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276 JUDIT FARKAS posits that the success of all these efforts depends on the profound comprehension that humans are not separated from nature; rather, they are biological beings and their cultural institutions are tightly connected to the natural cycle and the landscape in which they live. The complex urban development efforts that look on cities as ecosystems are becoming increasingly dominant in todays discourses on sustainability. The theme has a large literature and numberless methods and examples (see, e.g., Tang 2013) devoted to it; these will be developed in the — planned — new volume of this EH Reader. In this paper, the focus is on grassroots urban communities, specifically two of the initiatives, community gardens and the movement of the Transition Towns. Transition Towns Movement (TM, TTM, TTN)4 The Transition Towns Movement was initiated in England by Rob Hopkins. The first Transition Town was founded in England — under the leadership of Hopkins — in the town of Totnes. The movement's site showed that in January 2023, 1121 groups belonged to the movements (https://transitiongroups.org). The members are fairly well-off, educated people who accept the scholarly consensus on anthropogenic climate change and the energy crisis (Boudinot — LeVasseur 2016: 386). The movement is based on the postulate that the dual threat of the depletion of non-renewable energy sources and anthropogenic climate change urge people to rethink and redesign their ways of living and bring about more resilient and sustainable communities. Their objective is to contribute to a world of low carbonemitting resilient communities based on social justice, active participation and the culture of care. The instruments for achieving this are the resilient and adaptive local communities which can cope with the above-mentioned challenges. The movement's aim is to assist such communities’ founding and development. Hopkins based his idea on the theory of resilience and adopted Brian Walker’s and his colleagues’ definition: “Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and avoid a shift to an alternate state (regime) so that it still preserves the same function, structure, identity and feedback” (cited in Scott Cato — Hillier 2011: 6). In addition to resilience, the movement also lays great stress on developing adaptive skills. Transition may affect all aspects of local life: searching for, or creating, local food and energy resources; strengthening the local economy, local producers and small enterprises; trading or exchanging second-hand goods; economizing with energy resources; environment-friendly transportation options; introducing local currencies, and so on. The Transitioners (as they refer to themselves) try to find alternative modes for running the economy and elaborating the vision of a nonThe names used in activist and academic literature include Transition Movement, TM, Transition Towns Movement, TTM and Transition Towns Network, TTN. In short, they are often called Transition Towns. Hopkins was an instructor of permaculture, which knowledge he used to elaborate the concept of Transition Towns: he reinterpreted the 12 basic principles of permaculture (see the chapter on Food Supply as a Global Challenge) for the scale of the community.
