00201 The Permaculture Design for your Life

Four aspects of design.

The Permaculture Design Manual describes four aspects of design:

• Technique — how we do something.
• Strategies — Adds time to technique. We use strategies to achieve future goals. It has a value orientation. Some things are better than others so we encourage the good and discourage or eliminate the bad, as a matter of permaculture strategy.
• Materials — things we make things with. This includes energy.
• Assemblies — the combination of elements to make more complex structures. Often referred to as “systems.”

Suppose we want to design a more sustainable urban food system. We observe the situation, and we identify the necessary resources we need as follows:

Techniques — container gardening, market gardening, vermicomposting, vertical gardening, it’s a long list, it goes on for pages.

Strategies — cooperative business structures, local orientation, biological preference, rural/urban partnerships. This is another long list.

Materials — potting soil, seeds, containers for container gardening, worm bins, worms, food scraps for vermicomposting, a marketplace, tables and advertising for a farmers’ market, etc.

Assemblies — grocery coop, farmers’ market, balcony herb/salad green garden, community gardens, local food promotion organization, website listing food availabilities, prices, and delivery date, etc.

During your design process, you study and evaluate the lists you made during your observations.

You look for connections. You’d like for everything to do several things and for each function to have several supports for it. So you pick “local food cooperative” as part of your design, because

• a local food coop makes it easy for people in cities to buy food directly from farmers,
• It is a structure of social justice and fair distribution, since it makes it possible for even small producers to access an urban market, and it has low entrance barriers so even poor people could start a small enterprise and enter the market,
• It promotes ecological healing because it provide a market encouragement for producers who use organic and sustainable production practices.
• It takes money out of the international economy and puts it into the local economy.

Since food production is important, you pick several elements that contribute to it:

• Food coop
• Roadside stands
• CSAs
• Community gardens
• Container gardens
• Growing rooms in apartment complexes
• Concrete gardens,

And that process goes on, and on, until you have a complete, workable, understandable, practical, plan.

Based on this process of observation and evaluation, you write a permaculture design that would describe this process in detail and make specific decisions on how to organize the development and implementation of the decisions.

Much more will be said about this process in the rest of the documents of this section.

Location of Design.

For most of its history, permaculture has focused on the situations and needs of people living on rural or peri-urban small holdings, who wanted to produce a substantial amount of their household’s needs from their own land and/or to do market gardening.

Because of this rural and peri-urban focus, permaculture design sites have typically been dwellings with some amount of land attached, or land on which a dwelling will be built, or land intended for food production.

That is important work and it continues today.

But everyone does not live in a rural or peri-urban or suburban situation where they can access enough land to grow a substantial amount of their own food. Many live in apartments in cities or in dormitories on college campuses and have little or no land on which to grow food.

Therefore, we need permaculture design work for people who live in cities or other situations where they have no land or small land. Many people these days don’t have permanent homes. They are young. They are in college. They live in apartments and dormitories. They may migrate several times before they find a place to live more permanently, if indeed they actually settle down somewhere.

Permaculture has potential for everyone, whether or not they have land, whether they are nomadic or ready to settle down in one place. We ask —

what is the site that is the object of permaculture design for people who have no land of their own?

That is a simple question to answer.

The site of a permaculture design for a person or family/household without land is the life of the person, family, or other household living arrangement.

The goal of iPermie is to enable you to write a permaculture design for your own life.

This expansion of the concept of design site to encompass an entire life is possible for people who have land too.

Permaculture works for people in rural areas with houses and lands, and it works equally well for someone living in a high rise apartment in a dense central city, or who lives in a dormitory on campus.

A Living Document.

A design project like this is never actually “finished.” Since you can’t see everything that will happen to you going forward at this point in your life . . .

. . . You see what you can, and understand what you can, and do the best that you can to describe a way forward.

You must always be ready to revise your plan in light of changing circumstances and new knowledge.

A permaculture design for your life is a living document that changes and evolves as your life changes and develops.

Organizing the report.

It’s your report. Organize it in a way that makes sense to you —

• Cover the subjects outlined in iPermie sections.
• Add additional chapters or sections if needed based on the unique situation of you and your household at this time and space.
• Use a system to reference each design decision so that you can discuss and refer to them elsewhere in the text of the report.

In each section, describe your goals and the changes you need to make in your life and/or the actions/steps you need to complete to achieve those goals. In general, you make a separate numbered decision for each change you want to make in your life.

You want separate design decisions, and you want them numbered, because in the staging section you will list all of the changes in the order in which you will implement them.

Numbering the decisions helps you keep track of what you do and when you will do it. You will refer to them in other parts of the text, so a number for each decision is helpful.

Each design decision includes a short explanation. Without the short explanation as to why you make this decision, you might come back to this later, scratch your head, and say “what was I thinking of?” If someone else reads your design, you want them to understand your thinking.

Four components of a permaculture design.

We’ve seen that four aspects of a permaculture design are techniques, strategies, materials, and assemblies (systems).

Now let’s add the four components of a permaculture design, as described by Mollison:

• Site
• Energy
• Abstract
• Social

Site includes:

• Water
• Earth, Landscape and Plants
• Climate
• Geography
• Housing
• Work
• Education
• Stuff

When designing in situations where people don't have any land, the design site is the life of a person. It may or may not include a larger household. Since people who don't have land remain dependent upon land, only removed one or more iterations from personal use, geography and landscape remain important in all designs, "Earth" and "landscape" can therefore be understood as aspects of community geography.

For lifestyle permaculture design, we add Housing, Work, Education, and Stuff to the components of the “site” which is the life and the style of the life of the person doing this design work.

Energy issues are:

• Technologies
• Structures
• Sources
• Connections

Urban areas are dependent upon long supply chains for energy supplies. The goal of permaculture design in urban areas is first and foremost demand destruction (learning how to live well with less energy). As we learn to live better with less energy, we begin to develop resilience systems that can reliably provide energy to urban households through the challenges of the future.

Technologies drive our need for energy and the availability of cheap energy drives the developments of energy-hungry technologies. That is bad design run rampant.

Structures are systems, economics, businesses, political organizations, etc., that regulate and govern our access and need for energy.

Sources are the energies available for our use.

Connections unite the various elements of energy production and distribution systems.

Social components are:

• Legal aids
• Invisible structures
• People
• Culture
• Trade and finance

In permaculture, “invisible structures” are organizations, businesses, religions, belief systems, laws, regulations, governments — any kind of system or structure that influences the way we live. When doing design for urban areas, social components are primary issues and take more prominence than the traditional permaculture focus toward on-site food production. Since urban people may not have access to any land for food production, meeting urban food needs in sustainable methods requires recourse to invisible structures such as food cooperatives and partnerships with farmers.

Abstract concepts are:

• Timing
• Data
• Ethics

Timing is everything they say, and this is no less true for permaculture design in urban areas. Timing relates to succession, where first things are first. Then come second things and third things. Each new “thing” depends upon the development contributed by its predecessors. It is a matter of pulses that regulate growth and development. We accumulate data as part of our observations and data is important for making design decisions. Everything we do grows from the ethics of permaculture.

Sections of the Design Report.

Before we say more about the actual process of design, I want to talk just a bit about the written design itself.

You need a way to systematically refer to your design decisions. I used a descriptive word (like one of the titles of section) followed by a number — Food 1, Food 2, Food 3, etc. to identify each design decision. Always include a short explanation/justification for each decision.