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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] BOOK: A review of The Permaculture City by Scott Vlaun : Permaculture
  • Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2016 22:06:25 -0500

BOOK: A review of The Permaculture City by Scott Vlaun : Permaculture
https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/5l10oj/book_a_review_of_the_permaculture_city_by_scott/?st=ixb7uubl&sh=1da8c6f6

From:

Scott Vlaun, Executive Director

Center for an Ecology-Based Economy

447 Main St, Norway, Maine 04268

207 739 2101

Resilient Communities Restoring the Earth

ecologybasedeconomy.org

A review of Toby Hemenway's book:

The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town
Resilience

http://tobyhemenway.com/book/the-permaculture-city/

The Permaculture City, Toby Hemenway, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015, 269
pages

Every day the world population increases by over two hundred thousand
souls, with almost all of this increase being absorbed by urban areas. As
climate change-induced drought and flood, and related conflicts and
economic instability, drive people from the land, cities are rapidly
expanding to absorb the influx. By 2050 global population will likely
exceed nine billion, with nearly two thirds living in cities.

This migration to the cities poses a great challenge to urban planners and
governments, but, as Toby Hemenway illustrates in his recent book The
Permaculture City, it also creates great opportunity. In his highly popular
2001 title, Gaia’s Garden, Hemenway breaks down permaculture principles and
applies them to home-scale gardening, balancing philosophical understanding
with practical knowledge. In The Permaculture City, Hemenway takes the same
approach, exploring both the evolution and dynamics of the modern city and
surrounds, as well as outlining some practical solutions for thriving there.

While cities cannot feed themselves entirely or provide for all their
energy needs, they are centers of innovation and creativity, and as
Hemenway points out can be “surprisingly green,” capitalizing on economies
of scale and synergies of proximity. The city that Hemenway envisions in
this book, is not one in which the city becomes a self-sufficient organism,
but rather one in which the city becomes more conscious of its internal
relationships to its connections to resources and planet.

In the backyard permaculture garden we strive to develop systems that are
as complex and adaptive as natural systems, integrating and layering plants
and other organisms to create optimum conditions for each. Natural
succession, as well as careful observation and interaction on the
gardener’s part, evolve and refine the system in a fluid and ongoing
process, striving for optimum yield. Cities can function in much the same
way, acting as complex adaptive systems in their own right. The designer’s
challenge, Hemenway points out is finding the sweet spot between too rigid
a plan, and lack of structure. For any complex adaptive system to thrive it
needs the right conditions. For the garden it is soils and microclimate
that allows plants to flourish; in the city it is infrastructure and
policies that coax the best out of human nature.

The Permaculture City is by no means a blueprint for designing a city or
for designing a life within one. It is however a deeply thoughtful look,
through the permaculture lens, at how cities function most effectively as
political, economic, and social systems. It also offers up time-tested
strategies for applying the “tool kit” of permaculture design to create a
“whole systems” approach to living and organizing within the confines of
city life as we strive to meet our needs, not only for food, energy and
shelter, but for right-livelihood, community and culture.



  • [permaculture] BOOK: A review of The Permaculture City by Scott Vlaun : Permaculture, Lawrence London, 12/29/2016

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