Transition towns and world cities: towards green networks of cities

The Transition Initiative is a highly successful movement promoting localisation of economic processes. The basic question that this essay considers is how to relate this movement's favoured units of practice, transition towns with populations of around 5000, to the contemporary world of large cities, so-called world cities, global cities and mega-cities. My means to achieve this end is to interrogate the concept of “local” to make it more strategically amenable to analysing multiple-scale living, and concomitantly, to recognise and understand the importance of non-local spheres of behaviour. The latter is derived from Jane Jacobs work on the city in which the balance between local production and imported (non-local) production is crucial. Her import replacement argument is used to show compatibility between economic change and sustainability. This leads to the concept of green networks of cities which I begin to explore.