00301 Ideal City-Scapes
Cities can become more sustainable if they model their systems on natural processes. . . The characteristics of ecosystems include diversity, adaptiveness, interconnectedness, resilience, regenerative capacity, and symbiosis. — Peter Newman; Isabella Jennings. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems: Principles and Practices
iPermie includes three pamphlets by Bill Mollison:
- 00301.1 Humid landscapes
- 00301.2 Arid landscapes
- 00301.3 Islands landscapes
These three chapters/pamphlets may be downloaded at http://www.ipermie.net for free.
While every landscape has unique aspects, there are common characteristics of the patterns within humid, arid, and island landscapes that are useful for learning permaculture design. Permaculture classifies landscapes in general as arid, island, and humid.
We can also note common patterns in urban landscapes.
Inner Core — the “downtown” area and its immediate environs. The larger the urban area, the more high rise buildings will be found in the central downtown core. It’s as if the surrounding territory exerts a pressure that extrudes tall buildings in the central area. Downtown may be a place with a vibrant diverse community or it may be a stagnant zone of poverty and decay with little commercial or entertainment action. It is often a nexus of transportation and communication networks.
Urban Interior — the suburbs of the pre-freeway eras, often patterned by the mass transit systems of those years (typically street cars). These are often the most diverse and interesting areas of the city. Because they predate zoning and its mandated single use neighborhoods, they are not monocultures! They incorporate a mosaic of residential and commercial uses. The dwellings are owner occupied, rentals, duplexes, tri-plexes, four-plexes, attic, basement, and garage apartments. Due to their location close to downtown, and the fondness of American transit planners for “hub and spoke” systems, these areas will have the best access to whatever mass transit options are available in the area. They are diverse in race, ethnicity, and economic status.
Suburbs — areas of development outside of the Urban Interior that resulted from the transportation patterns of the 1950s-1990s (the construction of the interstate and intra-urban freeways and toll roads). The newer the suburbs, the more extreme the architectural and community monocultures. Entire neighborhoods may have only a handful of basic plans for the dwellings. Single family occupancy is the general rule. We limit apartments to carefully zoned ghettoes. Zoning laws often outlaw building small apartments ancillary to single family housing (such as attic, basement, and garage apartments). Most have poor access to urban transit systems and are automobile-dependent. The end result is to strictly segregate neighborhoods by economic class.
Peri-urban — the transition zone between urban and rural. These are fun zones where rednecks in self-built homes with chicken coops and pig pens on land inherited from their grandparents may be next door neighbors to millionaires in expensive custom-built homes. Both keep animals. The rednecks prefer pigs and cattle and horses and dogs and chickens. The wealthy favor horses and dogs and cats. This is often a zone of culture clash where the rich attempt to buy out, or failing that, use the law to drive out the original residents and convert the area for upscale use and comfortably segregate the neighborhood by economic class.
Urban land use patterns
Urban landscapes can be characterized by the general use of land. In most areas (there are a few exceptions) central planning systems dictate the land uses. When zoning is rational, it can be very good. When it serves the needs and wishes of special interests, at the expense of the common good, it is bad for urban areas. One of the most pernicious effects of zoning is the segregation of neighborhoods by economic class.
Older Retail. Before the advent of zoning, the demarcation between business and residential areas was much more fluid and most residential areas had shops that catered to the needs of the area residents. Shopkeepers often lived above their stores. Small shops and home enterprises were a common feature in the more residential parts of town. Decades of devotion to “single use” planning schemes has for all practical intents and purposes destroyed this kind of spontaneous urban land use pattern and replaced it with sterile monocultures with strict boundaries delimiting residential and commercial areas.
Residential. The older residential areas exhibit the most variety and diversity. The newer the suburb, the more extreme the monoculture. Newer residential areas are always by law segregated by economic class. This is a change from the pattern of economically integrated neighborhoods of previous years. It is tragedy for our society that as racial segregation of housing declined, economic segregation increased. Economic segregation mandated by law is as stupid a public policy as racial segregation mandated by law.
Commercial. Outside of the downtown areas and the urban interior, these commercial areas were mostly built up in recent decades. The primary land use is blocks of offices and commercial premises, retail etc. Strip malls are ubiquitous in urban life, in both old and new neighborhoods. I file “government buildings” under commercial, as they typically locate in government ghettoes or in other commercial space.
Industrial. Because of the general decline in manufacturing, many industrial properties have been abandoned. Even so, industrial uses remain in urban areas. Some of these properties are cesspits of industrial contamination.
Institutional. Institutional territories differ from commercial or industrial in that people live there — voluntarily (as in college dormitories, monasteries, and convents) or involuntarily (as in prisons and jails) — or the purpose is non-profit and communitarian-oriented. Hospitals and long-term care centers are somewhere between voluntary and involuntarily, and residence there is generally based on physical or mental need. Other institutional uses include places of religious worship, which may or may not have a residential component, and schools.
Communal. Despite the moves to privatize everything, there remains space in urban areas for communal purposes — parks, public gardens, and spaces for other civil society activities and associations.
Brownfields Areas where the presence of toxic pollution, left over from previous industrial uses, complicates the possibility of reusing the property for other purposes. This designation may overlap other uses.
The Problems of Zoning
The zoning structures of modern cities enormously complicate our goal of living more sustainably because current zoning laws mandate unsustainable urban practices. They create automobile dependent neighborhoods. Combined with transportation policies, they may make situations where it is actually unsafe to walk or ride a bicycle. Segregation of neighborhoods by economic class promotes a decline in solidarity and is a form of class warfare.
As we think of structures that will help us live more permaculturally, zoning laws should be greatly reformed or simply abolished in their entirety. One of the things history teaches us is that it can be dangerous to give people certain kinds of power. Zoning is a good example of the evil that can be done when we use coercive government structures for corrupt ends.