Neue Arbeit in Südafrika - ausführlich

Große Hoffnungen verbinden auch wir im deutschsprachigen Raum mit Frithjofs Anstrengungen in Südafrika. Es wäre das erste Mal, dass wir unter Beweis stellen könnten, welche unausweichliche und dringende Rolle die Neue Arbeit in einem gelingenden Zusammenspiel zwischen Industrieländern und der sogenannten Dritten Welt hat.

Seit mehr als zwei Jahren steht Frithjof Bergmann in regelmäßigem Kontakt mit dem südafrikanischen Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Technologie. Hier geht es um eine Reihe von möglichen Projekten, die derzeit sehr praxisnah entwickelt werden.

Wie so oft bei der Neuen Arbeit steht am Anfang ein langes Ringen, um heraus zu kristallisieren, was es vor Ort wirkilch, wirklich braucht. Dies kommt der in Südafrika praktizierten Projektförderungspraxis sehr entgegen, die zwingend davon ausgeht, dass Projekte von aktiven Gruppen vor Ort beantragt werden.

Erste Früchte trägt Frithjofs Arbeit in Mogale City (ehemals als Krugersdorp bekannt, nahe Johannisburg).

Zusammen mit dem Bewohnern dreier Townships der Stadt hat Frithjof Bergmann sehr konkret herausgearbeitet, welche Bedürfnisse vornan stehen. Eine der drei Townships ist die 300-Häuser-Siedlung „Ethembalethu“ nahe Muldersdrift, nördlich Johannesburg gelegen. Aufgrund des Engagements der Bewohner ist der sehr arme Stadtteil bereits als „Eco-Village“ bekannt. Hugh Gosnell, der Executive Director für Soziales und Wirtschaft von Mogale City hat hier im vergangenen Jahr unter dem Titel „PILOT PROJECT ON INTEGRATED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL SETTLEMENTS“ einen entsprechenden Projektantrag zur Realisierung eines umfänglichen Neue-Arbeit-Projektes gestellt. Die Bewilligung des Projektantrages wurde für die nächsten Wochen in Aussicht gestellt.

http://www.mogalecity.gov.za/

Im Mittelpunkt des Projektes stehen zunächst drei Ziele, die wir hier der Einfachkeit halber im englischen Originaltext wiedergeben:

 

1) VERTICAL GARDENS

Not through a fancy hi-tech, but through a small group of simple though brilliantly intelligent inventions, it has become possible and even easy to now grow vegetables like cabbages, cucumbers and peppers, but also melons and berries, mushrooms and corn not horizontally on the ground, but instead vertically in columns that can be up to four or five meters in height.

At the core of these vertical columns are “containers” that can be stacked on top of each other. These can be made from the same twigs that are otherwise used for the weaving of baskets, or also from waste wood, or again from recycled plastic, or from used automobile tires, or from still other locally available materials. Put simply, the columns are filled with the best possible compost, and are covered with holes on all sides from the bottom right up to the top, so that the vegetables and fruits can grow out of these holes.

The cluster of advantages possessed by these vertical gardens is multiple and dense: Most obviously one does not need land. (In the city of Detroit, for example, people are raising significant quantities of food on balconies, door steps, and roofs.) But these gardens also use water far more sparingly – since the containers are sealed on the inside with plastic garbage bags – than gardens where the water is splashed on the flat ground. In addition, one also needs far less in the way of tools or even of skills, since there is neither plowing, nor harking, nor pulling of weeds.

We plan to introduce this vertical form of gardening to between three and six carefully selected community sites. The expectation is that the exchanges between these different sites would be intense: they would learn from each other, support each other, but in a number of ways they would also compete with each other and in the process raise the level of their performance.

 
• Und hier für alle, die noch Fragen zur in Amerika bekannten Praxis des vertical gardening haben, eine Infoseite der University of Vermont, Extension Department of Plant and Soil Science:
http://pss.uvm.edu/ppp/articles/vertgard.html

• Hier eine gute Hintergrundseite zu Vertical Farming:
http://www.verticalfarm.com/index2.htm

• Und einige Links mehr:
http://www.cityfarmer.org/subrooftops.html

• Und ein augenzwinkernder Ausblick in die Zukunft des Vertical Gardening:
http://www.sentex.net/%7Eedc/VerticalGardens/vgs_take_over.htm

 

2) WEISE’S WATER FILTER SYSTEMS

The core of these systems is an amazingly effective small Filter (roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase)constructed so that one can pour dirty, foul- smelling, and bacteria ridden water in at the top and clean, odorless and healthy water comes out at the bottom. This filter uses no chemical ingredients, only minimal amounts of electricity, and has won the prestigious Wuppertal award. (See picture).

After a careful examination we would install filtering systems in three selected sites. Each of these systems would have the capacity appropriate for a small community. In a first phase the filters would be adapted to local circumstances and the manufacturing of the accessory components (pumps, pipes, valves, connectors etc.) in the local sites would begin. As soon as feasible we would advance to the stage where the actual filters (the core unit of the systems) would be manufactured in a small shop on one of the sites.

Both of these steps, the vertical gardens and the filters would be explicitly designed to serve a dual function. Both would serve the immediate community consumption (both would be contributions to the building up of a hi-tech base) but they would also at the same time be profit-producing business enterprises for the community. Some of the food grown in the vertical gardens would be for sale to the up-scale restaurants of the next town and not for self-consumption. This emphasis would naturally be very much stronger in the case of the filters. There would be multiple immediate local uses: Most obviously of course for the watering of the gardens, but also for the recycling of bathing, or laundry- and dish washing, or toilet water. In the case of cleaning laundry the same water could be re-cycled up to ten times. Still, the dissemination of these water filters would have an enormous impact on the general social well-being, but most especially on the health of countless South African communities in which water is scarce, and naturally beyond this on communities on the entire African continent. This means that the financial potential of a rapidly expanding water filter manufacturing operation in South Africa might be very impressive indeed. In fact, it is very much part of our plan to utilize this manufacturing operation as a source of funds (as a “cash-cow”)for the further development of New Work Poverty Eradication Projects. (In preliminary discussions with members of the World Health Organization and also the UNDP the appreciation of the magnitude of this impact was very acute, and possible support from these sources at a later stage is therefore a possibility.)

We will first introduce the use of a fabricator for the manufacturing of the accessory components of the filtering systems, but we expect to make the fabricator the center piece of a small mobile factory for the phase in which we will advance to the manufacturing of the actual core filter units. This mobile fabricator will therefore be able to travel to our various project sites, so that as many as three or possibly even five manufacturing sites for filters will evolve approximately one year from the start of the project. At the present time the cost of fabricators lies between 150 000 and 300 000 Rands which is less than the price of a single sophisticated robot. Using, the fabricator in this mobile fashion would obviously make it still more economical than it would otherwise be. For the initial installing of the fabricator and the training of the operating crew Prof. Andreas Gebhard, who is one of the worlds leading experts in this field would come to South Africa.
 

http://www.weise-water-systems.com/
(Ein Beitrag, den wir uns freuen aus Deutschland beisteuern zu können!)

 

3) THE BUILDINGS OF THE COMMUNITY

In the next phase we would construct the homes of the project villages or neighborhoods. These would be built by the community members themselves for the use of building components and systems that are especially designed for the self-building of people who have no previous experience with building has all along been one of the specialties of New Work. Since each of the houses would be designed and built by their future owners, each house would be distinctive and unique, but very much else would make these truly twenty-first century villages and as different from mere “dormitory – style” communities as can be imagined. Part of this would be assured by integrating the vertical gardens into the landscape design of the neighborhoods, but the “units” would also be of various sizes, some with six apartments, others for singles with only a room and a half. Crucially important would be the fact that the entire community would not consist only of homes, but that this would be designed from the start (by the best young architects and designers we can find in the universities of South Africa) as prototypes of self-sufficient communities. In other words there would be buildings serving many uses other than housing: buildings for storage, for the raising of small animals, various shops in which the community members make building components, perhaps cement, furniture and appliances, and garages for various repairs, greenhouses and the like.

In a centrally located and also otherwise eminent spot will be the Community House, (or, also, the Center for New Work.) It will be a large and very beautiful building, designed mainly as one large room covered by a gracefully constructed dome. (See picture) This building, too, would be built by the community members themselves. It would serve a host of different social, economic and political functions, it would be a school, a training center, but also the place in which the advanced manufacturing happens. It would greatly contribute to the identity of each of these villages or neighborhoods, and it would of course boost the pride of the people living there.

Once the dome is up (approx. two years from the start) many of the additional hi-tech- base-building enterprises on which we have been doing preparatory work should evolve quickly and take off with a kind of burst. Among these are a mini-bus renewal, or remanufacturing plant. This would be extremely different from a conventional garage: it would be a shop in which the minibuses that are presently miserably uncomfortable and ugly would be trans formed into far cleaner, far more efficient, but also far roomier and attractive vehicles. This is a context in which the fabricator would truly come into his own, for up to now the serious rebuilding of older cars was simply impossible because the needed spare-parts are too expensive and too hard to obtain. But making single and often complex and outdated parts is exactly what fabricators are able to do most naturally and best. The remanufacturing of minibuses serves once more a double function: The community could purchase inexpensively the number of minibuses they need for their own use and first renew these, and then continue and turn the remanufacturing of old minibuses into a business.

We have done preparatory work on numerous other such enterprises and products. For example, on a “kit” that would enable one to make a generator out of recycled plastic and metal, and similarly a small refrigerator whose cooling system is vastly simpler and more modern than that in our current refrigerators, so that one could make this refrigerator oneself out of recycled plastic milk and coca-cola bottles. On these and a number of other similar projects we work in cooperation with the technical university in Chemnitz, Germany. That university does the most advanced work on small mobile factories, and their contribution will be small mobile factories that allow one to re-manufacture recycled aluminum, or recycles plastic, or recycled glass.

At this point the general dynamic of the cluster of interconnected projects that we propose to develop should be quite clear: Step by step the high-tech base of the communities would grow in power and strength. The communities would become more self-sufficient, and produce an ever greater portion of what they need for themselves. But their business enterprises would multiply and grow in productivity at the same time. The upshot would be that they would leave behind the poverty in which they are now mired, and that genuine economic development would have occurred.

 

 

Projektskizze der zukünftigen Ansicht von Ethembalethu, in der Mitte das Gemeinschaftszentrum, in der Konstruktionsweise eines Monolithic Domes (die ja den eingefleischten Freunden der Neuen Arbeit nicht unbekannt ist).
Siehe auch http://www.monolithicdome.com/

 

Zum Weiterlesen:

Eine gute Übersicht über technische Grundlagen der Neuen Arbeit, speziell über die Monolithic Domes, finden sich in unserer PDF-Broschüre "New Work Center Components" (728 KB)