06051 Urban Zones

I will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot. — Saul Perlmutter

Permaculture uses zones and sectors as tools to analyze, evaluate, and design. While the concept originally developed for application to homestead properties, the principles can be applied to any situation of any scale where we do permaculture design work.

Your life does not happen in one place. If you are a hermit, I guess you are an exception. For most of us, organizing the sites and geographies of our lives to conserve energy is a primary purpose of zone analysis.

It should not be a surprise to discover that zones in urban designs look different from zones used to do design in suburban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Permaculture teacher Bart Anderson developed an interesting take on the permaculture zone concept that uses transportation as the defining characteristic. In an essay published online at the Permaculture Activist website (http://www.permacultureactivist.net/articles/urbnzonsectr.htm ), he defines six zones —

  • Zone 0: Home.
  • Zone 1: Walking distance (pedosphere).
  • Zone 2: Bicycling distance (cyclosphere).
  • Zone 3: Reachable by public transportation or by a short drive.
  • Zone 4: Driving distance.
  • Zone 5: Reachable only by plane or other long-distance transport.

This definition of zones primarily references the amount of energy required to access the zone.

This analysis of location and access in urban areas in this way suggests looking for places to live and work that are within zones 0 through 3 and minimizing our interactions with zones 4 and 5. This doesn’t meant that we have nothing to do in zones 4 and 5. It suggests that we should be more prudent in our zone 4 and 5 choices.

Here is a reminder of the Permaculture Design Manual's criteria for zones:

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

Using this criteria to develop a geographic zone system for the activities of your life, the areas of most frequent "visits" and "needs for intervention" are your home and your workplace, or school if you are not working and are a student. That's your Zone 1. If you are a working student, your zone 1 is your home, workplace, and school. If these three areas are widely separated by geography, that's an issue. These are daily, or "most days" activities (the 40 hour, 5 day work week seems likely to qualify as "most days."

The next most frequent "need to visit" and "need for intervention," would likely be shopping, which occurs a few times a week. It could be less, but for most people at this stage of the design process, let's say they go shopping three to four days/week. We'll call that Zone 2.

Weekly activities, which could be entertainment or religious worship or meetings, are Zone 3.

Irregularly scheduled activities, which could include things ranging from doctor's appointments to visits to friends and relatives, could constitute a Zone 4.

Zone 5 would be annual events, or things that maybe go on three or four times a year. This could be meetings or vacations.

You can picture your zones as concentric circles or as areas that relate to geography and transit routes. Within those zones, plot the locations you visit.

As with traditional permaculture design, you pay the most attention — and do the most detailed design work — for the areas close to you the person. This starts with your home and life, Zone 1, and would include the zones of more intensive use.

But if you spend most of your time in Anderson's urban transportation Zone 4 — where everything requires a lot of driving — you are living — or working — or living AND working — in the wrong locations. That’s a Type 1 error, just as surely as planting a kitchen herb garden a mile from your kitchen in the midst of a dense wild forest would be. If you come to this method of analysis after you’ve made a major commitment by buying a house or apartment in one area and committed to a life-work elsewhere, you have hard choices to make. You’ll need to sort through all of your alternatives to find the best resolution of your situation.

Design is always contextual. It relates to you in the specific situations where you live. The geographies and schedules of these destinations and events may not be entirely within your control. Your work may be located in a very upscale area where you could not afford to live.

Your area may not have public transportation or it may have a LOT of public transportation. You may be an expert cyclist and not think twice about traveling 10 miles on your bicycle. Or the last time you were on a bicycle was when you were in grade school. Whatever the case may be, use the context of your life as it is to define your urban transportation zones. Then work towards the optimum solution given the actual real-life circumstances, that will show care for people, care for the planet, and care for the future.

Zone analysis can help you design a rational approach to the geographies of your life. There are difficult choices ahead of you. The more information, ethics, and informed analysis you can bring into a decision, the better your ultimate decisions will be.

You may decide to stick with your present geographies and find ways to reduce your footprint substantially elsewhere in your life. It's your life and your plan. iPermie is here to help you make decisions, not to dictate them.