00281 Zones, Sectors, and Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps

Zones in urban permaculture design

We base the traditional zone structure on two criteria:

1. How often the element needs intervention from people, and
2. How often the people need to visit the element.

An element is any particular item of a site — traditionally, we think of plants, chicken coops, ponds, gardens, etc. In urban terms, we might think of farmers’ markets, bus stops, local shops, place of work, school, etc.

In traditional permaculture, we envision the following zones:

0 — The house.

1 — The area closest to the house and/or along frequently traveled pathways through the site. Elements placed here are those that need the most frequent attention from the household’s residents and that the residents need to visit often (to either care for the element or harvest something from it). For example, plants like greens and salad makings, and kitchen herbs need a lot of care and people harvest them frequently.

2 — The area, not quite so close “to the back door of the house,” where we put elements which need attention, but not quite as much attention as the Zone 1 elements. These items don’t need to be visited as often by people (for either maintenance or harvest) This could include some perennial fruit production (smaller trees, cane fruit, bushes, etc.), compost piles or bins, vermiculture projects, and annuals like corn or beans which don’t require daily attention or harvest except for their season.

3 — A larger area of food production which needs not-so-much attention, e.g., a wheat or hay field or a fruit and nut orchard of larger trees.

4 — Semi-wild — forage for animals, firewood, semi-managed.

5 — Wild — undisturbed by human management.

This isn’t just a rhetorical construct to make things look tidy. It is an important aspect of energy conservation (remember human energy) for a site that produces food. The zones help us organize the patterns, elements, energies, and wastes of a site for most efficient use. These zones are not concentric circles (although they could be). They may meander around depending on the lay of the land, the size of the site, the typical pathways to and through the site, and the access of the house from the rest of the area or community.

We base zone analysis on patterns of location and intensity of use. It means one thing on a farm or peri-urban or suburban plot. For design work in urban areas, zone analysis looks somewhat different.

Zones are relative to the sites, geographies, and activities of your life. They depend on the central orientation of the observer and the purpose of the observation. For urban permaculture design, you are likely to observe more than one set of zones for the design for your particular life, which may have multiple sites and geographies within it.

So let’s look at the zone concept and apply it, at a different scale from the rural/peri-urban, and suburban viewpoint, to your food situation in the city. I say this only as an observation, not a dictation. Your situation may be different from this description, depending on how things are set up.

Zone 0 — This is your kitchen — in particular, the traditional kitchen “work triangle” of refrigerator, stove, and sink, with a food prep area somewhere along these lines of travel. If you “watch yourself” while working in the kitchen, you will retrace this pattern many times when you prepare food. It includes your food pantry, refrigeration/freezing appliances, and equipment storage. It may involve cooking “stations” that you put together as needed for special projects like food preservation.

Zone 1 — This is any food growing you do yourself or in conjunction with your household. If you have a yard, this would be your garden. If you have no land, this could be a container garden on a porch or balcony or in a sunny window. Or a plot in a community garden. It could involve gleaning nut and fruit trees in public places or on private plots with the permission of the owner.

Zone 2 — Your local food systems. This includes farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, CSA’s, etc., anyplace where you buy food directly, or nearly-directly, from a local farmer (this includes non-food items like health and beauty items).

Zone 3 — Conventionally-produced foods sourced from locally or regionally owned supermarkets. Where possible, you choose local or regional brands. It includes meals eaten out or take out from locally owned restaurants and fast food locations.

Zone 4 — The outer zone in permaculture design is the area with least interaction. For the purpose of analyzing your urban food system, the “area of least interaction” should be the nationally owned supermarkets and franchised restaurants (including fast food) and US produced foods.

Now let’s think about transportation and the organization of your life.

An article by Bart Anderson in the Permaculture Activist magazine http://www.permacultureactivist.net/articles/urbnzonsectr.htm suggests travel distance as a way to do zone analysis in urban areas:

Zone 0 — Home

Zone 1 — Areas within walking distance, which should be the area of most intense use.

Zone 2 — Territory within bicycle distance (if you use a bicycle).

Zone 3 — Places accessible by public transportation or a short drip.

Zone 4 — Locations that are only accessible by automobile.

Zone 5 — Destinations requiring long distance travel (auto, trains, buses, airplane)

Using zones in your design.

Zones help you develop a design that is comfortable for your lifestyle and is energy conservative. Mollison says —

The golden rule is to develop the nearest area first, get it under control, and then expand the perimeter.

You will need maps and diagrams to effectively work through the relevant zones for the geographies of your life. These maps will need to be of different scales to work effectively.

To diagram transportation zones, start with a map of your entire community.

To diagram food zones, you need a map of your local food system.

To work on your household food system, you need diagrams of your kitchen and any growing areas you can access.

All of these require different scales based on the extent of their geographies. Your local food system might be 150 miles in diameter around your house. Your transportation zones might be all located within 25 miles of your home. Your kitchen diagram may be only 10-20 feet.

As you develop your plan, you plot the locations for all the elements encompassed by the particular map or diagram.

Use the various zone analyses of your lifestyle to decide where to place elements and activities in your life. A medical specialist that you might visit only twice a year can be further away from you than your regular general practitioner, who needs to be closer at hand since you will visit him or her several times during the year.

You may decide to move closer to the important destinations in your life. Or you may change your job, church, school, or preferred shopping sites to places that are closer to your house, especially the destinations that you frequently visit.

Sectors in urban permaculture design

Sector analysis is a way to govern and control the energies that originate off-site and flow on and through the site. Traditionally, we identify these as —

• sun,
• wind,
• rain,
• wildlife,
• fire.

We think of these energies as arrows zinging their way to and through our lives to dwellings and activities.

Some of them we like and can use.

Some of them we don’t like, so we develop and deploy —

Shields — to block the incoming energy (shade that protects us from sunlight in the summer),

Deflectors — to channel it for a useful result (such as rain directed to water plants), and/or

Collectors — to soak up all we can (like sunlight in the winter)

All of the traditional permaculture sectors (solar, wind, etc.) impact your urban lifestyle. In addition, cities have other energy sectors that impact our urban lifestyles. Here is my take on the additional sectors of concern for urban permaculture design besides the traditional permaculture sun, wind, rain, wildlife, fire:

Planetary energies

• Climate, includes weather (and the traditional permaculture sectors of sun, wind, and rain), but it is more than weather. It is the sum of your area's weather experiences over periods of time. Climate energies impact every human, whether or not you own land.

Grid energies

• electric,
• piped-in water,
• natural gas,
• waste disposal,
• sewage,
• communications

These energies come and/or go from elsewhere. They move around via grids of pipes and wire. While we find these useful, they don't come to us free of charge. They cost money and they have environmental impacts. Sewage, for example, is a system for creating waste and pollution. We need to minimize our dependence upon these and provide more sustainable alternatives. These grid-dependent energies require long supply lines that may be fragile as the cardinal threats (peak oil, climate instability, economic irrationality, political criminality) come upon us.

Fetched or delivered energies

• gasoline,
• propane,
• wood,
• food

The user must go and get these energies for them to be of use or they may be delivered to the site of use. Some grid energies may appear in your life as fetched or delivered energies. They could include electric, water, natural gas.

Invisible energies

• the effects of invisible structures on you (laws, crime, education etc.)

Invisible energies result from the actions of invisible structures, such as governments, bureaucracies, criminal gangs, and cultures. In urban areas, your design choices are to a greater or lesser extent dictated or limited, expanded or enabled by these invisible energies. They are as real (and often as dangerous) as the wind and the weather.

With all of these sector energies, our goal is to shield ourselves from any negative impacts, and to soak up all the beneficial effects we can get. We may redirect energies to achieve goals elsewhere.

We do this with the use of shields, deflectors, and collectors.

These are structures, things, or systems that we deploy to protect us from danger (shields), direct energies toward places they can be profitably used (deflectors), and in some cases soak up all we can (collectors).

In traditional permaculture, sectors point to compass directions from which we expect influences. For example, winds blowing from the north during the winter are cold. To protect ourselves from the impact of these winds, we can plant a windbreak of evergreen trees on the north side of the house to block the cold winter north winds (shields).

In urban and college permaculture, sectors may develop from geographic compass points, or they may come at us from —

• institutions,
• organizations,
• corporations,
• laws,
• regulations,
• economics,
• etc.

Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps

One useful tool for understanding our dependencies is the Simple Critical Infrastructure Map system developed by permaculture thinker Vinay Gupta. I discuss this concept in greater depth in section 9 on resilience.

His analysis rests on these simple observations:

1. There are six primary ways to die — heat, cold, hunger, thirst, injury, illness.

2. Three sets of essential services protect us from the six ways to die: Shelter (too hot, too cold), Supply (hunger, thirst), Safety (illness, injury).

3. These essential services come to us through seven layers of infrastructure: person/individual, household, village/neighborhood, town, region, country, world. We can speak of these as zones of infrastructure.

4. Four tiers of cooperation provide infrastructure — individual, group, organization, government.

5. There are six major problems in maintaining infrastructure — neglect, time and wear, availability of operators/skilled personnel, availability of necessary system externalities (such as fuel for a power plant), economics, violence/disaster.

6. There are three effects of infrastructure failure —

   — services become unavailable, — service prices rise, — service standards drop (e.g., dirty water, random blackouts).

   The intensity of these effects ranges from minor inconvenience to mass death.

7. There are four primary infrastructure delivery paths —

   — produce on site, — grid services, — delivery, — fetch/carry.

See http://butteredsidedown.co.uk/scim.html for pictures of diagrams that illustrate how you can use this system to analyze your sectors of risk and develop resilient backups. We will return to these concepts several more times as we work our way through iPermie.