The Global Studio

It is Blog Action Day 2008 today - and the focus issue is poverty.  I thought it would be the perfect opportunity  to introduce The Global Studio. 

Global Studio is an action research program where international interdisciplinary students, academics, and professionals in the city building professions come together to collaborate on community-based projects. Informed by the UN Millennium Development Goals, the program promotes forms of education and practice that will benefit under-served communities and facilitate bottom-up, collaborative partnerships. 

I was lucky enough to be a part of Global Studio Johannesburg in 2007 and together with other students from Brazil, New Zealand, Italy, Chile and America – we developed a project called Small Changes, Big Improvements.  Click here to see what we did.  

Another group of inspired and talented students returned to Johannesburg this year to work with the residents of Diepsloot in Johannesburg and did a fantastic job developing the work from last year.  Continuing to focus on projects ranging in scope from housing to the environment to communication technologies and the arts – all projects were driven by local people’s interests and developed with high levels of community participation.  Sustainability was number one priority and projects were developed with strong communcation with local authorities and NGOs. 

You can see the continuing work of the Community Chalkboards project on Candy Chang’s fabulous website.  These chalkboards in the township of Diepsloot improve information sharing between residents.

Candy explains that being public and paperless, the community chalkboard gives residents an accessible platform and allows them to share info on a daily basis, self-organize, and empower each other through local knowledge. And it's cheap to boot! 

Make sure you take some time to explore her site – she is pure talent.  Candy’s ‘I’ve Lived’ public art project will interest many in these times of number crunching. I know I have been dying to know how much rent my neighbours are paying.  What a great idea to start community dialogue.  

Back to The Global Studio, GS founder Anna Rubbo from The University of Sydney will present the work of Global Studio together with Diepsloot residents in Nanjing, China at the UN World Urban Forum. 

It is critical that design education and practice should focus on collaboration with the urban poor to improve the environment and living conditions of society's poorest 20% in cities worldwide. Let’s hope that Anna and the Global Studio programme can get some well-deserved recognition and funding!

blog action day - we're in. are you?

Next Wednesday the 15th of October is this year's Blog Action Day. The topic this year is poverty. If like us you haven't come across this great concept before your in for a lovely surprise. As Pia from the blog enhance the everyday said it's a "great idea to bang our blogs together to stimulate awareness, conversation and creativity about something that is in desperate need of our attention." 

Last year the issue was the environment and this year it's poverty. This project is supported by the UN, and lots of other organisations both big and small. So if you'd like to join us on the 15th click here to register and here for more information. 

We'll be posting something from bricks + cartwheels and will be clicking around the blogosphere to check out what everyone else is writing/thinking/creating.

Jeffrey Sachs in Sydney

Jeffrey Sachs was in Sydney last week and spoke at The University of Sydney as part of the opening festivities of USYD's new research group - the Institute of Sustainable Solutions.
This group will conduct very important research into issues such as climate change, renewable energy, population growth, health, food and energy security, providing new ways of thinking. Its great that Sydney University is choosing to tackle the big issues!

It was a great honour to have our favourite presenter Adam Spencer as MC for the night to introduce Jefrey Sachs - the absolute inspiration for bricks + cartwheels. Sachs has a bio that is too lengthy for me to even begin to summarise here unless I want to write a short book! I can say that From 2002 to 2006, he was Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Director of the UN Millennium Project. Many a night during uni - the bricks + cartwheels girls spent late nights reading the Millennium Development Goals and dreaming about the work that we would like to do (if we ever finished uni!) So the work of Sachs became very real inspiration for about solutions. bricks + cartwheels which we started in late 2006.

So - back to last week - Sachs speech in The Great Hall was very powerful and we were hanging off every word. Sachs covered issues such as climate change, low food productivity, the heavy burden of disease and the obstacles of physical isolation. One part of his talk that I would like to share was his emphasis on the problems of the high birth rates in countries like Kenya.

Birth rates stay high for multiple reasons: little or no access to family planning, contraception or education for girls, low child survival and a persistent view that children represent the only security for parents in their old age. We know that the secondary school for girls, Katolo, Kenya will work towards greater education for women so that family planning can become a choice and women can become educated leaders of their own communities!

Sachs is the author of two fantastic books - The End of Poverty (2005) and most recently Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008)


The End of Poverty inspired the work and philosophy of the bricks + cartwheels team. Sachs describes his work in over 100 countries including Kenya and explains how our generation can choose to end extreme poverty by the year 2025. The methods he describes scream common sense that it is heart wrenching to understand the stubborn attitude of the first world and their reluctance to take part. Don’t think that this book is going to a dry, academic exercise. Sachs has a gift for making statistics and complex issues accessible, highly readable and memorable. Bono is a huge fan of the work of Sachs and writes in the book's introduction: “He helps us make sense of what senseless really means: 15,000 Africans dying each and every day of preventable, treatable diseases.”

I am yet to read Sachs latest book but Common Wealth explains the most basic economic reckoning that the world faces. We can address poverty, climate change, and environmental destruction at a very modest cost today with huge benefits for shared and sustainable prosperity and peace in the future, or we can duck the issues today and risk a potentially costly reckoning in later years. My signed copy of Sachs latest book is sitting by my bed. I can't wait to start reading it!