The project Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles (CCSL) investigates the possible links between grass roots innovations and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. More precisely, it discusses the potentialities of collaborative everyday life creativity (the creative communities) in generating and diffusing new and more sustainable ways of living in the urban environments.

Examples of creative communities initiatives are: self-managed services for the care of children and the elderly; new forms of exchange and mutual help; alternative mobility systems; socialising…

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From the 20^th to the 24^th of February, the first CCSLA workshop will take place in Cape Town, South Africa.

It will be based on two appointments:

- the Design Exercise with the students, where they will be asked to reflect, analyse and re-think the cases of “creative communities” they found in their previous research work;

- the Expert Seminar with researchers, designers, professors and NGOs representatives, where a discussion, starting from the cases that have been found, will try to outline their common characteristics, their sustainability potential and their possible improvement.

Click on the images below to hear about some of the cases that will be analysed and discussed in the workshop.

Click on this link to access to CCSL South Africa blog, with a repository of all the South-African cases found by Cape Town students:

http://www.sustainable-everyday.net/ccsla_sa/

The following section presents a list of cases coming from different African countries, illustrating examples of creative communities engaging themselves in collaborative production and service initiatives.

This list is in the form of a ’catalogue-in progress’ and will be used during the workshop, to support and foster the discussion, while at the same time being enriched by the contribution of students and experts.

Claim:

St. Kizito Gardening project is one of the initiatives by Kolping that supply some of the areas around Khayelitsha with fresh vegetables. This project supplies from schools, local clinics, vegetable vendors to a simple man in the street.

Service idea:

St. Kizito gardening project is a community based agricultural project serving as a local provider of nutritious foods such as vegetables.

Function addressed:

As a reason of a growing need for nutritious foods as a result of HIV/AIDS, this project becomes the heart of the community in closing that gap. St. Kizito provides most of the local clinics with fresh vegetables at a reasonable price and also supplies some primary schools and locals. The list doesn’t end there as they also help a number of families by providing job opportunities for the unskilled and the uneducated. 

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Claim:

Car-pooling amongst working colleagues  

Service idea:

A group of co-workers in Cape Town who drive to and from their place of work together. Each member has a turn to use their personal vehicle. The schedule is on a weekly rotation basis.

Function addressed:

This initiative helps the participants to save money through paying less for petrol and having less wear-and-tear of their vehicles. This initiative does not just only help the users but also the environment. The carbon footprint decreases due to three cars being replaced by one. Hence fewer fumes are released into the air.

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Service idea:

Product or service sharing and exchange within Mount Pleasant Community Harare Zimbabwe.

The service idea is Community Support through exchange and sharing - basically supplying one with what you have in exchange for what the other has, in this case water, in exchange for a skill or whatever one has growing in one’s garden or whatever one has in abundance. This project is rooted and driven by the African belief that we are all brothers and need to uplift each other, take care of each other, respect each other and love each other.

When the water supply is cut off, one goes to the property of a person they know has a borehole in the neighbourhood and asks for water, in this particular case the house of Mr Hove, 16 Kingsbridge Avenue. The person comes with containers and is allowed to fill them with what he or she needs and at a later stage, the person returns with products or a service to say thank you and the exchange is complete. This exchange often results in a building of lasting relationships between neighbours, which in turn enables and allows communities to continue to sustain themselves during the economic hardships facing the country and until the country is functioning again. The main problem of this idea is that the boreholes sometimes run on electricity and the electricity supply is also erratic thus the person may not have enough water to give. Also the properties with boreholes may be very far away thus a person is limited to the amount of water they can get and one is also limited by time as they may only collect water when the owner of the property is present.

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Claim:

Practical and affordable wooden furniture from recyclable materials

Service Idea:

Providing outdoor hotel benches, dog kennels, Wendy (timber) houses and ceiling boards from sustainable materials.

Function Addressed:

The idea creates jobs for those who are self-employed by taking an initiative to find these products or items and make them available to the public at reasonable prices. This in return creates a market for those who cannot afford to buy these goods and disadvantaged by adverse economic circumstances.

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