Permaculture going urban

Part one : Analysis

Cities, why did we start building them and what can we do with them today? As with any of these big questions Permaculture designers will think strategically, analyse the system and then work out how to improve it.

Keep what works well

Improve and reorganise that which works poorly

Eliminate anything that harms people or the biosphere

One of the things to which a Permaculture designer accords a lot of importance in a system the area or areas that will be returned to nature and allowed to naturally rewild. In the jargon we call these areas zone 5’s. I tend to start a design by selecting these areas and then leaving them be, which is an easy start and takes a big chunk out of the whole process. In a similar way when analysing a city, town or village I tend to start at the 3rd point above which means assessing those things which harm and damage and must be removed from the system. The sound environment, the air quality, the causes of accidents, for example. In fact in many ways removing that which harms and destroys health and wellbeing can profoundly change the quality of life of urban dwellers.

The classic example of this is road traffic. The roads and parking areas take up a lot of space. Vehicules, even when ‘low emission’ pollute. Electric vehicules shed tyre and brake particles which are toxic, above a certain speed the impact of the tyres on the road is noisy They are as dangerous as petrol or diesel cars, (I wrote about this in an earlier article).

In general a Permaculture designer won’t propose a stick approach but will use an organic carrot, so the question here is how to attract people to other forms of transport? What can we do to make a car an expensive road ornament that is so rarely used that people get rid of them? A part of the analysis will be to explore why people use cars in an urban environment? Sometimes it is because public transport is virtually absent or due a lack of political will the existing systems are underfunded and incoherent.

In one study, done in an English town, people were asked why the drove their kids to school instead of letting them walk or walking with them. The primary response was that being a pedestrian in a city was dangerous because of the cars. It is worth noting that children suffer more from pollution than adults, the key, as with any poison, is the dose. Children, in general, have lower body mass indexes than the adults who are getting the same dose which means that said dose is more harmful to the kids.

Another seeming paradox is that many people are attracted to urban areas because of all the activities to be found in them. These activities need a big urban population in order to thrive yet being surrounded by large numbers of ‘strangers’ is often harmful to people. Being bustled by people one doesn’t know on a bus is stressful and tends to provoke a ‘flight or fight’ reflex. In fact most urban dwellers have over activated amygdalas, (two almond shaped parts of the brain highly linked to the flight or fight reflex). The amygdala chronic overstimulation and dilation in urban dwellers is similar to that found with ex-combatants suffering from PTSD.

Ok, I’m starting to write a book here. I need to be more concise.

Zoom out of the city and we can see people quitting the countryside and heading to town. We will also see a counter and smaller migration of people moving back to the countryside or to suburban areas. A bigger pull-out zoom will show huge areas of countryside where there are very few people and the landscape is dominated by extensive, inefficient (Chris Dixon wrote about this) mechanised farms. Around the world we see villages dying as people rush to the cities, I worked in one that had gone from several hundred inhabitants to six. This drain away provokes a negative cascade effect, as people leave there are fewer services, shops, and entertainment, which pushes more people to leave. Urban areas swell and spread over farmland and wild areas, replacing the with buildings, roads and destroying the ecological services they once provided.

The massive urban population growth that we see is encouraging an increase in the number of people leaving to set up in smaller towns and villages. In some places this is quite an important flow yet strangely one doesn’t read much about it in national newspapers, on the TV nor even on Twitter.

Basically what I’m saying is that in a similar way, when designing a building, we work out how best to position the house in such a way that the landscape and planted landscape is the first line of house insulation, urban permaculture starts with reducing the rural urban exodus. We do this by designing small towns and villages to make them function well and reduce the push factor that encourages people to leave. We also redesign them to encourage an in-flow of ex city people; to be noted, we put into place local strategies to avoid gentrification and and the creation of ‘holiday’ villages. When this is done we can start looking at how to improve the quality of life of urban dwellers and reduse the negative impacts of cities on people and the biosphere.

The next article will look at rural renewal and how to design villages that function well.

I must apologise for the longer periods between articles. I am rebuilding a 16m long bridge, the orginal collapsed into the river.

This is taking a lot of my time,

I was also bitten by a teeny weeny spider and my arm swelled up and I was laid up for a week with a pretty impresive infection. To quote the local nurse ‘ well, with this climate change business we’re seing more and more exotic insects and insect bites.’ La vie est belle!