04071 The 21st Century Integral Urban House and the 21st Century Integral Urban Apartment

Live simply so that others may simply live. — Elizabeth Ann Seton

The Integral Urban House could be considered the grandparent of iPermie. In 1974, the Farrallon Institute purchased a 100 year old Victorian house in Berkeley, California. They converted it to be a model for a more sustainable way of urban living.

The house featured a vegetable garden, chickens, rabbits, a compost toilet, fish pond, beehives, and solar power. The size of the lot was only 1/8 acre. The residents recycled 90% of their wastes. You can read an article about the house from a 1976 Mother Earth News at http://www.motherearthnews.com/modern-homesteading/urban-homesteading-zmaz76ndztak.aspx.

They got a lot right about what we need to do to create more sustainable urban living systems.

Before permaculture developed as a design discipline, the Integral Urban House experiment showed the productivity possible by integrating beneficial connections even in such a small space as the Berkeley House.

Going forward, we have much to learn from them. You can probably find the book at your local library or via inter-library loan or at a used book store.

The Integral Urban House in the 21st Century.

Located on a small lot in a densely populated neighborhood, the 21st Century Integral Urban house, like the original model, is a retrofitted house. It is not new construction.

The 21st Century Integral Urban House is an energy conservative dwelling. There is no dishwasher, dryer, clothes washer, disposal, electric can opener, trash compactor, central air conditioner, central heating system, big screen television, motorized lawn mower, leaf blower, garage, garage opener, nor are there incandescent lights. The refrigerator and freezer are appropriate scale for the household.

The house has about 250-300 square feet per occupant.

It has a passive solar heating system, solar water heater, solar food dehydrator, solar oven, biogas digester, biogas stove, outdoor summer kitchen, ceiling fans, whole house ventilation fan, double hung double pane argon-filled low-e coated windows, insulated doors, storm security doors with locks, interior insulated shutters for windows and doors, exterior insulated storm shutters for windows and doors.

The house has insulation in all four walls, the attic, and the floor to the high range amount recommended for the attic in its climate. There are buffer zones around the outer walls (vegetation or screened porches). The doors feature air-locks (that is, all doorways have two doors, connected by a short hallway/entrance). The porches have screens in the summer and during the winter, storm windows and doors.

The house has extensive edible landscaping. Deciduous trees shade the roof in the summer except for the location of the solar water heater. Depending on the climate, there may be one or two small window AC units. The house has at least two interior house plants for every 100 square feet of space. The roof overhangs shade the walls during the summer. The attic ventilates with soffit vents and passive turbines. The roof is white or is a “green roof” planted with vegetation.

They cook outside during the summer.

The gutters pour rainwater into large cisterns shaped like jugs which provide water for the edible landscaping. The house harvests grey water for use on its landscape.

Earthworks sculpt the yard so that it catches water running off the sidewalks and the driveway, plus other rain falling on the yards, to keep it from running into the storm sewers. They allow the rainwater to infiltrate into the ground on the property.

If the residents are meat eaters, they keep rabbits and guinea pigs for meat. They raise chickens for eggs and meat. They raise fish in an aquaponics system on their solar sun porch, which serves as a winter greenhouse.

There is no flush toilet. They use a compost toilet instead. The household vermicomposts, has hot and cool compost piles, and brews compost tea. They make biogas (methane) from biomass they grow on site. All the fertility for their property originates on site. They do not bring in any off-site fertility materials. About 40% of their growing area grows biomass for compost. Some of this goes through the biogas digester before ending up in the compost piles.

The residents work about 20 hours/week at jobs off-site. They own their property free and clear, buying it without a mortgage after several years of working full time jobs and saving money to buy the house and make the necessary improvements. With eight people living in the house, everyone does about a half hour each day of work around the house or the yards on the various energy and food producing projects.

The house does not have a freezer. Instead, the family has a locker in a neighborhood service center, which also has washing machines. They have a small efficient chest refrigerator in their kitchen-, with a small freezer for ice, ice cream, and other small items. If they need frozen items, someone stops by the service center and gets what the family needs out of the locker. The service center freezers operate via a solar-driven process. Neighbors wash their clothes at the center and take them home to dry on an outdoor clothes line (or on an indoor line in the solar porch. The service center has a large commercial kitchen. The service center organizes processing days during the garden harvest seasons, where neighbors get together and put up food for winter eating.

No one in the house owns a personal automobile. Everyone has a bicycle and a bus pass.

The Integral Urban Apartment in the 21st Century.

The integral urban apartment in the 21st century may be located in any size apartment building including complexes with hundreds of units. It is typically an older building that a housing cooperative retrofitted for sustainability. The cooperative may or may not actually own the building. It may have a long-term lease instead of actual ownership.

The apartments are energy conservative. None of them have a dishwasher, dryer, clothes washer, disposal, trash compactor, incandescent lights, central air conditioning, big screen television, or vacuum cleaner. There is no parking for individual vehicles but the building has a bicycle garage.

Every exterior wall and the roof and floor have insulation to the amount recommended for roofs in that climate. The windows are double hung, double pane, argon-filled, low-e coated. They have interior insulated shutters and exterior insulated storm shutters. The building features include insulated and sound-proofed walls, floors, and ceilings between apartments.

Every apartment has a porch or a balcony. The building owners added them as part of the reskinning of the building during its extreme green retrofit. Most residents cook on their balconies during the summer, to keep the heat out of their apartments. They do a considerable amount of container gardening on the balconies too. Vertical growing systems are popular. During the winter, storm windows enclose the balconies creating buffer zones.

All the humanure and urine from the toilets goes into biogas digesters in the building’s basement which produce methane. This provides cooking gas to the apartments and heats hot water boilers that provide steam heat during the winter. There is a green roof system that grows vegetables and greens in containers during the growing seasons. The roof has solar hot water heaters that provide hot water to the apartments. During the winter, additional rooftop solar water heaters replace the container garden to produce hot water that, together with the basement methane-fueled boilers, provide steam heat and hot water supplies for the apartments.

Greywater from the building cycles through a wetlands system on the property that cleans and purifies it naturally. Rainwater runoff from the building fills cisterns which provide water for the landscape, whose berms and swales retain water so most of it infiltrates into the ground onsite.

The building contains a meeting room of sufficient size to hold most of the members of the housing cooperative. It is often in use for coop meetings and social events. Members can schedule it, or one of the other smaller common areas, for events too large for their individual apartments. The size of the apartments ranges between 450 to 750 square feet. If a larger household needs more space, the management installs doors between two apartments to unite them as one unit.

The apartments feature LED lighting. There are washing machines in the building's service center and each balcony has retractable clothes lines. The lines run both horizontally and vertically. A pulley system allows people to put their laundry on the line and retrieve it when dry. Each bathroom has a retractable clothes line for use during times of rain or extra cold.

Several farms and food coops deliver groceries to the building. The building has a large commercial kitchen that residents use for food processing and preservation. People usually do such activities in groups. They make deals with farmers for meats, produce, or fruit and spend part of a day processing it with their neighbors. Besides the typical jams, jellies, and pickles, people make and can a large variety of soups for convenience “heat and serve” eating. Everyone goes home with food. Each apartment has a locker in the building freezer for frozen foods. The locker works on a highly efficient solar-driven process. The apartments have chest (or drawer) refrigerators with a freezer compartment big enough for ice trays, ice cream, and a few small items. The neighborhood service centers provide extra climate controlled space for non-refrigerated food storage.

The building’s grounds are landscaped with a forest garden and each household can, at its option, have a plot in a community garden located on a former parking lot. Biomass harvested from the grounds supplements biogas production.

No one in the building owns a car. Everyone has a bicycle and a bus pass. There is a neighborhood car rental system if somebody needs a car for some reason. A portion of the former indoor parking garage for the building is now a bicycle garage. All of the outdoor parking lots are gardens.

The 21st Century Integral Urban Duplex, Triplex, and Fourplex.

Between the single family home and the apartment building or complex, the city has a considerable number of units accommodating two, three, and four households. While many of these are rentals, occupants own an equal number of the units. Their features and amenities are similar to those listed for the Integral Urban House. Instead of having common facilities like the larger apartment buildings, they will use the neighborhood service center for activities like washing, frozen food storage, space for entertaining, food preservation, etc.

A thought experiment based on the Integral Urban House and Apartment.

How many beneficial connections can you find in the descriptions of the features of the Integral Urban House and Integral Urban Apartment? What elements have multiple functions? How are important functions supported by multiple elements?