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The architect students' own image of a sustainable Alingsås.
Earlier I’ve written about the 25 architect students from Chalmers University of Technology who have been concentrating on how to turn the ordinary small town Alingsås into a place that will work and prosper without fossil fuels.
Now the time has come for the students to present their ideas, and yesterday they met local politicians, the Transition Alingsås group and “ordinary” inhabitants in a crowded assembly hall.
All their projects are presented on their website (some of them in English) and several of them focus on the importance of producing food locally in a world where greenhouse gas emissions must decrease and energy will be a more expensive resource.
One of the studies that I like particularly is made by Elin Erlansson, who has sketched the first steps of how to make Alingsås more self-sufficient on food. Her idea is to engage the inhabitants to start growing more food themselves, individually and collectively, and to create a food centre in the middle of town just by the train station. In this centre the locally and regionally produced food would be gathered and then further distributed to consumers coming to the grocery shop by bike or by foot, or transported to people’s home areas with public buses that will anyway make their way through town.The centre also houses a restaurant serving locally produced dishes and Elin discusses the possibility of using a local currency to facilitate these local supply chains.
Another project work written by the students Hajir Latifi, Virginie Ducournau & Daniela Farias (in English) target on how the city centre has been flooded with cars and how this could be changed, making Alingsås a town for pedestrians and cyclists.
It all sounds very nice and when you think about it, it’s easy to start wondering why these aren’t ideas always applied: After all, having towns made for the people living there, making sure they will have food, clean water and encouraging their engagement in the local environment sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?
