And he gets worried. And the fisher says, no. And at some point he answers, no, I was out already, already got a lot of fish. Oh, fine. The tourist starts asking. And he's very enthusiastic and he wants to help. Just go out again. You can catch some more fish and maybe a third time. So you'll have a lot of access. And if you do that every day, then at some day you can start a factory and hire people and maybe get a second ship. And that's the ship on the top right. That's the idea of the tourist. How the fisher is more and more productive and more and more busy. And at some point he has a restaurant and a factory and all these things. And the fisher always says, and then, and then, and then. And the tourist keeps coming up with new things. But at some point he has no idea how to increase it even more. And then you can just, just lie down in your small dinghy and enjoy the water and sleep if you like. And the fisher says, yeah, that I already have. And then the tourist is a bit speechless. He doesn't know what to say anymore. And got the lesson, so to speak. I really like this story that illustrates the idea of the happy frugal net quite well. And now the principle of the local. So why local? Don't worry too much about reading the small print here. It's not for reading. It's just to illustrate the amount of text. It's about the illustration. In a moment there's a slide where I zoomed in a little where you can read the text if you like. So the subsidiary principle is something in politics where you want to decide something on a lower level as possible. So the idea is to maximize self-determination and to increase how much an individual, a family or a community can have as much self-determination as possible and be responsible for themselves. And to want to maximize this and the individual and so have all the decisions made on a low level. And we can use this principle on our society, on our trading, our everyday life. And the new economics foundation had this idea in 2009. And I think this illustration shows it quite well. And on a global level there's hardly anything. So there's microchips, big planes and medication. That has to be handled globally because you really need a lot of cooperation. And at the top there, the first two layers, there's a lot of things and the important things. So I zoomed in there a little. So for example basic food and then we have schools and local doctors, things like that. And that's in a very local area. That's elementary things for your life. And you cannot survive without food. And you can produce that and trade it very locally. And that is something that's basically a no-brainer, that you do it like that. So you produce the things where they are needed and you're not shipping them all around the world. And in today's world we're doing the opposite basically. Going one slide back. We're basically doing what is shown in the image down below all the time. We're shipping all kinds of produce around the world, although we wouldn't need to. And that also causes massive issues. You probably know the reasons. It's the costs of transport, the social costs. And I mean with social costs I mean exploitation of people who are paid low wages in some countries. So that other people can afford the goods they produce. And ecological cost also comes on top. That brings me to my first example. Local resilience and blissful frugality achieved by architecture. And especially by using bricks as a, using clay as a raw material for a building. How can you reach local resilience and blissful frugality with that? Basically the goal is to achieve what I just showed you. To reduce the production context to produce as many goods as you can locally and yourself. And building can be organized locally and clay is a very good example because clay can be found anywhere. So we have high availability as clay is found anywhere in the ground and you can use it relatively directly without much processing involved. So you have a low threshold to community building, building within a community. Building, the building process brings people together because you need more than just one or two people to build a house. And people who know what they're doing. And it's also ecologically sensible because you have less gray energy. Gray energy is the energy involved in processes such as transport of goods and building materials. And also the cost or the resources involved in tearing down buildings. And clay is very efficient in that regard because it can be put back into nature without having to be torn down or reprocessed. It's basically it's it's soil and it goes back into the soil without further ado. Now there's a few pictures to illustrate that the simpleness of the building material and the community involved in building. There's different procedures in how you can build with clay. Here, for example, straw is mixed with clay to get a very simple building material. So you don't even need specific knowledge in order to build like that. Now clay has an image problem. As many things do. I wrote on the slide, don't get frightened by the argument that clay is beck wards or not modern. Because at this point, just it's just the distraction from the social and ecological advantages. It's the reaction I often get like you can't build with clay. That's how beck wards is that. But it isn't that isn't an argument. That things that are progressive in essence get labeled beck wards because they have a good ecological balance. And because sometimes it just makes sense. I put the pictures in here to show that you can build modern houses and can create modern architecture using materials such as clay. I can skip this slide. I already said that clay is locally available. You can take it from the local soil and also as you can see in the pictures, you're not taking away too much from the landscape. So much for architecture. Let me get to the second example, the city and its community. Maybe I didn't elaborate enough on the terms of resilience and frugality and in how far they match the clay building principle. I'll try to put it in my next point. Diversity and redundancy. Self-sufficiency. The items you can find here on the slide make local communities stronger and make local communities resistant or resilient towards crises and even make them completely independent of delivery chains. And similarly to clay, this means that certain things and that's the frugality aspect. Some things can't be done using this principle. For example, if I want to eat local food, I have to renounce on some things like on lobster or whatever. That doesn't mean that I have any lack. It's a different way of life. You might even argue that it makes you happier in the end because you can savor the little things and appreciate things even more if they're not constantly available. Now, I was a little bit all over the place. Sorry for that. Here on the right, you can see examples of city communities such as communal kitchens, communal rooms, work spaces, repair cafes, small farms, work spaces, communal retirement homes. Those are things that local communities can build and entertain themselves and that are as self-sufficient as possible, where at least they go into the right direction. And by people collaborating and working these organisations together, social cohesion has increased because you get to know each other and you know who you can rely on in situations of crisis or catastrophes because the threshold to asking for help is lowered. I have some examples for that as well that I haven't got in the slide, but it's pretty much self-explanatory. Social cohesion and interconnectedness are important terms and self-sufficiency offers tools. There are ways of doing that. Let's go on. Coming to other points about the city and its community. I was going a bit all over the place, but it just adds to what I already said. It's about creating communal spaces. This example you can see on the slide is an urban garden in Berlin where they offer all kinds of things like a repair shop. And it's an example of a space that has been created in collaboration by different people where they've created spaces and workshops where they can exchange, where they can do important social work, repair things. So all those topics that have already been touched upon in other talks. And this is what a community can achieve together and it strengthens local resilience and plus full frugality. Now coming to the end of this presentation, I wanted to make the bridge between local and global. And this is networking. We've been having the internet for a while and it's a great tool to enable us to connect local productions with one another, independently of the spatial context. So exchanging with other regions while still acting locally, acting locally and communicating and exchanging experiences globally and helping each other out globally. For example, if one community is facing problems, if there's a draft or an earthquake or a flood, you can support each other and you can exchange information and news without having to go there yourself and without having to decide where do I want to live globally. So global interconnectedness and exchanging experience is essential to this whole principle. And you can achieve that by telecommunication and connections. And it's also an important tool to promote awareness of small projects. The lists I had here, those are in niches more or less, food sharing, urban gardening, all of those things. So those are alternative projects that are more or less confined to certain social bubbles and the internet can help raising awareness here. That's why I also have some ideas here at the end where we can cooperate. Maybe it's something like a Wikipedia of cities. So the idea would be that you have a platform where everybody knows where it is and where you can collect information. So information about a place, about projects in a place. So you can see what's in this city, where I am or where I just moved to, what projects are here. So to make information easier to find, that's the idea behind it, but that's just me spitballing. But it could mean so global basic income through local sharing. That's another idea that if you are producing too much locally, you're using that up. And if it's really too much and you can't use it up yourself, then you're sharing it in your neighborhood or in your region. And if they also don't need it, then you can see where's the need. And so networking is a great tool here. And in that direction I would like to keep thinking. And maybe you get ideas, maybe you get questions. And we'll come to that now. Unfortunately there's no contact information on the slides. So my mail address. It's on the page of the talk, so in the schedule or in the far plan. So you can also download the slides there. And also there's a mailing list for this topic in exchange about this topic. Yeah. Well, a small technical difficulty, we have no sound. Yes. Now Harold is here. Hello. Hello. Okay, good. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Tim. It was a very interesting talk. I would say we have a few questions in the pad. No. We don't, sorry. But what really jumps at you when you have listened to this talk, this point about slowness as enjoyment and frugality as enjoyment and time and peace and quiet. See that as a plus. That's something I wanted to focus on, especially in the time that we are in right now. The lockdown is seen by many people as a very negative thing and a difficult situation. But I think you could do yourself a favor if you are focusing on just using the time and using the time for yourself and focusing back on these things and seeing them as a positive thing. Because there is no way for us to change the situation. Well, if that's change, I want to call into question that, but yeah. Of course, it's correct. I also feel like I feel powerless. I keep feeling powerless and there's nothing I could change because your possibilities as an individual are quite limited. But the peace and quiet and just relaxation, that's of course very important and a very nice tool to handle the situation. Yeah, and as you just said, we just can do something together. Also, this problem can only be solved as a community. So your ideas about the community and coming together are quite relevant here. So feel free to ask your questions in the pad or just some feedback for the speaker. It's always nice to get feedback to not speak into the void. So there is a question. What does building with clay mean for the price? And is it multi-storey? Is it possible to build multi-storey houses? Yes, absolutely. So multi-storey buildings is totally possible. There is a city in Yemen, a very old city. I don't know which century, Shibam. So it's a city with SH. There are houses with six, seven, eight, nine stories and they are there for a few hundred years and they were built with clay. So multi-storey buildings are not an issue. And you might not even want to build higher than that because the energy you need is exploding at a certain point and the social interaction falls short at a certain point. So the connection between city and people living there, between the street and the people living there, it falls short in price. So I have a clay architect who said it very nicely. She said that in poorer cities, countries, it's normal to build with clay or with alternative building materials that are more ecologically friendly. And so the more ecological way of building is always the cheaper one. So countries that cannot use high tech for building or they can just use it less. The cheaper solution is usually the also the ecologically better solution. But for us it's the other way around. All the norms are structured in a way that the building materials that are friendly for the environment are the expensive ones because they are not mass produced. And the other ones that need a lot of energy are isolation. If you have styrofoam and such, that's cheap because it's mass produced and that's the case in many areas. So well made fruits or harvest fruits that have low footprint are the more expensive ones. Yeah, maybe now we're building more clay. That's a very nice point. So you had an example for better crisis management through local resiliency and you mentioned the Princess Garden in Berlin. Maybe you have another example, especially in the city. Yeah, the first example I can think of. And I think is a very nice example is the planning hut, Planbude in German in Hamburg. And it's very nice because they really did it together. So a lot of citizens were taking part in this. What was the area called? St. Pauli, right? And what they did there was doing real participation by citizens. If you want to put it that way. Because the people who were really living in the area really helped. They were given tools and ideas. Well, they were given time and the space to develop ideas, what to do with old buildings. Some old buildings should be deconstructed because some investor bought them. And the citizens, they disagreed and they fought. And the laymen who were not really at home in the architecture world, but who were directly affected, they were working together. So everyone was working together. The laymen and the idea givers and the investor also had, was forced to even think for a lot of it. And most of those ideas were turned into reality. I think this is a very nice example because it's also a lot bigger than the Princess Garden. Of course it's not directly comparable because it's an investor project as well. But that's a nice example for participation and how a city can be developed together. And that's a similar project in, I think the city is called Schönau, close to Freiburg. And there's people who also are connected to the planning hut, the Planbuder. And they're doing something similar in area there. And they also try to do the planning with the people living there. It's an interesting coincidence. I hadn't dealt with the Planbuder, but with the people before there, Park Fiction. And so these were initiatives by neighbors as well, where a building should be deconstructed or highly renovated. And I was living there myself. And there I... And people tried to bring in the citizens. But one problem that happened there. If it's Park Fiction, that's around there. So for those who don't know it, it's in Hamburg, close to the port. It's a very nice park with artificial hills and metal palms and patterned stones. The living area that developed there and the investors were forced to follow a certain legislation. And the rents were limited and stuff like that, so nobody was forced to move out. But of course it led to gentrification around the area. So these areas within the city increased the prices or the values for other investors. And the rents exploded then of course. So do you have any ideas for this? Yeah, that's of course a very important point. Yeah, it's very difficult. So the topic of gentrification. So increase or increasing the value of an area. So people are active there and do nice things. And then investors come and hike up the prices. Or maybe not just investors, but just people who can. Who can buy in their share there because suddenly it's nice. So people of means basically. That's a problem. And that's a problem of our economic organization. So we have to find an alternative there. I'm sorry, I don't have another answer. This is something like a syndicate of land plots or rent houses. So areas are taken out of the markets. But of course you are fighting against groups that have a lot of financial means. So it's a hard struggle. But those are small ideas in the direction. But my first idea is you need to change the system to answer that. But now that the less we don't want to leave it at a negative point. I think it was a very nice input. And I think we should take it as an example and keep thinking. And yeah, don't be turned off by the side effects. And I think if we all keep increasing, improving the situation, it will go away. Yeah, thank you very much. So the slides are in the schedule. There you can also find an email address. And I assume you'll happily answer questions by email. Yes, of course. Thanks. Thank you for this very nice event for all the helpers.