Thinking about permaculture…
A critique of permaculture ideas again raises questions about the suburbs
I wrote this article around a decade ago but never published it. This is the 2022 edition and it lead us through how permaculture might best respond to suburban living.
I REMEMBER THAT permaculture design system co-creator, David Holmgren, was not all that impressed when his ideas about the suburbs becoming food-producing places was criticised by noted Australian planner and urban systems academic, Peter Newman and his fellow authors in their 2009 book, Resilient Cities. The issues they raised have not gone away and are worth revisiting.
The ideas criticised in Resilient Cities are central to the Retrosuburbia model of urbanisation that appeared in David’s 2018 book of the same name. The authors wrote that the permaculture ideas David put forward would worsen the problems of suburbanisation by consuming additional land and exacerbate its other problems. They saw the ideas as promoting suburban growth with its attendant dysfunction.
The authors were talking about urban sprawl, one of the long-running and continuing critiques of urbanisation implicated in the loss of urban edge farmland and natural systems, as well as private motor vehicle dependency, inadequate public transport and inadequate access to services. The process was boosted during the 1960s and the following decade when what are now the middle ring of suburbs of our big cities were developed and populated. Little regard was paid to retaining bushland and larger areas of public open space as street after street of detached houses each on their own large block of land rolled towards the distant hills. In some cities, development leapt ahead of provision of services such as sewage.
The urbanisation of city fringe market garden space consumed by our expanding suburbs is important because, taking Sydney as an example, vegetables produced in the Sydney region in 2009 account for 22% ($167 million) of total NSW vegetable production (Malcolm and Fahd, 2009). The paving of city fringe market gardens and farmland means that food has to be imported from more-distant places. In a time of climate and weather abnormality and geopolitical conflict this brings its own production and supply chain vulnerabilities.
Nowhere to talk and explore
These critiques are real, yet we find little discussion of them in permaculture circles. There are two possible explanations for this.
One explanation might be because these issues of urbanisation are too big for a permaculture that is aware of them but that does not have the organisational tools to deal with them, in part due to its focus on the individual, especially on those who own land whether that be a suburban block or a small rural property. This in itself poses something of a challenge to permaculture’s growth thanks to the high cost of buying a home, whether that be an apartment in the city or a suburban house on a block. A permaculture tied to home ownership at a time that it is unaffordable to many could well become a limited version of permaculture.
The popular model of the homesteader on their rural block is also of limited value in furthering permaculture because for most people it is unattainable on a cost basis as well as on the time and skills commitment of managing a homestead. As it is, the notion of the idea scaled to the size of the urban block, the ‘urban homesteader’ we find promoted in books, courses and on YouTube—and it is not a permaculture idea alone—can be a challenge to people working and commuting while raising a family. The time commitment comes into play here and that can limit what householders can do. The idea itself is a good one when we think of household food security and self-provisioning in water and energy, and childless couples might find it easier to make happen. The extent to which the urban homesteader model can be adopted, and these are its limiting factors, is reliant on financial resources, householder time and skill availability plus land ownership.
I think of permaculture people I have known who quit the city for the land, only to return after a few years because the hard and constant work, the isolation and the car dependency for even small needs became draining. I acknowledge those who have made a success of the small scale rural homesteader model and they would have valuable advice for anyone contemplating the lifestyle. Even a rural block of 2.5ha can prove a handful when it comes to management. Some permaculture rural property owners call on the unpaid labour market to get the work done—help is rewarded by accommodation and food and by learning, or by the satisfaction of voluntarism (which usually relies on some kind of external income stream or savings). Although some have criticised the model on the basis of the social equitability of access—they say it is biased to middle class people with financial reserves—some permaculture and other properties find it viable and have adopted it on a win-win basis.
A second explanation for a lack of discussion around alternative models of urbanisation and the issues raised in Resilient Cities may have to do with a lack of space for intellectual dialog in permaculture. Unlike other design disciplines and other fields, permaculture has nothing like an industry journal where in-depth discussion can happen.
There are sources on permaculture’s intellectual fringe that can be drawn upon to imagine and perhaps build an alternative type of urbanisation such as Anitra Nelson explores in her book on alternative housing options, a product of her international research—Small is Necessary — Shared Living on a Shared Planet, the works of retired NSW limits-to-growth advocate, Ted Trainer, and the work on community land trusts by Australian cooperative housing advocate, Louise Crabtree Hayes.
I am not saying that permaculture in Australia is devoid of intellectual discussion. Conversation occurs between practitioners on a person-to-person basis and occasionally in social media and on the websites of permaculture bloggers. The design system, however, lacks a main central venue where it could take place. The development of such a venue is unlikely, thanks to the fractionalisation of information sources that characterise the contemporary internet.
As has been pointed out before, there is little introspection on the development of permaculture as a design practice and a social movement. All we have to explore where permaculture has been and what permaculture is becoming and how what makes it up is changing are the mental ruminations of a handful of bloggers like David Holmgren, academic sociologist Terry Leahy and myself.
The individualisation of responsibility
I recall Resilient Cities saying that permaculture ideas individualise infrastructural things like food production, water supply and waste management at the cost of developing broader-based solutions. That is true. Domestic water harvesting and storage, home photovoltaic systems, home gardening and domestic waste recycling have been promoted in permaculture courses and literature since its early days. These are positive life hacks and interventions in the economic system and should be baseline practices for permaculture households — normalised, that is.
The argument goes that by promoting water, food and energy as household initiatives and responsibilities alone, permaculture ignores these things as civic infrastructure. No doubt, individualisation benefits manufacturers of photovoltaic and other systems perhaps more than would shared systems. It may be that some of these things might be more effectively implemented at the municipal level than as initiatives by individual households, like the community batteries for household energy supply that we see starting to pop up here and there.
This is not the authors’ criticism alone. When the idea of getting your own place in order first — as advocated by permaculture co-creator, Bill Mollison — stops at your garden gate and fails to extend out into communities, neighbourhoods and suburbs as Bill envisioned it would, it positions permaculture as an expression of the libertarian notion of private rather than social solutions, of going it alone, say its critics. The result of an overt focus on the individual or household is a lack of civic infrastructure for essential services and a decline in community cohesion.
I’ve realised… being a good gardener can be like being an ostrich with your head in the sand. You will inevitably die in your own good garden if you don’t pull your head out and see what is happening in the real world.
Therefore, for us to continue to live on the earth, stop for a while from just being gardeners and look at what is happening and try and stop it.
…Interview with Bill Mollison, Permaculture magazine, 1983.
It was Helena Norberg-Hodge, the environmental campaigner, international development advocate and author who some years ago warned me about the danger of individualising what should be social responsibility. Putting responsibility for solving environmental solutions onto individuals at the household level leaves corporations and government off the hook, she said. Helena was commenting on how at the time the environment movement was individualising responsibility with its messages about waste reduction and energy conservation in the home. Remember all the hoopla about those online environmental impact carbon footprint self-assessment calculators, LED lights, bicycling and recycling? She was not arguing against people reducing their environmental impact, just saying that ascribing to individuals the prime responsibility for reducing environmental impact in society left the real perpetrators to walk free.
Since then we have seen the movement focus more on the impacts of global heating while continuing to push people to adopt individual solutions. This is a positive move in that the movement contextualises individual actions within the global climate change scenario. The movement has come to realise that big issues require social and political solutions and that the actions of individuals cannot scale to the level where they can blunt the changes taking place, even with increasing numbers participating in them. Small and slow solutions might not be solutions at all. Why? Because even large numbers of people adopting environmental practices does not constitute an organised lobby that could move those practices into political policy.
There is, however, an instance where individual actions are having an effect on the big picture. That is Australia’s 3.3 million photovoltaic (PV) installations, the highest coverage of rooftop solar electric generation in the world, according to Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator. Roughly one-in-three suitable households has solar PV panels with an increasing number installing home batteries. Enquiries about systems have increased since the federal government forecast up to a 56% increase in domestic energy costs over the coming year. Australia also has a high number of domestic solar hot water arrays.
In combination with the move towards investment in renewable energy, primarily photovoltaic and wind, the scale of domestic PV installation demonstrates how individual solutions in tandem with large scale industrial investment and enabled by progressive government policy and incentive form a virtuous reinforcing loop that can accelerate positive change in our suburbs.
In a regime of escalating energy costs and increasing cost of living expenses, household investment in individual solutions that would reduce home running costs over time makes sense for homeowners with the capital or access to credit to adopt them. That, though, is another barrier in our current cost of living crisis. Householders might like to install these technologies but they can be unaffordable, partly as a result of the failure of incomes to keep pace with the escalating cost of living.
The current and anticipated increases in household energy costs offer permaculture educators an opportunity to refocus their work on ways for households to reduce their running costs. The solutions have for a long time been part of what permaculture proposes, and repackaging and teaching them in terms of our cost of living crisis might make permaculture relevant to a wider range of people because increasing utility, transport and other costs are real challenges that people face. It would have to go further than just home gardening (recognising that many people do not have a garden) and turning off lights and would have to produce measurable results.
Why the suburbs?
The suburbs are rightly criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities as places of excess consumption, not only consumption in the households that make them up but consumption due to the suburban layout itself. Poor public transport forces private vehicle use. Commutes become long and carbon emissions become more than those of people in the inner, more densely populated suburban core where plentiful public transport, walking and bicycling are viable ways to commute to work and get around.
Many people in inner urban areas already live in de-facto 15-minute cities where important goods and services are within a short walk or bicycle ride. Many old cities are walkable cities with goods and services close to where people live. The 15-minute city is a town planning model for pedestrian-friendly cities, however it has been politicised by the far-right of fringe politics which promotes the disinformation that it is a government scam to impose lockdowns on personal movement. The idea of walkable and cyclable cities has long-been promoted in permaculture, however the irony that some permaculture people subscribe to this conspiracy theory demonstrates how its own people can militate against the very ideas that permaculture stands for. It is a self-defeating attitude.
Distance, infrequent public transport and too few safe bicycle routes makes shops and other social and public places more difficult of access in the suburbs. With the necessity for the family’s adults to work to buy their suburban home the suburbs become dormitories, what are called ‘bedroom suburbs’, and are partially depopulated during the working day thanks to the tidal flow of commuting to the workplace. Social alienation for those remaining becomes a psychological factor in suburban life.
Criticism of suburban residents is sometimes made in ignorance of the circumstances of their lives. People move to the new, urban fringe suburbs in search of affordable housing. With adults in the family working to buy their home and spending time commuting to their workplaces, there is only limited time left for domestic pursuits like home food growing and cooking. People are tired when they arrive home from work and want to relax. Especially where families have children, comments made online demonstrate that time unavailability is a big factor in why suburban gardens grow easy to maintain lawn instead of time-consuming vegetables. It also explains the popularity of ready-to-heat prepared meals from the supermarket, which is often the only source of food in some suburbs, a fact sometimes missed or ignored by fair food advocates. Perhaps, what would be helpful for permaculture educators would be a guide about how to shop the supermarket for the nutritionally-best foods along the lines of food writer, Michael Pollan’s notion of shopping the supermarket periphery where the less-processed foods are found.
Time poverty due to work and family commitment, commuting and taking time to decompress and relax seldom gets consideration as barriers in permaculture literature that promote home food production. Yet, they are real. Also largely ignored is the reality that many urban people have no access to land on which to grow food and, when they do, it can be overshaded by neighbouring buildings and trees and is therefore less productive of vegetables and fruit. Sure, you can grow a few lettuce, tomatoes and herbs in containers on your balcony, but you cannot feed a family from it.
American speculative science writer and permaculture advocate, Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) takes a critical view of the suburbs (reference lost).
“[Cities] house a lot of people on small patches of land, which makes them hugely better than suburbia. In ecological terms, suburbs are disastrous, while cities can perhaps work”.
Americans differentiate between city and suburbs. ‘City’ means the denser populated inner regions or denser islands in the suburbs close to business districts where services, shops, employment and public transport are in easy reach. ‘Suburbs’ means much what we in Australia mean when we use the term: places of low population density where families live in detached houses or apartments and that are characterised by social isolation and urban sprawl.
What KSR is getting at is supported by Jane Jacobs in her 1961 critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs argued in favour of high density neighbourhoods like New York City’s Greenwich Village, which she said was an example of a vibrant urban community. Urban density creates a socially diverse concentration where ideas compete, mix and blend, and that provide the economic density that supports local (and sometimes specialised) business in providing for local needs. Denser inner urban areas can be innovative environments — economically, socially and in the opportunity they offer. That accords with what I learned in a placemaking workshop when I worked with City of Sydney — that it is the search for opportunity that attracts people to cities where exchange — economic, intellectual and social—takes place. Population density brings a local diversity of those things that feed opportunity.
Personal experience confirms critics
I experienced what critics of the suburbs say when living in Sydney’s southern suburbs on the shore of Botany Bay. To make use of public transport required allocating the time to get to the train station or bus stop, then for the journey itself. The street was largely deserted during the day and even when going to the local shopping centre people seldom walked in favour of driving.
What saved the suburb as a reasonable place to live were the beaches along the bay, the proximity of the ocean beach at Cronulla and the reservation for the highway which was never built and that was developed as a linear parkland with sporting fields and wetlands along the creek, and a market garden. People used the parkland for walking, running and other activities such as family play and cycling on the unmade tracks. This multiple use of the open space made apparent the necessity for suburbs to have places for active and passive recreation and for natural systems.
That was reinforced with my association with the development of the Randwick Sustainability Hub, its Permaculture Interpretive Garden and the adjacent, remnant bushland reserve, open space and walking/cycle track. Located in an area of medium density coastal suburbs where over half of the population live in apartments, duplexes and similar compact dwellings, the bushland was made up of whatever had grown from the seed left in the soil after the sand miners departed 60 years ago. The development repurposed military land into a regional park and place for people and nature in the city.
Suburbs can be recreated as regenerative places to live, however they still have problems stemming from their lower population density. I compare my life in the southern suburb to that in the denser populated inner urban region where facilities were in walking distance and public transport to the city and my workplace was frequent. This was due to a lot of people living on a limited area of land. Population density made small business economically viable, supported specialist businesses and increased social opportunity. Those factors, however, also lead to competition for landuse. That I encountered when working in community food and landcare for the City of Sydney. The City, which includes the city centre and its surrounding, densely populated residential enclaves, had a mere 200ha of open space available for all landuses including sports and the urban parks that are necessary for mental health and as passive recreation space.
In the Eastern Suburbs, up the hill from Coogee Beach, we lived in a building of four apartments. Once again, it was a higher population living in a small area that supported the small businesses a mere seven minutes walk away and allowed us to live within a 25 minute bus journey of the city centre or of Bondi Junction’s commercial centre where we could access specialised services. We were fortunate in our apartment block having its own vegetable garden and in having the bulk of our food sourced from Ooooby, a food hub supplying produce from Sydney region farmers and from further afield.
Life in our apartment was a more conducive way to live than our life in the suburbs had been. We had all we needed within a short walk—parks, shops, the beach, swimming pool and even a gym, as well as public transport. We also had a range of vehicles nearby belonging to the car co-op which we could book on an app and open with our membership card. We lived without a private vehicle. It also showed me how wrong are people who criticise apartment living. Our two-level apartment block occupied the space of one suburban house and was home to seven people (more when a family with children moved in), whereas suburban houses accommodate mostly between one and four. Sure, they could accommodate more were David Holmgren’s ideas in his Retrosuburbia book to eventuate, however that would rely on introducing enabling legislation and dealing with the attendant social challenges. They remain good ideas still the province of the few.
Retrosuburbia contains valuable case studies of local initiatives that people are making to improve life and provide their basic needs. The suburbs would be better places to live were these to become widespread, which is the intention of the book’s author. Achieving that would require a significant cultural shift away from the place of the private home in Australian culture. As David has speculated, external developments like a severe energy shortfall or global warming impacts might stimulate adoption of some of the ideas in his book (many of which appeared in the works and lectures of UNSW academic, Ted Trainer, years before David revived them).
Many of the examples in David’s book rely on the interpersonal social networks that develop when like-minded people inhabit a limited area. Organisation and cooperation becomes possible in these circumstances. Unfortunately, the churn in working and social life and the frequency of changing residence militates against the formation of neighbourhood social bonds, a does the structure of working life and its attendant commuting. The initiatives that can develop become more the property of enclaves of people with particular social outlooks and beliefs.
Pandemic refugees
The Covid19 pandemic was behind what we witnessed as a movement out of the cities by what we might call pandemic refugees. Stimulated by the necessity to work from home and telecommute during the pandemic lockdowns, they discovered that working remotely is the key to leaving the city for the hopefully slower pace of rural towns.
Doing this realises the dream of quitting the cities with their congestion and hassle. Some in permaculture have encouraged this, however it is doubtful they considered the effect of high demand and low supply in regional housing markets. The price of rural homes increased, rendering them as unaffordable as many city properties.
The move out of the cities and into the countryside and the coasts was widely reported in the media. It is well underway in the state where I live. Even before the pandemic started sending people our way, demand for housing, in a state with an existing housing supply deficit, by people moving here was already pushing up prices and pushing down availability. In social media groups for people planning to move to the state, some said they changed their minds on seeing the escalation in house prices and shortage and the high cost of rentals, and decided to stay where they were. It comes down to income and affordability. In recommending that people leave the cities for country towns, maybe people should think about how that affects local housing affordability and availability for local people.
Adopting new models
I take these side trips into personal experience because they bring us back to the critique offered by Peter Newman and his fellow authors. How do we want to see our suburbs develop? We have the ideas and the models here and there, however like so many solutions to contemporary problems they are scattered and can be hard to find. Collaborative living, housing co-ops, ecovillages, vertical communities in multi-story buildings have been with us for years. My first encounter with them, other than living in a sharehouse, was a community that owned a red brick walkup apartment block in inner urban Marrickville. The replicability of that model seemed to offer possibilities that have not been copied at any significant scale that I know of.
There are other models and they work. I have visited a number of them including the rural sprawl of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, the convivial compactness of the attached dwellings of Auckland’s Earthsong cohousing and South Australia’s Aldinga Arts Ecovillage on the edge of a coastal town, as well as the earth construction off-grid homes of Penrose Rural Co-op on NSW’s Southern Highlands.
The authors of Resilient Cities are right that the city is not a farm, however the evidence is that within the city a compact form of agriculture is a possibility in the form of home gardens, commercial market gardens and the DIY approach of community gardening. All of these exist in Australian cities and existed well before the notion of urban agriculture was born. Rather than create the practice, the urban agriculture movement emerged from what was already there and gave it a voice. Food hub initiatives like Food Connect, OOOBY in Sydney and CERES in Melbourne offer models for replication in distributing the productivity of regional farms within cities. Add to this the possibilities inherent in worker cooperatives and in alternative food enterprises like food cooperatives, that receive too little attention in permaculture, and we start to see that scattered through our cities and suburbs there are viable models that enlightened government policy could help to grow so that, to borrow a quote, we could all live long and prosper.
What of David’s retrosuburbia model? That too has potential but would require some kind of kick-start stimulus to expand at scale. Many of the ideas are not new and have been around for decades. They continue to work.
Initiatives like those of Ted Trainer and David receive little mention in Peter Newman and his fellow authors’ Resilient Cities. I put this down to the social milieus in which the respective people circulate and the ideas flowing within them. You encounter some information but the rest passes you by.
What of Resilient Cities and its critique? Like all reasoned critiques coming from people with expertise in a particular area we should listen carefully. Criticism can form the feedback loop we need to continually assess what we do.
Related reading
Resilient Cities — responding to peak oil and climate change
2009, Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, Heather Boyer; Island Press, USA. ISBN: 978 1 59726 498 3.
A book about the future of our cities by Australian urban planning academic, Peter Newman and others. Discusses four scenarios for the cities: collapse, ruralised, divided, resilient. Discusses ecovillages, the suburbs, access to housing and poverty, climate change and peak oil impacts and strategies for the resilient city. Critiques David Holmgren’s ideas on urban development.
Retrosuburbia
2018 David Holmgren, 2018, Melliodora, Hepburn Victoria.
ISBN 9780994392879
https://www.retrosuburbia.com
A reimagining of Australia’s suburbs as productive, humane and cooperative places.
Small is Necessary — Shared Living on a Shared Planet
2018, Nelson, Anitra; Pluto Press. 2018
Paperback ISBN: 9780745334226. Hardcover ISBN: 9780745334233. eBook
Research into eco-coopeative housing. Australian book.
Cohousing For Life
The story of Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood, the sustainable cohousing neighbourhood in Auckland, New Zealand, and what they learnt about key issues faced by cohousing groups, from design and development to governance and leadership.
Urban Permaculture-a practical handbook for sustainable living
1993, David Watkins; Permanent Publications, UK. ISBN 1 85623 002 3.
The Great Neighbourhood Book — a do-it-yourself guide to placemaking
2010, Jay Walljasper; New society Publishers, Canada. ISBN 978–0–86571–581–3.
The great good place: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community
1989–1999, Ray Oldenberg; Marlow & Company, New York USA. ISBN 1 56924 681 5.
Sharing Cities — activating the Urban Commons
2017; Sharable. ISBN 978–0–9992440–0–5 (paperback), 978–0–9992440–1–2 (ebook). https://www.shareable.net/sharing-cities
What’s mine is yours — the rise of collaborative consumption
2010, Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers; HarperCollins Books, New Your USA. ISBN 978 0 06 196354 4.
An influential book in the emergence of the collaborative or sharing economy.
Take back the Economy—an ethical guide for transforming our communities
2013, KK Gibson-Graham and others; University of Minnesota Press, USA. ISBN 978–0–8166–7606–4.
Reclaiming the Urban Commons
2018, Nick Rose, Andrea Gaynor ed; UWAP Publishing, Western Australia.
Focused on urban food production, these are stories of Australians who are pioneering the edible greening of the suburbs.
All that we share — a field guide to the commons
2010, Jay Walljasper; New York Press, USA. ISBN 978 1 50558 499.
Fully automated luxury communism: a manifesto
2019, Aaron Bastani; Verso Books. ISABN 9781786632623.
Rather than undermine full employment, automation could lead to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness for everyone — to abundance. Technology could reduce the value of commodities — food, healthcare and housing — towards zero. An alternative to technopessimism, Bastani’s book shows what automation could do if fully implemented.
The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability
1995, Ted Trainer; Zed Books, UK. ISBN 1856492753.
More reading for the hungry intellect…
