R-Urban is a project that aims to increase urban resillience by initiating community projects. Their strategy is to "initiate locally closed ecological cycles that will support the emergence of alternative models of living, producing and consuming between the urban and the rural." Their London site is run by Public Works, using shipping containers housed in a disused car park. It's a workshop, training and event series that provides space for green experimentation for solutions to London’s biggest environmental challenges, such as poor air quality and waste management.
We ran a series of three workshops to support the creation of community compost systems. The first workshop introduced students to the art of community composting, through practical, theoretical, playful and speculative lenses. We learned together about the multitude of organisms that are part of the soil, including humans, who have a role to play in collaborating to transform our waste materials, attend to soil health, and imagine better systems for living, caring and being on this planet.
The second workshop had us feeling the heat of a woodchip pile at R-urban, and learning about the biological and chemical processes which make it hot. We will use all our senses to play and experiment with what this pile can do, and made a tasty stew as part of the process!
In the third workshop, we took all the work we had done exploring soil and compost through our different senses: sniffing, feeling, watching, tasting, dreaming and used it to listen to the multispecies stories that surround us. We explored the role that listening and story-telling can play in understanding soil health and building relationships with green spaces.
Photo by Acabashi under Creative Commons license.