Finsbury’s Budding Community

As the St. Paul’s encampment chapter of Occupy London closes, Finsbury’s  blossoming eco-village is preparing to accommodate some of the occupiers forced by eviction to relocate their passion, politics and possessions. Public spending cuts have left the square’s owners, the Borough of Islington, with an overstretched legal team. Although officially declaring the site an “unauthorised occupation”,  the council is “reluctant” to devote potentially millions of pounds to evict the protesters. Walking into Finsbury Square on a grey Sunday morning, visitors are confronted with an eerily barren site. Yet scraping below the surface one finds a thriving community, rebuilding itself from its ashes.

In January a violent storm devastated a large part of the camp’s infrastructure, giving the occupiers an ‘opportunity’ to rebuild the site and to realign with its original mission. The first Finsbury Square General Assembly, held on the 22nd of October, ratified that due to its setting, the ethos of the camp would be  constructed around concerns for eco-friendliness and sustainability. However due to logistics and timing constraints these ideas were not implemented during the initial camp construction Margarida, one of the main proponents of the sustainable rebuilding project explains that “Environmental aspects are not separate from economic ones, and that’s something we have to put on the table as part of Occupy.”

At present, the eco-village is comprised of two model houses, a geodesic dome and a wooden yurt, which is under construction. The houses are built and insulated with 100 percent reclaimed material. The dome is an art installation donated by British artist Alex Hartley. Nature has been a constant theme in Hartley’s work, which seeks to explore the connection between habitation and wilderness, between belonging and isolation.

In its transition to self-reliant sustainability the project’s key targets are energy, food waste and construction. The issues raised by the eco-village have resonated with a number of organisations external to Occupy. Particularly notable in it list of partners is the architecture firm Archetype. The studio is developing a low-cost demountable pavilion made from structural newspaper bales and reclaimed timber pallets for the protesters, built accordingly to the Walter Segal method. The Swiss architect developed a self building architectural system, using primarily reclaimed material. This model, which will guide the majority of the camps’ infrastructure, takes two months to plan and two days to build.

The path to completion of the eco-village will unavoidably be a long and winding one. The majority of occupiers involved in its construction have never been involved in a similar project. Thus, as Margarida says, “Flexibility is key and we work on a trial-and-error basis. While we do have models to inspire us, diversity is essential. What may work for one community might not work for another”.

Despite the many obstacles, ranging from the technical skills required for sustainable projects to the unforgiving weather, the potential of the project is immense. Margarida argues that while the Finsbury Square project is perhaps not an obvious course for Occupy to take, it is absolutely at one with the social, political and economic messages of the movement, as “during the coming year we will see thousands of families losing their homes. Projects such as this are a creative way to bring communities together and empower them, in the spirit of self-sustainability…”. In this small central London square, people of all ages are learning the skills to help them build their own futures.