_Just So Studio

I am a 25-year old allotment-holder, guerilla gardener and architecture student.  Originally from Sheffield, I have been living in London for 5 years.  I am currently based in North London, with an allotment near Wood Lane, friends scattered around and a guerilla garden I started last summer at Hornsey Police Station.

I look at graphs of Peak Oil and wonder what our neighbourhoods will be like to live in 10, 20, 50 years down the line. How will our supply chains, hospitals, councils, sports facilities, places of work and cultural institutions function with significantly lower energy and resource availability?  What infrastructures need to be established now [physically, culturally, socially, locally] to enable our communities to function well into the future?

How do we move forward with less energy?

I am starting by looking at Haringey, focussing on a study area around Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale during Spring 2010.  An area with many community buildings, many sites with potential, many thriving local businesses, many grass-roots sustainability groups, and also many challenges.  There are approximately 5000 living in temporary accommodation across Haringey.  How can we meet the immediate local needs in the context of the global and environmental needs?  The blog is a record of ideas, observations and projects, and is open for public discussion.  Through interventions, design projects, the blog and Flickr photostream [www.flickr.com/justsostudio], I aim to populate both online and physical space with optimism, dialogue and whole system design-thinking.  Please add your comments, add your ideas.


\\\\\ Just So Studio \\\\\

Learning how to respond to the challenge of Peak Oil through innovative design leadership in our community.  Within our means, within the means of the earth.

_I began

I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjoured up the book I myself would have liked to read.
Italo Calvino