00131 How to permaculture your urban lifestyle and why you should do this

No place at last is better than the world. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens. — Wendell Berry

Here’s some more contrary wisdom:

The future hope of humanity is in the cities.

Since Thoreau, we’ve dreamed of self-sufficient acreage in a rural area as the ideal homestead. Add guns (lots of them) and you have the basic modern survivalist orientation.

Like much of life, time has given us a different reality. While we may long for rural areas, people have been voting for the City with their feet for a long time.

If half of everybody in cities flooded out into the countryside and attempted to set themselves up as subsistence farmers, the two primary results would be an enormous ecological catastrophe and a die-off of the human species so chaotic the earth would not recover for centuries, maybe millennia. We’ve had a recent example of what happens when cities empty into the surrounding countryside — the forced evacuation of Cambodia’s cities by the Pol Pot regime.

Living in cities can be good for the environment.

The greenest city in the United States is New York City. That’s what the data say:

The carbon footprint of the average New Yorker is less than 30% of the US average.
54% of NYC households don’t own a car. On the island of Manhattan, 77% of the people do not own a car.
It is the most densely populated US city — 27,000 people per square mile. Manhattan has 67,000 people/square mile.
1/3 of all public transit miles in the US happen in NYC.
While the average size of living spaces elsewhere continues to increase, in NYC the average size of dwellings is decreasing.

Living in cities is not a good way to engage in subsistence agriculture but subsistence agriculture (“growing all your own food”) is not a synonym for sustainability or for permaculture design.

In some ways, it is actually easier to live lightly upon the land in a city. Depending on how you organize the geographies of your life —

You can manage your life without owning an automobile. This is HUGE! It is one of the most important things people can do to become more sustainable.
Cities require less wire, pipeline, and street infrastructure per person than do rural areas. A ten-mile long road, with electrical and communications wire and maybe water pipe, in a rural area might serve a half dozen families totaling perhaps 24 people. That same stretch of road in an urban area could serve thousands of households.
On a per capita basis, there are economies of scale in moving resources to cities (the energy expense and material cost of the transportation).
It takes fewer resources and land to house people in apartment buildings than in single family dwellings.
People in cities walk more than people in less densely populated areas. One reason for this is that city walks are interesting. A mile walk in NYC takes you on a route with a myriad of things to look at so you never get bored.

Cities help us to —

live in smaller spaces,
live closer to each other, and
drive less,
all of which are necessary for a better, more sustainable and resilient future.

Urbanization can be bad for the environment.

Because of poor design, cities create large amounts of waste and pollution. Although in the denser populated cities, the amount of waste generated per resident is lower than it is in less populated areas, the sheer amount of it is problematic. The concentrated nature of the problem is an issue in finding solutions.

Extremes of social injustice are common in cities. The low income neighborhoods of virtually every large American city have been attacked by various varieties of urban renewal schemes. While the details vary a bit, in the end these scams are about taking the properties of the poor at cheap, non-market, politicized prices and transferring them to those with privileged access to political power. Another driver of social justice is the exclusion of people without access to power from certain kinds of work and employment. It may be effectively unlawful for poor people to live in certain neighborhoods in a city.

Large cities have persistence, constancy, and resilience issues. Constancy is the ability of a city to maintain itself. Cities depend on supply chains which are often long and complicated to bring food, water, energy, and other necessary items to support their populations. Throughout history, as the infrastructures that supported cities failed, so did the cities (cf. the failure of Rome’s aqueducts due to military attacks and neglect which resulted in the near-depopulation of the city).

Persistence is the ability of a city to resist damage. Most large cities in the United States do not have much in the way of defenses or mitigation for severe weather events and other threats to human life and property. Some cities near rivers have levees and there are sea walls, but we have nothing so aggressive as the Dutch. Their port of Rotterdam has structures twice the height of the Eiffel Tower that they deploy as necessary to prevent flooding from damaging the port and the city. London has flood gates on the Thames River. New York City has nothing. When the city flooded, there was nothing to prevent the subways from flooding.

In the United States, the recent hurricane Sandy event exposed just how defenseless New York City — our richest city! — was during the recent super-storm.

Resilience is the ability of a city to repair itself. Most cities do better with this. They have police and fire and emergency services departments. There are dense networks of civil society organizations. Most nations have national systems of disaster relief and recovery involving both government assets and large national civil society organizations.

Recognizing that they have problems with constancy and persistence, people in many urban areas around the world are developing local foodsheds and creating other systems of resilience that build redundancy into the systems that supply their cities. Redundancy decreases the risks of failure. It is a measure of constancy and persistence.

Individual households in cities can significantly reduce their risks in the event of catastrophic failures of supply systems that support cities by developing storage systems for food, water, and energy for their cities.

Permaculture design teaches us that waste and pollution are design issues. Cities produce so much waste and pollution because they and our economy are poorly designed. With better and smarter design, waste and pollution in cities can be greatly reduced. Ultimately, we will eliminate urban waste and pollution.

Injustice and persecution of the poor are additional design problems for urban areas. Better design of the invisible structures that govern urban life can eliminate social injustice and bring economic opportunity to all residents.

Permaculture design is the solution to the problem of the sustainability, persistence, constancy, and resilience of cities. It is a way towards a better future for all people and ecologies.

Permaculture can help you design your life so that you experience more beauty, health, freedom, happiness, security, and cooperation — with less work, consumption, conflict, danger, injustice, and waste.

What's not to like about that?

How do we permaculture our urban lifestyles?

Keep reading and studying,

Find or organize a small group to study permaculture.

Tell others!

Observe, Study, Evaluate, Design, Implement (OSEDI)!

Reflect on what has happened (your experience and feedback), repeat OSEDI.

As you develop your own permaculture design for your urban life, you will join a process that makes your city more resilient, more sustainable, safer, and a better place to live.

Don’t stop with yourself and your household. Spread the word! Permaculturing your neighborhood is a significant step toward urban resilience.