Real Urban Permaculture

Strategy and design

You’re not going to find any info on how to grow food in a city in this article. What I’m writing about is a strategic approach to urban restructuring, it’s based on studies in neuroscience, anthroplogy and tied together with Permaculture design.

Is Urban Permaculture about growing food in cities? No.

Is it about creating forest gardens in urban area? No.

Is it about setting up a complimentary currency? No.

Urban Permaculture is about growing food, forest gardens, complimentary currencies and it’s also about housing, pollution, waste, energy, water and on and on.

But urban Permaculture is Permaculture so it’s all of the above, plus a lot more things, designed to work together.

Permaculture, and let’s get this right, is a holistic design system that we use to build sustainable human settlements that care for the Earth and for people. “Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things." ~ Bill Mollison

Urban Permaculture is a strategic approach to urban regeneration that takes into account the impact of urban areas on the biosphere and on the people who live in them. It also considers future trends and their potential needs and consequences.

So where do we start? As usual we analyse, then we design and then we build. So let’s do some analysis.

A brief look at urbanisation

The migration from rural to urban areas continues unabated

Approximately 50–63% of the newly expanded urban land is expected to occur on current croplands. Global crop production will decline by approximately 1–4%, corresponding to the annual food needs for a certain crop of 122–1389 million people.

Urban areas contribute to 70% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions⁶. Urban expansion has resulted in more than 80% of natural habitat loss in local areas⁷.

Urban land is expanding even faster than urban population²

Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.

I could go on analysing urban areas and I did so for my book “La Permaculture urbaine, sociale et économique” but it’d be too much text for an article so here’s a synthesis of the above plus some other bits.

Urban expansion tends to happen on the land we need to produce food and replaces natural habitat and farms with built environments that are highly polluted and produce huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Today’s cities are not fit for purpose, too hot, too cold, too crowded, too polluted, too dangerous and they consume too many resources and produces enormous quantities of waste.

Urban areas are not adapted to us as a species, we still carry many characteristics adapted to a nomadic lifestyle in groups of 20 to 80 people. Urban areas are too crowded, people are squeezed too close together and the number of people around is beyond our psychogical capacity to be comfortable with. Studies have shown that the amygdalas of city folk are overstimulated and swollen compared to rural folks. The amygdalas are a major part of the ‘flight or fight’ reflex we all carry, this means that city dwellers are continually being stressed and are, at least partly, in a ‘flight or fight’ mode.

We can analyse why people are drawn to cities, there are quite a few reasons but the most important are employment, education and security. The first being the dominant reason.

So we have two flows, a major one of people migrating in from the countryside and a minor one of people migrating out of the city to smaller towns, villages and hamlets. The first flow means that the countryside is being abandoned and this has been going on for decades. The second flow shows that there are people who want to leave the cities when they can or who would if they could.

The flight from the countryside means that there are fewer and fewer people managing it and producing food. Farm mechanisation has meant that farming needs fewer people but at the same time mechanised farming is environmentally destructive and unsustainable. The food has to then be processed and transported to the urban areas, the way that this is done today means that crops arrive in shops and markets but the fruit and vegetables are, for the most part, unripe and not ready for consumption. The refrigeration and transport of these foodstuffs has a negative impact on the biosphere and on the food that is transported.

If we wish to continue the transition towards small-scale farms, market gardens and community gardens and away from unsustainable extensive, synthetic, mechanised agriculture, then we need more people in the countryside.

Action

A major part of a strategique urban Permaculture plan is to work out how to inverse the two migration flows. We need to figure out how to encourage people to stay in the countryside and also how to facilitate migration from urban to rural. This is essential, we cannot continue to allow unfettered, un-planned urban expansion, this takes us full throttle towards the dystopias portrayed so well in many films such as Bladerunner.

Building on prime agricultural and is not only stupid it is short-sighted and immoral. This has to stop and is another reason we need to inverse the migration flows. Most urban areas are surrounded by farmland so urban sprawl will inevitably transform farms to built areas. The only ways to avoid this is to go high, skyscrapers that are inadapted to both the biosphere and human health, or to inverse the flows.

Human scale

We’re happy, or a lot of us are, being up close to people we don’t know in certain contexts. A concert maybe and getting squashed in the mosh pit. In general however, as mentioned above, getting squeezed in with strangers tends to provoke a fight or flight reflex, we’re not particularly adapted to these situations. The reason being that for the most part of our history we were in small bands with people we knew. Urban living is crowded with strangers, we socialise ourselves to accept this but deeper down it’s still a problem. The urban solution to this is to restructure the cities in such a way that we have the impression that we live in low-density areas.

Some people for mysterious reasons have taken offence at the ‘15 minute city’ idea, apparently it’s too ‘woke’ whatever that means. The concept isn’t especially new and is a more recent take on the Urban village idea that has been around for decades. The latter is however a bit more useful in Permaculture terms because it’s also about the crowding stress that people endure, as discussed above.

In order to make an area an urban village the process is quite simple but as usual some people can make it difficult!

• Form a group

• Identify an area and define it geographically. Urban neighbourhoods were often villages before they were swallowed up by urban sprawl.

• Physically define the area by creating green and blue corridors. The former can consist of community orchards, parks, gardens, micro forests etc. The latter are the ponds, lakes and rivers that some areas have. These often need cleaning up and some rivers need opening up,having been paved over. The corridors form a sort of green and blue circumference which contains the urban village. Some of this is psychological, the green and blue circumference may only be 2 trees wide but it is identified as being the edge between ‘our’ village and the neighbours.

• In the same way as with the 15 minute city the group will now identify which services are locally available, shops, cinema etc and which aren’t. Those services which are essential to any village yet absent are opportunities for someone of some people to launch an economic activity.

• The group will also identify those things that need eliminating from the system, polluting industries, dangerous and polluting road traffic etc.

• The group can use Permaculture engineering, ideally with everyone else, to design and then create what everyone agrees is needed. Food gardens, meeting places, micro forests, community orchards and all the rest.

• The group along with everyone else will also evaluate the problems confronted by the urban villagers. Low income, poor housing etc and the village population will act to improve everyone’s lives.

When all is done and everyone is living in an area that is pretty well sorted out, beautiful and abundant then gentrification will happen. Wealthier people will move in and force those with more modest incomes out. The urban village population can resist this as making it socially unacceptable to sell outside of the local population or to raise rents. Local authorities can act to demand higher local taxes from people moving in from outside and/or, lower ones for longterm residents who are actively involved in the urban village.

Urban farming is great but most towns and cities would never be able to internally feed their population. We need to reintroduce the idea that surrounding farms produce for the urban villages. Combining local farm production with internal village production plus exchanges whereby local people help on the farms is what is known as community integrated agriculture.

There are activities that need a certain density of population, universities are an example. Their grounds could produce more food and they often need to be better integrated into the local community but a bit of tweaking is often all that’s neded.

So to recapitulate :

• Restructure rural villages to reduce or remove those forces that push people to leave the countryside for urban areas.

• Encourage people to reinhabit rural areas and contribute to a rural revival.

• Reduce waste (heat etc) and act to reduce people’s living costs.

• Stimulate the local village economy so that people no longer have to travel across the city to work.

• Transition all polluting activities to ones which don’t pollute.

• Restructure urban areas to create interdependant urban villages

• Reduce waste (heat etc) and act to reduce people’s living costs.

• Stimulate the local urban village economy so that people no longer have to travel across the city to work.

• Transition all polluting activities to ones which don’t pollute.

A lot of what is often presented as Urban Permaculture places too much emphasis on food production, creating gardens etc. This is good stuff but if it’s not integrated into a general strategy for urban renewal then it’s simply not anywhere near enough. I’ve often worked with urban groups and sometimes a large percentage of the locals simply weren’t interested in growing food, Permaculture activists have to think and act more widely and much more strategically.

Low income neighbourhoods are the most polluted, the inhabitants suffer the most from hot and cold spells. These areas tend to have the highest crime rates and in general the infrastructure makes this worse, as do the roads that cut through them. We have to prioritise renewing these areas but not from the outside in, the renewal is done by the local people with the help of permacuclture designers who live there.

In a previous article I proposed some principles of local economics, I discussd the importance of local economies V national ones and how to boost local, ethical, equitable and circular economic growth.

When well designed, well coordinated and run by local people the type of rural/urban renewal I’ve described above can advance very fast. I talk in terms of a year or two, the whole design won’t yet be implemented but people will already be seeing a huge difference.