permaculture

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

Russ' excellent commentary on the realities of urban/suburban transport
and work patterns applies equally well to those urban centers I've lived
in in the USA, specifically the San Francisco Bay area (where I was born
and grew up) and the greater Seattle area (where I've been mostly from
late '96 to present).

>From a permaculture design perspective (beyond gardening, that is, so I
think this is an example of what Russ is talking about...?) some leverage
points are obvious.

For example, the "problem" of urban/suburban transportation is not a
result of lack of transportation resources or of such resources being
reduced or taken away.  Those conditions may exacerbate transportation
difficulties but they are not the cause of them.

The root cause of "transportation problems" is culturally embedded and
legally codified land use patterns that result in ever-increasing needs to
move more and more people longer and longer distances every day simply to
meet their basic daily needs.

So any amelioration of "transit problems" must at root deal with land use
patterns and policies.  This is a whole systems design opportunity, to
(re-)integrate these pieces that have been split apart (land use patterns,
transportation patterns, basic human needs, etc.).

Seattle for example already has 'neighborhoods' that are to some extent
(housing, basic services/shopping, entertainment, parks, etc.)
self-contained on a pedestrian and/or bicycle and/or alternative transit
scale (including for differently abled folks).  Albany, California, the
small town (embedded in a large urban matrix) where I grew up, is another
example.

As in so many other urban places, however, the cultural pattern of land as
commodity combined with land use choices made by arbitrary outside
authority means that most people who work in the better provisioned
neighborhoods can't afford a home there, and those who can afford a home
there do so by working somewhere (usually much) too far away for walking
or cycling (and perhaps poorly served by mass transit, but again the whole
mass transit issue is ultimately a distraction from the land use issues).

European and Canadian cities I have experienced do tend to have denser
cores, but they certainly have later-model urban/suburban sprawl as well. 
Europeans (and Canadians?) seem more willing to subsidize public transit,
which is nice, but it still takes a long long time and a lot of
non-renewable energy to get from sprawl A to sprawl B.

> On Sunday, June 8, 2003, at 04:55  PM, treaclemine@intranet.org wrote:
>> Should committed permaculturists be giving up
>> private fossil fuel burning cars as quickly as possible, and moving to
>> sustainable forms of transport (including community vehicles running
>> on alternative fuels)?

Those that can, great; IMO it's a small-scale localized interim 'better
practice'.  Bear in mind that meeting current global transportation energy
usage (not to mention all other energy usage) from biofuels is not in the
least sustainable.



John Schinnerer, MA
-------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net