A crash course in changing the world.
I found out from my research for this week’s Act Mission that Grahamstown actually has quite a strong urban resilience plan in place in case of emergency and it is ongoing, which makes it a valuable resource in the ongoing battle for sustainability.
Unfortunately at the same time I must admit that a lot of the people I spoke to did not know that this was the case. I must admit however, that I as well did not know about many of the projects until I delved deep into the town’s archives and information centres, so I cannot blame them.
I was therefore pleased to be able to tell my digs mates as well as some of my colleagues about the plans that the city has taken to ward against urban disaster.
When I told them about the plans they all thought it was a good idea and a few even said they would try and find out more about them by themselves.
The main project is a greening project. This serves three main purposes. Firstly it helps to create employment in a town that is very heavily struck by poverty. Secondly it helps with sustainability and finally, and probably most prevalent here, is that it results in the city’s urban resilience plan. The project is basically the growing of “imfino” by gardeners all over the city and the outskirts. “Imfino” are wild, edible greens. This gives those gardeners a job where before they had nothing, it then allows them to out food on the table for their family as well as giving them a sense of pride and self-help. The fact that the gardeners are growing these plants all over the city means that there is far less carbon dioxide in the air and is also helping give out oxygen, which will obviously lead to increased sustainability of our city. Finally these greens will be of great help if the city was to ever fall into chaos or crisis.
Because Grahamstown is downhill of many dams and rivers it is important for us to have a flooding contingency plan. Due to this there are already certain measures in place in case we do recover from this drought and go onto the other extreme. These measure include a stockpile of empty sandbags at the local quarry, ready to be filled at a moments notice and taken to town to be distributed to the shops so that the water won’t get under the doors and destroy the owner’s stock and therefore his/her livelihood.
Grahamstown also has and emergency evacuation plan, where the army will step in and will therefore be able to evacuate certain areas of the city in very little time at all. The town is divided into four sectors that each have there own emergency contingency planning committee who meet regularly in order to make sure all the plans are in place, should the worst case scenario occur.
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