04011 Urban Shelter Design

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. — Gaston Bachelard

Shelter is one of the three types of infrastructure (shelter, supply, safety) that protects us from the six ways to die (heat, cold, hunger, thirst, injury, illness). Section 9 has more information on resilience, the six ways to die, and types and layers of infrastructure.

Shelter is a major consumer of energy and one of the primary sources of the emissions that drive global climate change. The present housing built environment has mostly been designed to be energy inefficient. Reducing the amount of energy embodied in our dwellings and their operations is critical to caring for the planet and caring for people. This demands better design for our urban shelters and their operating systems and the development of standard methods to retrofit existing dwellings to be more energy conservative.

Urban design involves the macro and the micro.

Permaculture takes a holistic view and that is as true of shelter as it is anything else. It is always a mistake to simply focus on the details of the individual shelter space to the exclusion of other aspects of design. While certainly the details of the individual shelter are important, so are the macro aspects involved with that shelter. Invisible structures may dictate where the shelter may be, what materials can be used in its construction, who can build the house, its minimum size, the minimum size of the lot, and many other details.

We need at least as much design work for coping with — or changing! – the invisible structures impacting upon a structure as we do the shelter itself.

The problem of new construction.

When we think of housing design, the first thing people want to do is go somewhere and build a brand new house. It will be, of course, perfectly designed as a “green” building, with all of the bells and whistles pertaining thereto.

But we have to ask if any new construction can be considered green, even if environmentally aware architects design it to high standards, due to the embodied energy cost of the materials. That can be mitigated somewhat by using recycled and locally sourced materials, but there remains a lot of “new energy” expenditure in all new construction.

That's why the iPermie focus is on retrofitting existing construction.

There aren’t enough resources on the planet for everyone to build a new house that is energy efficient. We have the built environment that we have, for better or worse. It’s as much a part of our urban ecologies as the plants, the soil, and the flora and fauna. Permaculture design can help us evolve this built environment in a way that cares for people, cares for the planet, and has a care for the future.

In urban areas, the built environment includes –-

Individual family houses,
Multiple unit housing, which ranges from duplexes all the way up to high rise apartment buildings and complexes with hundreds of units,
Commercial buildings (distribution points for products and services)
Industrial buildings (places where things are made or rebuilt)
Public purpose buildings (government offices, schools, religious buildings, etc.)
Abandoned and vacant properties

Housing consistent with permaculture ethics.

A primary urban design evolution for housing that cares for the planet, cares for people, and cares for the future is that we need to live in smaller spaces in more densely populated neighborhoods.

Big living spaces require big energy expenditures, both for initial construction and for operations. There is no such thing as a “green” house of 5,000 square feet inhabited by two people, even if the designer outfitted it with a grey water system, hot water heating, extra insulation, passive solar, and PV cells to generate electricity.

The standard design for human settlement these days mandates the use of personal automobiles. That is a prescription for ecological disaster. To resolve this problem, we need more densely populated neighborhoods in our urban spaces.

When we design situations so that it is easier for people to make good environmental choices, we design to make it harder for people to make bad environmental choices.

People in NYC live amazingly green lifestyles because their built environment and its systems make it easier for them to live their lives closer together, in smaller spaces, with little or no use of a personal automobile.

Urban Design is Personal

Human behavior is a critical aspect of urban ecologies.

What we do,
Where we do it,
How we do it,
How often we do it,

— fundamentally impacts the ecologies, including the built environment and the infrastructure of our urban areas.

We can do a lot by changing personal behavior.

We can do more with better design of systems and invisible structures.

The Personal and the Communal

Our communal behaviors are the sum of our personal behaviors, “only more so” — due to the synergistic (good) — or dysergistic (bad) — impacts of our collection actions.

As we consider ways to improve the ecological conditions in cities, particular attention must be given to our politics. Local governments can have enormous impacts, for good or for ill, on the ecologies of the areas that they govern. Local government functions that relate to sustainability and permaculture include –-

Waste disposal and recycling,
Public transit,
Roads,
Zoning,
Property maintenance codes,
Building codes
Parks and recreational facilities
Water
Education

These communal invisible structures constitute a second layer of design in our pursuit of a system that makes it easier to live good and harder to live bad.

Designing to make it easier to live good.

The built environment can make ecological behaviors easier or harder. You need a place to live that meets your needs and helps you to live lighter upon the land and make good ecological choices for your lifestyle.

So we start by designing smaller living spaces.

Apartment buildings, of whatever size, house a larger number of people in a smaller space than do single family homes. This has some interesting environmental impacts.

New York City, which has 2.7% of the nation’s population, emits only 1% of our national US greenhouse gas emissions.

The average greenhouse gas emissions per person in New York City amount to 7.1 metric tons/year. The US national average is 24.5 metric tons/person.

Gasoline consumption in New York City is at the 1920s national average level.

The average New Yorker consumes only 1/4 the electricity during the year that the average resident of Dallas, Texas does.

75% of the households on Manhattan Island do not own a car. Nationally, only 8% of households don’t own a car.

The dense population of New York City, coupled with its advanced network of public transit systems, combine to make it the most energy efficient city in the United States.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t ecological issues in New York City, because there are. It does show that the common assumption — “an ecological lifestyle is easier in a rural area than in a city” — is not necessarily true.

A family in a rural area might live several miles from a small town, and even further from a larger town. That burns a lot of gas for shopping, school, after-school activities, social activities, medical care, and etc.

It takes a major amounts of wire to provide electricity across miles of rural territory.

Rural houses often have individual wells and septic systems. If they do have a rural water system, one family may require miles of pipe whereas in a city, a mile of pipe might serve hundreds or thousands of families.

Those same people, living in a city, would occupy a fraction of the rural foot print. They would need less road, not so much pipe and wire, less driving, more walking, etc.

I'm not saying “rural is bad, urban is good.” Instead, I suggest that the situation of sustainable living is more complex than many seem to think it is. You may find it easier to live more sustainably in the city than you do in a rural area. If people want to move to rural areas from a city, they can follow their dreams. But people should not feel that they have to move to a rural area to live more sustainably.

Designing for Resilience, Persistence, and Constancy.

Long-lasting ecosystems are —

Constant. They maintain themselves.
Persistent. They resist damage and destruction.
Resilient. They repair themselves following disturbances.

The resilience, persistence, and constancy of ecologies derive from the complexity, redundancy, and diversity of its systems and the beneficial connections that unite them. In an ecosystem without human habitations, this “wisdom” encodes into the biomass. In an ecosystem populated by humans, we find some of this wisdom in the actions and behaviors of the people and the dense networks of invisible structures incorporated into urban settlements of whatever scale.

Besides wisdom, humans may bring stupidity and evil to an ecosystem. This is always a problem.

Diversity in scale is a critical aspect of ecosystem resilience, with or without human beings. This manifests in two ways:

form — (size, substance, pattern), and
time — (rate and schedule).

If a tornado hits a neighborhood, it destroys human scale structures. The grass, the bacteria, and the little critters survive. Branches may be broken off of trees, while the trees may remain.

If an international financial crisis hits, large corporations may be severely hurt. A healthy economy will have a diversity of enterprises, of different sizes, so that the impacts of international crises will be felt at different levels in different ways.

A national government may become dysfunctional to the point of collapse, while local civil society organizations remains effective and picks up the pieces. Diversity in scale is as important among invisible structures and human communities as it is in a mature forest.

In a forest, plants leaf out and bloom on different schedules. Plants and animals propagate at different rates. Everyone does not eat the same thing at the same time.

In a city, everyone does not go to work at the same time or for the same amounts of time. Industries, commercial enterprises, and public purpose institutions all have schedules and frequencies that are not identical with others. Fortunately! In urban areas, uniformity of schedules can be a problem (rush hour congestion) or it can be an asset (large number of people wanting to move at closely scheduled times facilitate public transit instead of private cars).

When it comes to urban shelter, we always want to design for diversity, constancy, persistence, and resilience. This calls for careful attention to both the details of the structure and the systems and situation in which the shelter will be embedded. The more we design our cities in accordance with natural ecologies, the more diverse, constant, persistent, and resilient they will be.

Multi-unit housing is a good ecological choice.

No one should be afraid of multi-family housing as a prudent ecological shelter choice in urban areas. Living in a situation with limited on-site food production capacities simply points to the importance of developing the invisible structures of local food systems and promoting the use of foods derived from your city’s foodshed.

Everybody does not have to grow all of their own food to have a sustainable future. Sustainability does not mean the division of labor goes away or that specialization will end.

Designing for affordability.

One of the critical issues in urban areas is affordability of housing. We presently operate in an economy of scarcity where the price of housing is artificially inflated. This is a faux economy whose scarcities are contrived by political and economic design. Special interests regularly corrupt the government in order to increase the price of housing by various political shenanigans.

Government zoning and building codes mandate buildings to accommodate the middle class and wealthy.

In most areas the housing needs of the poor and the working classes are routinely ignored by municipal government authorities responsible for building codes and zoning.

Minimum lot sizes, minimum apartment sizes, and eminent domain combine to reduce the amount of affordable housing and thus drive up the cost.

Governments regularly destroy housing. Eminent domain used for the purpose of redevelopment (in particular) is a constant war on the housing and neighborhoods of the poor. This drives up the cost of low income housing way above where the actual market rents would be set if eminent domain was not being used to destroy so many low income housing units.

So-called “urban renewal” programs, which use eminent domain to take the properties of the poor and destroy their neighborhoods, are class warfare at its worst. They are due process pogroms directed against those who have no political power.

Urban renewal and eminent domain are acts of political terror wielded by those who covet the neighborhoods of the poor for their own economic benefit. The urban renewal eminent domain scam steals the property of the poor by paying cheap, non-market, politicized prices for it.

We need to abandon the economics of scarcity and design for abundance and affordability because that's how we evolve our cities to care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future. Everyone deserves adequate housing, not just the wealthy and the middle class. We should stop destroying the neighborhoods of lower income people and converting their lands for other purposes. Although everyone involved would deny this if asked, driving up the price of rents by non-market mechanisms is a stacked function on these campaigns of political terror we sanitize as "urban renewal", which is nothing more or less than the destruction of low income neighborhood driven by green and corruption.

Besides stopping the non-market politicized destruction of low income neighborhoods, we need more:

Small apartments
Boarding houses
Single Room Occupancy Hotels
Housing Cooperatives

When it comes to getting more of these into our urban ecologies, much of the problem is simply a matter of repealing government rules and regulations that forbid the construction of small apartments, the operation of boarding houses, and that encourage and subsidize SRO hotel gentrification.

We need standard models.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Unplugged vision of the future (see 08141) was the “Pod” — three models of inexpensive manufactured housing that enabled their residents to live low footprint lifestyles consistent with the permaculture ethics. The story is a bit short on details of the housing. Fortunately, we don't lack for ideas and models in the real world that could help us create sustainable living situations at lower cost than is presently the case.

One of the problems we faced in our extreme-green renovation of our home was the lack of a standard model to follow. Instructions would have been helpful. People are always hesitant to be the first to make big changes to the living environment. They might not fret about a $20,000 kitchen makeover, because "everybody is doing it" and there are lots of resources and models to follow. Those same people might turn their backs on a $5,000 energy conservation upgrade because nobody they know is doing it and in any event, the government is promising cheap energy prices "forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, hallelujah!"

Going forward, standard models can help people gain the confidence necessary to make these sometimes extreme changes to their built environment. People hesitate to do much “out of the ordinary” with a house that they own because of concerns as to what it might do to the property values. Like it or not, that’s on people’s minds these days. The development of standard models for renovating older housing to become ecologically beneficial is an important task of urban design.

We need the real world equivalents of the Unplugged Pods, either as a renovation of an existing building or as newly manufactured housing that could be done in an ecological way and thus avoid the concerns about new construction because it is so consumptive of resources.

The beginning of a standard model.

If someone has a dwelling that they want to take in the extreme green direction, here are some basic options. Note that these are mostly suitable for areas with four seasons — where it is hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and mixed weather during the fall and spring. Persons living in hot tropics can use some of these options, but they will need other strategies suitable for their climate.

Seal the building envelope as best as can be done with caulk, foam, weather-stripping, etc.
Super-insulate the building envelope — insulate the walls, floors, and attic to whatever the recommendation is for the attic. If there is a range of R-values given for a particular climate, always take the higher number for more insulation. Follow local climate guidelines regarding vapor barriers.
Install insulating window treatments that are at least R-20. If you have curtains, Install cornice boards or valences above windows to stop any window convection effect behind the curtains.
Add glazing on the south (in the northern hemisphere) or the north (in the southern hemisphere) to make a passive solar sunspace. Using vents near ceilings and near the floors, create a convective loop to move heat in the winter from the sunspace through the rest of the house. Shade the glazing in the summer.
If the dwelling is separate from other buildings, the walls need overhangs.
In most situations, opt for zone heating and AC. Don’t install or use central heating/AC unless you can afford to go the ground-sourced heat pump route. Use individual room heaters and small window AC. If you do have central air, install a heat exchanger on the ventilation intake, insulate the ducts or route them through conditioned spaces and keep them out of non-conditioned spaces like your attic. Depending on your climate (how cool it gets at night during the summer) a whole house fan may help you live without any AC.
Paint the roof white or plant the roof with vegetation (planting is the best choice, white paint is the next).
Shade the exterior walls with deciduous vegetation and plant edible landscaping.
Shape the ground around the building to catch and infiltrate rainwater.
Harvest rain from the building’s roof for storage and use later or for immediate infiltration into the ground.
Install plumbing for easy grey water recovery if possible with your local codes. If not, use basins and such to collect greywater for use on the landscape.
If the sunspace does not provide enough heat in the winter, install solar air heaters and additional thermal mass to get you through the cloudy days.
Install solar hot water heating.
Create canopy beds for the residents to use during the winter. During the summer, remove the side curtains and top drape.
Ceiling fans in every room. Install more than one ceiling fan in large rooms.
LED lighting throughout.
Minimize accumulation of electric junk. No dishwasher, garbage disposal, or clothes dryer.
A space for outdoor cooking in the summer, to keep the heat out of the house. If an apartment building, this could be a balcony or breeze-way.
Very efficient appliances appropriately sized for the household.
Larger buildings need bio-digester systems that treat sewage waste onsite and produce fertilizer and methane gas which supplies (or supplements) the building’s energy needs.

This is not as technical a “standard” as (for example) the passive house standard, discussed in the chapter on energy conservation for home-owners. It is more or less the practical experience of people we know who have years of experience living lightly on the land. It’s not focused on buying expensive systems that people may not be able to afford. In other words. . . there are multiple paths to achieve the goals of this iPermie model. This is the low-tech not-so-expensive method.

Much of this applies as much to apartments as it does to individual houses on plots of land.

Depending on the location of the apartment, there may be some structural insulation. An apartment on an interior floor on the south side of a building, whose front door opens onto an interior hallway, with apartments above, below, and on two sides, has a considerable amount of insulation in its location. There is less movement of heat through the walls because there is less temperature differential between the apartments. More heat moves faster when there is a large temperature differential on either side of the wall. However, extra insulation makes for a quieter apartment and that is a big deal for apartment dwellers. So if you own your apartment, insulation has some stacked functions for you.

Maximize Beneficial Connections

Your housing considerations do not exist in isolation.

What is the size of your household? Will it increase over time?

What is the location of your dwelling relative to the geographies of your life? (work, shopping, education, entertainment, etc.)

Is migration to a different place in your future? How soon?

If your accommodation is temporary or rental, what ecological improvements can you make that are portable and can thus take with you if you move or migrate?

How does your shelter relate to the geography of your food supply?

What sectors impact your housing?

What invisible structures impact your housing?

How does your housing connect with invisible structures?

What energies make your accommodation comfortable and habitable? What are the connections between those off-site energies and your lifestyle and your housing?

Housing Checklist

Energy reductions to be gained by passive measures? Insulation, caulking, weatherizing, window treatments, passive solar, passive ventilation strategies etc.
Energy reductions to be gained by active measures? Replacing inefficient cooling/heating equipment, fans for cooling and ventilation, air to air heat exchangers, solar hot water heating, automatic thermostats.
Energy reductions to be gained by behavior changes? Light discipline, vampire loads, use of hot water, outdoor cooking in the summer.
Food production possibilities? Container gardening, small scale aquaponics, sprouting, microgreens, community gardens, CSAs, food coops.
Resilience, Persistence, Constancy issues? How well built is the structure? What hazards may impact the dwelling and its residents? Water issues? Reduce water consumption by passive and active measures, including behavior changes.

Invisible structure issues? Do the systems of government regulation support sustainable housing or do they drive unsustainability? What needs to change to make the system better?