Whether idly over a beer, or more seriously as part of GIS sustainability modelling, it’s a question I’ve been mulling over. It’s also something I’ve been discussing with my daughters, aged 10 and 7. What are the most important things for a safe and comfortable life? “TV!” they laugh, knowing it will wind me up. “Zhu Zhu Pets!” (I know, I didn’t know either, but sadly I do now).

Then the other night, the water company had to fix a leaking main up our street. By chance I was outdoors and heard their muffled attempt at letting us know via a loudhailer. Five minutes’ notice, they said, and the water would be off for two hours. At least I think that’s what they said.

And the whole mood changed: a sunny spring evening was suddenly full of people coming out looking perplexed, knocking on each others’ doors, and running up to where the water people were busy digging. They had turned on taps. Nothing had come out. Civilisation had come to a shuddering halt.

We’d filled a few jugs and the kettle, but my seven year old started crying. “You can die without water!” she sobbed. “I saw it on TV!”

We calmed her down, but it was a useful opportunity to have a good discussion about what a privilege it is to have safe, clean water on demand, and not to have to walk for hours to collect it, like many young girls around the world. Whole regions can be threatened if their water supplies are diverted by dams, and wars over water are far from unthinkable. Even here, the lack of water can have some extreme impacts.

Up the road in Gloucestershire, the floods in 2007 put out a pumping station for three weeks. On the one hand, as Anna in Gloucestershire commented on the BBC website, the street corner water bowsers built the sense of community – “I will miss the social activity that it became, seeing children collecting it, the elderly man walking with his walking stick and his saucepan, taking just enough, the comments that we were the lucky ones, and the feeling as I collected it that it was a precious commodity which we usually take for granted.”

On the other, vandals urinated in a bowser for the old people’s home where my mother works, and police had to be called to supermarkets to stop fist fights over dwindling supplies of bottled water in Cheltenham.

These two extremes of response highlight clean water’s undoubted position as No. 1 on the list of survival needs even in our “civilised” country. An online survival specialist puts it in black and white: “When faced with a survival situation, clean drinkable water is often the most important consideration. People have survived without food for weeks or even months, but go without water for even just one day and the survivor will be in desperate straights indeed.”

They also highlight the central position of community in responding to a shortage. Clean water, food, shelter, warmth… and good people around you to share them with. Maybe it’s not my final list of Top 5 necessities, but it’s not a bad start.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

We’re now well settled in a handsome listed building in Bath’s Walcot Street, but the intriguing part is what happens when you start talking to your new landlords and their other business partners. MASCo is a long-established architectural salvage company, and in recent years they’ve applied their experience of sensitive demolition and reclamation of historic building materials to wider sustainability consulting, also recruiting full-time sustainability consultant James Hurley.

We were introduced to MASCo by Bath-based architects and urban planners Nash Partnership, who use their renovation and regeneration experience to maintain the highest standards of sustainable design.

So both these organisations saw the potential of working closely to offer a blend of talent and sustainability expertise, and also got interested in how Geofutures’ mapping, data analysis and visualisation could contribute to regeneration and development planning. Nash Partnership is also moving here, redeveloping the historic North Range building into sustainably designed office space.

Meanwhile ‘Walcot Yard’ is taking shape not only as an office location, but a sustainability hub from which we can offer public and private sector clients insight and advice, reconnecting the building cycle with the geographical region, based on a unique combination of knowledge.

We’ve always enjoyed the fact that so many sustainability organisations are based in the south west – while also taking our place within the well-developed knowledge economy of Bath. It certainly seems like a natural development for us and we’re excited about working with our Walcot Yard colleagues in future.

Oh – and the MASCo guys certainly know how to throw a party. To celebrate the creation of Walcot Yard and their expansion into their new Bath premises, founder Steve Tomlin and team hosted 500 friends, colleagues and clients to a rocking opening night in May, and of course we (among other local glitterati) were there to welcome them to the city.

L-R: Edward Nash (Nash Partnership), Kevin Harris (MASCo Director), Steve Tomlin (MASCo MD), James Hurley (MASCo Director), Mark Thurstain-Goodwin (Geofutures), Ruth Keily (Geofutures) at the MASCo and Walcot Yard opening party, May 2010

More about: MASCo | Nash Partnership

It’s a great example of data made accessible and meaningful, no doubt the reason why so much of the UK’s media ran the story today. The Local Data Company have launched a report for the 2009 year end, Dawn of a Better Market, including a Geofutures retail vacancy rate contour map for Q4 2009, updating the one used by the FT looking at the first quarter of the year.

Side by side, the maps show a contraction in the area of highest vacancy rates in north east England and southern Scotland, though vacancies are still running high, with north Wales/Merseyside and the south Midlands also performing slightly better. The North Midlands and East Kent are still hotspots of high vacancies.

These results are based on over 149,000 shop premises in 700 town and city centres across Great Britain surveyed by LDC. More information about Town Centre Intelligence.

High street retail vacancies, Q1, 2009

High Street retail vacancies, Q4 2009

These maps are the results of our food security analysis published together with the Transition Network this month – you’ll find details of our methodology and a link to the full report in our earlier post.

The analysis is based on Defra land classifications, a permaculture model and a ‘food zoning’ model based on perishability and labour intensity, which places fruit and vegetable growing areas closest to the town, followed outwards by cereals and other food crops, dairy and beef, and finally sheep farming on the poorest soils furthest from the town.

Have a play and see how you can zoom in to see the component parts of the foodshed. Doing so against an aerial photography background brings home how a relocalised food economy might look around this classic market town.

Of course, the analysis raises many more questions: about the overlap between towns’ foodsheds, the lack of sufficient woodfuel and the urgent need for more fine-scale land use data among other issues. As Transition founder Rob Hopkins wrote in his blog, food scarcity is how wars start – unless, we hope, we’ve done much more analysis of this kind to plan for it effectively in advance.

It’s a good example of how GIS, spatial analysis and mapping data can bring possible future scenarios to life, igniting debate and making results widely accessible to experts and non-experts alike. For us, it’s satisfying applied to any sector, organisation or data type, but food security analysis probably has the widest implications of anything we do.

What happens when oil is too expensive to transport food around the world?

To avoid famine and food conflicts‚ we need to plan to re-localise our food economy. This map is part of that process – showing the food requirement ’footprints’ around settlements in SW England.

Use the pan and zoom controls to view your chosen area‚ and read more about how Geofutures is mapping our food future below.