Urban Sustainability in Action
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The Ashevillage Insitute (AVI)
AVI creates sustainable urban solutions through education, demonstration and action. AVI's living laboratory headquarters is in a downtown neighborhood in Asheville, North Carolina.
AVI promotes urban sustainability through:
• Hands-on educational workshops & trainings
• An eco-urban demonstration center in downtown Asheville
• Community outreach, organizing & advocacy
• Educational documentation & presentations
The Vision of City Repair
City Repair began in Portland, Oregon with the idea that localization - of culture, of economy, of decision-making - is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.
What is City Repair?city-repair-logoCity Repair is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.
City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. The many projects of City Repair have been accomplished by a mostly volunteer staff and thousands of volunteer citizen activists.
Our vision is to:
*inspire people to both understand themselves as part of a larger community and fulfill their own creative potential, and
*activate people to be part of the communities around them, as well as part of the decision-making that shapes the future of their communities.
City Repair was formed in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. Born out of a successful grassroots neighborhood initiative that converted a residential street intersection into a neighborhood public square, City Repair began its work with the idea that localization (of culture, of economy, of decision-making) is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.
Operations
We are an almost entirely volunteer-run social-profit (non-profit) organization. Our projects include:
temporary and permanent placemaking installations, community events, educational presentations, consultation and technical assistance, community placemaking facilitation, and the development of our own egalitarian community of activists and volunteers.
The City Repair Project maintains an office in Portland, operating with over 15 largely volunteer and part-time staff, coordinators, and assistants.
We facilitate artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world.
Our Fields of Work
Placemaking and architecture
Urban planning and design
Ecological and Social Sustainability
Community resource localization
Nonhierarchical decision-making: Resources include:
Seeds for Change, Making Decisions Co-operatively, Starhawk’s Activism Page
Equality, diversity and peace
Cultural identity and Bioregionalism
Paradigm reconstruction
