Cities
Currently more than 54% of the world's population lives in cities. Projections indicate that this percentage will increase to around 66% in 2050, meaning 2.5 billion more people in cities. Most of this growth will take place in Asia and Africa. In India, there will be 404 million urban dwellers in addition, in China 292 million and in Nigeria 212 million.
In 2014, there were 28 mega-cities, with approximately 12% of the population living in these cities. About half of the urban population lives in smaller cities, with 500,000 residents or fewer. In rural areas, on the other hand, we can observe a population decline. We are witnessing a cascade effect: the fewer residents there are in the village, the fewer public services, work, public transport, culture, as a result, the flight towards the city increases.
What attracts people to cities or to stay in cities?
● Employment opportunities
● Higher salaries
● Better living conditions
● Impression of more religious and political freedom
● Education
● Better healthcare
● Security
● Professional, personal or family ties
● Better marriage opportunities
The negative consequences of city life
● Population density can stimulate stress in people
● The amygdalae in the brains of city dwellers become hyper-reactive
● The fight-flight response, adapted to occasional stressful situations, is overstimulated
● Compared to country dwellers, city dwellers have a higher risk of mood disorders
● Certain forms of architecture can jeopardize the sustainability of social ties
● There is more pollution in the city. Air pollution, noise and a high noise environments are associated with a higher mortality rate. City dwellers, compared to country people have stronger allergic reactions. Children growing up in the city are much more likely to suffer from asthma.
The negative environmental impacts of cities:
Cities consume 60 to 80% of the energy used by humans and produce around 75% of climate forcing gas.
The urbanization of watersheds increases the frequency and severity of floods.
Urbanization causes a great loss of biodiversity.
Analyses
They are identical how we analyse a village.
● Identify areas that are degraded.
● Identify areas where there is a major lack of plants.
● Identify commercial, residential and leisure areas.
● Identify the routes most used by local residents.
● Identify the sources of all types of pollution, air, noise, water etc.
● Identify areas where the quality of the built environment has a negative impact on people.
Continuing the strategic approach
With our rural villages well designed and heading for their own transitions (Urban Permaculture #2) we can turn our attention to the cities. Thanks to our efforts in the countryside more people are staying there and those who seek to quit the cities can find work, housing and thriving communities in the countryside.
One of the most important part of our analysis is to figure out what things work well in a city, what things need some adjustments and what needs to be eliminated. We cannot continue to have governments that put into place badly thought out urban policies. The UK government at one point encouraged people to install wood burning stoves, the government now wants this to stop as such stoves produce a lot of fine particles which are bad for health. This was known beforehand so it is hard to understand why a government would encourage a proliferation of wood burning stoves. What we need are integrated, holistic, well designed policies based on people’s needs and traditional and scientific knowledge.
Too many people stresses us
We are a social animal and as with the other social animals parts of our brain are used to manage our social interactions. The ‘bigger’ and more active these parts of the brain the bigger the social network. Herds of wild herbivores can reach a certain size and then split into two herds, humans have similar instincts but we have created urban environments where the proximity to very large numbers of people, predominantly strangers, exceeds the ‘natural’ size of our individual social network capacity and we live stressed.
Our current understanding is that many cities grew from villages that specialised in the production of certain goods. For example growing hemp, transforming the fibres and producing ropes, cords and sails for coastal fishing villages. Moving up a river to find an area well adapted to hemp production makes more sense than struggling to do it on the poor soils around the fishing villages. Artisans grouped together to create micro-industrial systems and these areas grew to become cities. Eventually people grouped together in and around stockades and forts for protection but this seems to have been later on. There are activities that we should preserve and which need a higher density of population than would be found in a village, Universities for example, hospitals another, people often mention that cities are centres of art and culture which may be true but encouraging more cultural activities in our rural towns and villages makes them even more attractive.
The city organism
We can consider a city to be a form of organism, material is absorbed, transformed and excreted. The materials are sourced globally, the transformation produces goods and services plus a wide range of secondary products such as heat, fine particles, noise and suchlike. The products are exported around the world. Many cities rely heavily on tourism and draw in visitors from their own country and from abroad, the latter, in today’s world, is becoming more and more problematic. An example of political ‘myopism’ and industrial propaganda is the focus on the Co2 produced by aircraft, the solution touted is to make aviation carbon neutral by using bio-fuels instead of kerosene. This focus ignores the climate forcing caused by the condensation trails left high in the troposphere which account for a big part of the climatic forcing caused by the aircraft.
We continue to analyse the urban system in more and more detail, we must also see how the city reacts to seasonal changes. Too hot in the hot seasons? Too cold in the cold seasons? Flooded during the wet seasons? Etc.
Design
Permaculture engineering adapts to any scale, from a garden to a bioregion. The methodology does not change but the techniques and strategies will be adapted to the requirements of each scale. Future cities must also be adapted to humans and their impact on Earth must be positive,the opposite of today.
Urban villages, scaling for people.
The permaculture approach is to use, or create, green corridors (plants), blue corridors (canals,rivers), parks, forests etc. and organise them to create what we call urban villages. A permaculture city will be a place in a country where the density of villages is much higher than in the countryside. This approach helps to resolve certain problems of cities such as their size and population density. People continue to live in high density areas but, thanks to the green and blue corridors coupled with the parks and green spaces around and within their neighbourhood they don’t perceive this to be the case.
Steps :
● Identify a “neighbourhood”, a part of the city, distinguished by certain characteristics and above all considered by residents as their neighbourhood.
● On a map, draw the ‘border’, the geographical limit, of the neighbourhood.
● Identify canals, parks, lakes, etc. which are on or near these ‘borders’.
● Identify places where it will be necessary to plant trees/shrubs or create a lake or pedestrian zones to complete the ‘border’.
It is essential that this is done with the full participation of all the inhabitants, the process must be inclusive and not imposed or perceived to be imposed. Our objective is to make the neighbourhood attractive and also to help people develop local micro-industrial activities that reduce the need for daily travel to a job in another part of the city.
Food
Urban food production is much talked about but the population density means that in most areas local production, which must be encouraged, won’t be sufficient to feed all the local people. Neighbourhoods can create links to a nearby peri-urban farm to supplement the production and produce the staple crops (rice, wheat, potatoes etc) that need bigger fields. Community integrated agriculture (CIA) systems such as I have just described where local production within a village or urban village is complemented by nearby farm production also give urban dwellers access to the countryside which is important for their health and well-being. CIA systems also allow us to create positive flows, for example sewage treatment. Current sewage treatment plants tend to be polluting and require considerable quantities of water to move things along, water is becoming a scarce resource that needs to be better valued. People living in apartment blocks are unlikely to want dry-composting toilets and in any case the quantity of composted material produced would exceed the capacity of local gardens to absorb it. A better approach is to install drying toilets which use a small amount of heat to dry out the faeces and urine thus massively reducing the quantity but leaving a material that can be used locally and the rest is taken to the associated farm.
One of the biggest threats to transitioned urban villages is gentrification, local people improve their area and are then pushed out by incoming people with higher incomes. This is a subject I will explore in the next article on Urban Permaculture.