more appropriate model’.27 From the very start, therefore, it addresses the tension between the linearity of the steps and the more irregular, tumultuous coming to life of Transition. It soon emerged, in fact, that new Transition initiatives would normally be following the Handbook for the first few steps, and then proceed in a less rule-bound fashion, using this text more as a source of inspiration and examples than working their way through it in a structured manner.28 Hence the relinquishing of an instruction manual-like way of introducing Transition that risked enclosing it in a bounded, normative framework.29 (The stepwise presentation that is shed in the passage from the Handbook to the Companion, however, is the same one to which a number of academic authors still cling, given its easy adaptability to scholarly habits of exposition as it lends itself to analytical and comparative examination.)30
The Companion is therefore the point at which awareness appears to emerge about the need to achieve greater fittingness and alignment between the practice of Transition, and the ways in which that moving is communicated and re-presented. In the Companion, Hopkins is able to develop a type of narration that leaves behind the tone of an instruction manual, towards what was dubbed – in an interview with the publisher of this volume – as a ‘recipe book’ consisting of ‘ingredients’. This type of narration is one that proceeds through concrete examples, showcasing possibilities for engaging and experimenting with Transition, as enacted in a variety of disparate settings. Readers are furthermore encouraged to pick and choose those opportunities with which they may resonate most.31
The inspiration for this approach – as Hopkins makes clear in his dissertation32 – was Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.33 This is the work by a renowned advocate of ecological architecture, who looks at the built environment as comprising of patterns that are susceptible of application to similar contexts while – at the same time – retaining sufficient adaptability so that no two instances in which a pattern occurs will be exactly identical.34
Part of the process of aligning the life of Transition with a suitable style of re-presentation also involves a breaking down of the authorial voice. As Hopkins promises in the Introduction: ‘You will find not just my voice throughout this book, but the voices of many people who are actively trying out these ideas and sharing their experiences’.35 The Companion, in other words, has less of the structured, linearised approach of the Handbook, and offers what could perhaps be dubbed a more ‘Transition-like’ possibility for communicating Transition; an instance where resonance is produced between the expression of Transition’s moving in language, and the moving itself.
The change from the Handbook is, at times, striking. Far from a normative pre-setting of the goals that Transition is set to achieve as ‘resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change’, the Companion enumerates a number of different reasons why people are drawn into the moving of Transition. A number of these, such as ‘because it means they can do that project they have always dreamed of’,36 hold little sway as motivations that would be recognisable in some academic settings, where some agreed definition of a ‘problem’ to which a ‘solution’ is being suggested would be expected. But, I believe, this is precisely the point. To observe Transition as a moving, and to go deeper into it, involves precisely a splintering of all-too-neat discursive shells that may be the result of the application of this or that framework to explain an emerging phenomenon away. For this reason, the Companion represents a significant innovation in that it does away with the one good ‘official’ reason to enter Transition, and looks at a much broader array of motives. This, judging also from the interviews I conducted as part of my fieldwork in Totnes, is a more grounded re-presentation of Transition, as the manifold existence of a community in its making.
This approach echoes throughout the Companion. In ch. 6, for instance, Hopkins introduces Transition while avoiding any straightforward definition, but rather by proposing different ‘flavours’ that Transition may disclose to different people. So it is, for example, that Transition is presented as an ‘inner process’, as storytelling and leading by example, as well as a ‘cultural shift’.37
Finally, when presenting possible strategies of performing Transition, these are all offered up as ingredients in a recipe that can then be adjusted to context. Moreover, these strategies are always buttressed by the narration of examples and individual instances carried out in different Transition initiatives. There is, in sum, a much wider diversity of ‘ways into’ Transition and a richer expression of the qualities of its moving that find their way into the re-presentation crafted in the Companion, than there might have been in previous literature.
This approach also shines through in the last addition to Hopkins’s ‘Transition trilogy’ with Green Books: The Power of Just Doing Stuff.38 The book begins, however, by temporarily reverting to a more normative style of exposition. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff, in particular, Hopkins tries to account for the emergence of a number of initiatives around economic relocalisation, which have become thematically recognisable under the label of the REconomy project (see ch. 6). It is understandable, therefore, that this new title has an upfront focus on presenting Transition as an alternative economic model (in a manner reminiscent of the way in which Transition was presented as a community response to peak oil and climate change in the Handbook). The more sectorial focus on economics might equally be a consequence of the fact that the book was originally conceived – according to the publisher John Elford – as a guide to Transition for local authorities, which might therefore justify the inclusion of an immediately recognisable ‘policy’ framing. However, as the book moves beyond the first chapter, the strategy of presenting a number of stories to illustrate and articulate certain common themes in the moving of Transition brings The Power of Just Doing Stuff once again closer to the Companion. Hence, after introducing a new ‘Big Idea’ (that of local resilience as a model for economic development),39 this book eventually departs from a straightforward definitional process. Instead, it articulates that idea by feeling its contours as they emerge through different stories and initiatives.40
The adoption – in these later works by Hopkins – of a format leaning towards a collection of short stories is deeply interesting, as it resonates with a number of other works that fall into a somewhat loose and expanding family of books about Transition-like cultural experimentation. These are other attempts at making visible and calling forth a phenomenon that shines through situated instances of unrest and activism.
One of these works is called Tales of Our Times,41 and it is a collection of Transition-related stories gathered by Stephanie Bradley, a storyteller based in Totnes. A member of Transition in Totnes, Bradley undertook a pilgrimage on foot through a number of other Transition initiatives in the UK. In the process, stories were gathered that Bradley has subsequently retold in the form of fairy tales. The idea behind the project being that, imagining to look back at the present from the future, many of the experiments woven in the moving of Transition could be recast in retrospect as ‘folk’ tales of a time of change.
Bradley, however, goes beyond a mere recollection of projects undertaken under the institutional patronage of Transition. Instead, Transition finds expression here as an open-ended form of life, which makes it possible to recognise kinship across a broad spectrum of outwardly different experiments. For this purpose, she willingly departs from formal designations and institutional belonging. After presenting the stories of a number of Transition initiatives (such as the ‘failure’ and collapse of Transition Brighton42 and the ‘resurrection’ of Transition Lancaster after a similar disbanding,43 or the touching story of a LETS system in West Bridgford near Nottingham),44 she then moves beyond the virtues and vicissitudes of undertakings designated explicitly as ‘Transition’. Instead, she also relates, for example, the tale of care and conviviality shared by one of her hosts during her pilgrimage, whereby a group of elders in the town of Bridgwater would organise to meet local youths outside nightclubs, in order to provide them with ‘essential supplies’ necessitated after a night of partying (such as flip-flops for girls tired of heels).45 With this style of presentation, Bradley channels the experience of Transition through concrete instances. She does so by offering an insight into the continuity transpiring across the breadth of her encounters,
