Transition Móstoles, a short step, a big city, a long way.
By rob hopkins 11th January 2016
During the 2015, the Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo and the municipal candidatureGanar Móstoles have worked together in designing the strategies that will make Transition City Mostoles possible [Este post está disponible también en castellano]. As a result of this cooperation and the effort made by the candidature town councilors –people we specially want to thank for their hard-working dedication to the arduous tasks they had to take over- last Thursday the 16th of November, a municipal motion to include Móstoles in the global Transition Towns movement was accepted unanimously by the whole of the parties composing local government.
This motion supposes an explicit compromise by all the local groups in government to:
- Make a future institutional statement including Móstoles in any of the emerging networks that are bringing together these experiences at an international level and
- Become this compromise into facts, by developing a pilot project in cooperation with the actors that from the civil society have been driving the plan Móstoles, Transition City.
We know this is only a short step, maybe not even the most important one, but this is a step allowing us to generate a framework for action that, institutionally, may make viable later developments with a more practical dimension, in reach of everybody in a finite planet.
From the Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo, we will start by trying to turn this institutional compromise into an ambitious urban garden network along with a powerful program to intervene in educational centers. We trust in continuing adding the other projects –among the total 22 designed by working together with the social movements -with the aim of implementing an integral Transition process.
However, our activity will continue being independent from Institutions since we know institutional policy is a minefield for social transformation. It would be rather naive to believe a motion could not become a dead letter if it is does not come along with an external effort, made from self-organization and self-management. But we know, by our own experience, that self-management has also its limits. Necessarily, a transition process has to be a process of experimentation with dual strategies: a foot in councils and ten feet on the streets, in communities, in the construction of alternatives from the grassroots and specific utopias.
We consider the declaration of “Móstoles, Transition City” is an important and hopeful landmark. We are talking about a city -200.000 inhabitants- 17 km from Madrid city center, but having the social environment you would typically find in a town. It has a wide area that has not been urbanized, agriculture in the outskirts is still alive and the city has a rebel social fabric that has been proving to be a transformational muscle for many years. In addition, Móstoles has an enormous potential to pass on its initiatives, since it is situated in Madrid’s working class area, an urban space bringing together a million people with similar social, cultural and urban characteristics. We hopefully believe the success of a Transition process in Móstoles could spread along the whole of the sociologic space that has an important weight in the future of our country. Our objective is massive, and doubtlessly escapes our current possibilities, but this, as any big adventure, has a humble start.
This post is based on a larger text which will be published at 15-15-15 and can be downloaded here: comunicado-mocion-transicion-para-15-15-15.pdf