01021 The importance of invisible structures for urban and college permaculture

A Sustainable Urban Food System

Residents and businesses in and near the city grow all of the vegetables eaten in the city via a complex constellation of market, community, home, and container gardens. People with homes harvest food from their edible landscaping. People in apartments may have some container food plants, like herbs and tomatoes, and may have a plot in a nearby community garden, the commercial market gardens supply the bulk of the produce. Some apartment complexes have contractual relationships with peri-urban market gardeners.

Nearly everybody does some food preservation. In the spring, summer, and fall, people buy extra and preserve it for eating later in the winter. Most religious organizations and community organizations offer their members the use of their kitchens and kitchen equipment for food preservation purposes. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods have service centers equipped with processing kitchens for use by their residents. People work with other members of their extended family or with neighbors or co-workers to put up jams, jellies, vegetables, salsas, ketchup, and etc. They do some freezing, both of vegetables and prepared foods. Cooking parties are popular — people will use a large church kitchen and get together to prepare several meals for multiple households, which they take home and freeze. Apartment building and neighborhood service centers offer freezer space to area residents. That way people don’t have to have a large freezer at home and there are some energy economies of scale available. Some people don’t have a freezer at all, only a small refrigerator at home.

People source meats, dairy, and eggs from the city’s foodshed, which may extend about 150 miles out from the city. In places like the northeast and southern California, where you have large megalopolises with millions of residents, the food shed includes foods brought from further distances. Water transport — down the Mississippi into the Gulf and then around to the ports on the East Coast or in the case of the New York City metropolitan area, via the renovated Erie Canal — greatly lessens the energy cost of moving this food to urban centers.

The Great Plains remains the source of much of the nation’s wheat and grain production. There is less corn and soybean production since grain-feeding of cattle has fallen out of practice almost everywhere. No one wants grain-fed beef anymore. Everyone wants grass-fed and that’s good for people and good for the environment.

Cities have evolved away from centralized supermarkets with their 80 acre parking lots and toward a system of small shops and markets in every area of the city. Most of these stores have direct relationships with area farmers and contract for production to sell to their customers. Since the shops are in every neighborhood, people shop more often.

Citrus and bananas, chocolate and coffee, tea and other exotic foods still come to town via a variety of sources. The dominance of big corporations in those markets has been destroyed. These markets now incorporate direct purchase agreements between individual stores and cooperatives with the producers who grow these products and their distribution cooperatives.

The cooperative is a primary form of business organization in the food marketplace.

A More Sustainable Urban Energy System

Cities run on a fraction of the energy they used to require. Demand destruction has been enormous.

Most people don’t drive. They walk, ride a bicycle, or take transit. The reformation of the school system, which multiplied the number of schools back down to the neighborhood level, eliminated the need for school buses. People repurposed many of those buses for public transit. Much of the transit system is privately operated. That was a matter of getting rid of the multiple laws, rules, and regulations that kept people from offering transportation services for hire. There was some public investment in transit infrastructure, mostly for tracks for trains and trolleys. The transit systems that run those trains and trolleys are private businesses or in some cases, cooperatives. They pay a fee based on their use of the system which the government uses to keep the tracks in repair, just as gasoline sales used to be taxed to provide money for road maintenance.

The transit system runs entirely on biological fuels, typically a mixture of units running alcohol and others using biodiesel.

Use of energy for heating and cooling is much less than it used to be. This was mostly a matter of intelligent remodeling that increased insulation, installed passive solar add-ons, and added details like insulated shutters for windows and doors, shady landscaping, sunshades on tall buildings, and many other such innovations. Better design resulted in incredible energy savings across the board throughout the built environment.

Governments used eminent domain to take over the private utilities and converted them into cooperatives owned by their customers. The new energy cooperatives provided attractive financing to their members as well as energy buyback programs that incentivized the installation of photovoltaic solar panels on roofs throughout the city. The sun heats nearly all hot water in the city. Many homes and buildings, especially those without good south-facing orientation, used passive solar and solar air and water heaters for heat in the winter. The energy cooperatives invest strongly in wind generation and solar thermal. Some areas have district heating and cooling.

The city’s sewage problem was mostly redirected as one of the solutions to the energy problem. Nearly all the urine and humanure in the city ends up in on site or nearby bio-digesters instead of a sewer system. What doesn’t go to a bio-digester goes into a composting toilet as it is illegal to introduce humanure or urine into the City’s waste water system. The plan is to eventually shut down the city-wide waste water system in favor of handling any greywater issues on site or nearby in neighborhoods. There are individual house models and digesters that take care of entire buildings. People use the gas for cooking and running refrigerators and freezers. People sell their surplus biogas to aggregators and there is a brisk and competitive market for it. Most buildings open to the public have nice and attractive restrooms and encourage people to use them. There is quite a market with a robust competition among the composting cooperatives for the solids left over after the methane is taken off.

The residential natural gas distribution grid no longer exists in most cities. Between demand destruction and the pollution caused by natural gas production system and the dysfunctional nature of the corporations involved, people decided that natural gas was a heritage fuel that was no longer needed nor wanted. Some of the cooperatives use it as a fuel for electrical generation plants where it has almost entirely replaced coal. It is used in some areas for industrial purposes.

A Vision of More Sustainable City Water Systems

The city’s water system has its own energy supply independent of the electrical grid. In many cities, much of the water enters the city by gravity. Once in the system, it moves around by the system’s own energy supplies. The primary energy used to power the system is wind-generated mechanical energy, with methane, alcohol fuels, and biodiesel used in the distribution system mostly as backup fuels when the wind doesn’t blow and the storages are low. Security and resilience issues dictated the decision to separate the water system’s energy supply from the larger area electrical grid.

The City uses its storm water for a multitude of purposes. Many buildings use rainwater to flush toilets and water landscapes. People sculpt the terrain of their parks, yards, and other public and private landscapes with berms and swales to retain water and infiltrate it into the soil.

There are fewer fossil fueled vehicles these days to pollute the storm water so the runoff is cleaner. Before discharge into the watershed, it goes through a natural purification process that feeds hundreds of acres of biologically active wetlands that do work formerly done with energy and chemicals.

The city uses much less water than before. No one irrigates acres of Bermuda grass. Even the golf courses learned to become water frugal. It's amazing what their greens-keepers can do these days. Edible landscaping harvests rainwater. Everyone mulches their landscapes so we need less irrigation. Since most people don’t own cars, they don’t wash them. The toilets don’t need as much water to flush. Everyone is much more water conservative these days. Many industrial processes, which consumed lots of water and generated major pollution, are no longer in play.

One of the critical decisions driving the success of the more sustainable water system was real-world pricing of water, which involved dropping the subsidies for the water system. In the old days, people who were frugal and water conservative effectively subsidized those who used lots of water. By removing the structural subsidies for water supplies, the price of water increased, industries and businesses discovered water conservative ways to operate. Arrangements were made via various mechanisms for the poor.

Getting from here to there.

These are visions of what a mature system of the future could look like. The devil in the details, however, is how we get from here to there. When it comes to water and energy, demand destruction is the place to start. If we want more sustainable systems, we will need to learn frugality and respect for our use of the natural resources of Creation.

Local food systems plant seeds of sustainability everywhere they flourish. In many areas it is no longer hard to find farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture farms, and food cooperatives.

I will not pretend that I know all the details of the design path from our present situation to where we want to be in the future. We don’t need to know that right now. We need to know what the good, better, and best next steps are for us and our situations. Every situation is unique and that's why the first step of all permaculture design is Observation.

There is much that needs to be done about public education and formation of better attitudes and ideas. The good news is that as people live the permaculture ethics in their daily lives, they sow seeds of a humane and ecologically aware future.

In other words, besides starting a food coop, getting water-wise, and ditching your car in favor of a bus pass, we need to be actively involved with the invisible structures of our communities. There may be existing organizations and campaigns that need more support. Your area may need to start new organizations and campaigns.

Your involvement with the invisible structures that impact your life will be a major aspect of the design work that will come together as the permaculture design for your urban life.

For people in urban areas, besides attention to the details of one’s personal lifestyle, invisible structure work is the most important aspect of permaculture design.

You can’t create a sustainable lifestyle in an urban area on your own, by yourself. You need help, allies, friends, networks, community.

To rephrase an old saying . . . It takes an entire city for your household to become more sustainable.