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| research_report_sanjeev-shankar [2008-04-01 10:13] – sanjeev | research_report_sanjeev-shankar [2008-04-01 10:18] – sanjeev |
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| A permaculture garden is not a garden seen in nature. Though it might have a configuration like a forest in terms of stability and efficiency, it is rich in functional plants which have a strong relationship with each other and result in high yields. In urban situations, space is limited, there may be little or no access to land, and various regulatory restrictions exist when it comes to gardening or having backyard animals. Some of the concepts that people have used in urban settings which have allowed them to circumnavigate these obstacles are discussed below. They are a mix of approaches, ranging from gardening to co-parenting, going across different aspects of sustainability. Further the character of cities in the western world is extremely different from the eastern world. These differences work at social, political and physical level and have shaped these cities. Hence, there is a great diversity in all these examples but the concept of "no loss" links them all. | A permaculture garden is not a garden seen in nature. Though it might have a configuration like a forest in terms of stability and efficiency, it is rich in functional plants which have a strong relationship with each other and result in high yields. In urban situations, space is limited, there may be little or no access to land, and various regulatory restrictions exist when it comes to gardening or having backyard animals. Some of the concepts that people have used in urban settings which have allowed them to circumnavigate these obstacles are discussed below. They are a mix of approaches, ranging from gardening to co-parenting, going across different aspects of sustainability. Further the character of cities in the western world is extremely different from the eastern world. These differences work at social, political and physical level and have shaped these cities. Hence, there is a great diversity in all these examples but the concept of "no loss" links them all. |
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| * Rooftop gardens: Rooftop gardens are a specific urban agriculture niche set within a broader system of city gardens, enjoying their own set of distinctive benefits. Rooftops are underutilized and rarely-considered urban spaces with great potential for creative development. There are essentially [[three options]] for rooftop gardens. The first is container gardening, a less formal, highly flexible, cheaper form of roof gardening which is commonly seen in cities worldwide. In container gardening, few to no modifications are made to the existing roof structure; containers – anything from plastic swimming pools to recycled-wood planters – are placed on a rooftop and filled with the desired soil type and plants. One of the problems here is the soil in rooftop containers might thaw on a warm winter day. Further roof container gardens dry out quickly and often require daily watering unless a mulch cover such as straw, wood chips or even a sub-soil layer of newspapers and compost is used to slow down evaporation. Also, in places with extreme climate, the container material must be carefully considered. | * Rooftop gardens: Rooftop gardens are a specific urban agriculture niche set within a broader system of city gardens, enjoying their own set of distinctive benefits. Rooftops are underutilized and rarely-considered urban spaces with great potential for creative development. There are essentially [[three options]] for rooftop gardens. |
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| The second type of roof garden is green roofs in which the rooftop actually becomes the planting medium. This involves more intensive investments(upto two times the cost of a normal roof), but comes with its own set of advantages, including greater storm-water retention, building insulation, and the formation of patchwork urban ecosystems, which work to reverse the fragmentation of ecosystems that follows urbanization by offering temporary habitats to fauna such as birds and butterflies during their long migrations. Green roofs are constructed using a special root and water-proof membrane for the base layer, then a root barrier, a retention/drainage layer, plus the soil layer, and finally the plants. Alpine plants or desert succulents are often used for green roofs, as they can withstand harsh rooftop conditions like wind, erosion, and extreme temperature. Native plants are also used for rooftop plantings, though all of them are not conducive for roof top conditions. Herbs are commonly grown too as they need minimal soil depth. With a modular green roof system, roof infrastructure access and maintanence has become much easier as parts of the roof can be moved independently. | * Vertical gardens: Commonly seen in many western cities, vertical gardens act as good insulators and a source of food. They also increase the life of the structural wall behind. Vines are one of the most common plants used to create vertical green facades. |
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| The third rooftop garden possibility is rooftop hydroponics, in which plants are grown in a soilless medium(peat, sand, gravel, old rubber tires, rockwool, perlite or vermiculite) and fed a special nutrient solution. Rooftop hydroponics can be the lightest of the three options and may offer the possibility for faster plant growth(up to two to four times) and increased productivity. The purest form of hydroponics is water culture, in which a plant’s crown is supported by a thin layer of substrate, while its roots are immersed in a nutrient solution. Hydroponic systems can be divided generally into two groups – passive and active systems. Passive systems are the most simple, and the cheapest, requiring only a container with drainage, a tray that holds liquid, and a growing medium. Plants are hand watered with the nutrient solution and soak up the solution via capillary action. Active systems include “ebb and flow” or “flood and drain,” in which a pump regularly floods the plant tray with nutrient solution, which then drains back into a holding tank. Various other systems require different growing media and methods of irrigation, but all need to be monitored for pH and nutrient solution strength, since plants have different nutrient requirements during different stages of their growth. Commercial systems can cost from $100 to several thousand dollars. Hydroponics can be practiced anywhere, even indoors, with the help of artificial lighting, and no digging or weeding is generally required. Growing conditions are highly controlled, so plants can be provided with the best possible conditions, resulting in better quality, disease-resistant plants with higher yields – commercial tomato growers have reported yields up to 40 times higher per hectare than soil-grown plants. Almost any kind of plant can be grown hydroponically – tomatoes, peppers, rhubarb, cucumbers, squash, snow peas, beans, spinach, lettuce, strawberries, chard, and broccoli are just some examples. | * City farms: In New york, numerous vacant plots have been converted into city farms where communities grow there own food. These range from apples to pears. Further, by using graftign techniques, fences can be made entirely out of such plants. In Melbourne, the city farms also play the role of community education centres, which is a brilliant way to introduce kids to aspects of food production. In Davis, California, through the allocation of areas for directing rain water into catchment basins, //swail areas// have been created which over the years have now transformed into productive fruit farms. |
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| * http://www.greenroofs.com | * Cooperative Arrangements: In Santa Fe, a community group is applying for a variance from the city to start using a small open space in their neigborhood for keeping chickens and bees and to plant an orchard. Combining their negotiating power helps with getting a variance, and distributing responsibilities as well as financial burden of setting up a productive environment ensures its stability and long-term success. |
| * http://www.hydrogarden.com | |
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| Rooftop gardens: | * Co-Ownership of Assets: In Albuquerque, a group of people that live near each other decided to downsize and now own one truck, which is shared by several households. |
| * Cool and shade buildings reducing the 'heat island' effect of a city | |
| * Retain and utilize rainwater, provide wildlife habitat and enhance the roof membrane life | |
| * Have an aesthetic appeal creating a private haven | |
| * Remove heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, and lead from runoff. | |
| * Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the air quality by trapping and absorbing nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds and airborne particulate matter | |
| * Overcome the problem of restrictive land prices and with other vertical sufaces of a building infact create more land. | |
| * Are better off with respect to pests, vandalism and theft as compared to community gardens on land. | |
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| Some interesting developments: | * Grafting Fruit Trees: In limited spaces one can still get a variety of fruit, when using a technique of grafting. A desirable variety (early ripening, or developed for storage, etc) is grafted onto an existing rootstock, resulting in trees that bears several types of fruit (now, apples don’t become oranges, but there can be several different apples on the same tree!). |
| * In Switzerland and parts of Germany, this kind of mental shift – resulting in imagining buildings as displacing and not destroying land surface – has become federal law: developers must either improve the biodiversity of existing land, or transfer the green space that they displace to their rooftop or other building surface. | |
| * Rooftop gardens are a billion dollar industry in Germany | |
| * One clause of the Russian law states that authorities are obliged to help gardening associations with roads construction and repair, as well as water drainage and supply. | |
| * Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, both used roof gardens extensively in their architecture | |
| * New York has established a green roof task force, which is exploring direct government support of green roofs, including tax credits and other | |
| incentives. | |
| * The Earth Pledge Foundation in New York strives to address sustainability at the local level – its programs include the Green Roof Initiative, which | |
| encourages initiatives to green New York City’s rooftops, and the Waste=Fuel program,which aims to facilitate an industrial infrastructure for turning food waste into fuel,enabling the city to generate electricity, heat, and steam. | |
| * Hydroponics is found to be way too complex and expensive in lot of eastern countries and some of african countries too. In these places, roof gardens build out of local materials are most suitable. They are repair and maintained by the communities themselves. This is seen in places like India, St. Petersburg and Senegal. Infact, in Senegal people have devised a local solution using bricks and wooden box beds. In India too, the use of locally available cheap materials to create roof gardens is most successful. The “Doshi System” is offered as the most suitable method. It uses sugarcane stalks, collected from sugarcane juice vendors outside of his house, as biomass. This is lightweight, allows water drainage, and keeps soil in place. | |
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| The most significant challenges facing roof top gardens in all its forms are issues of access and roof load capacity. These barriers are especially problematic in liability-obsessed countries like the United States, although concerns for safety and building protection are certainly valid. Lack of | * Worm Composting: A plastic bin with holes can house a family of red wiggler worms, who will be happy to eat your kitchen waste (eliminating it from the urban waste stream), and these critters will make it into good odor-free compost. |
| knowledge or incentives, funding, water supply, safety, and the harshness of rooftop environments are also major barriers. Still, rooftop agriculture is slowly becoming more common, particularly in the developing world, where rooftop food production may have a significant impact on food security and income, solutions are creative and site-specific, and roofs are often built of different materials than those in the developed world. | |
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| For more details and case studies about rooftop gardens around the world, please click on the link below. This is a senior honors thesis from Cornell University. {{:roofgarden_thesis.pdf|}} | * The BackYard Forester, Los Angeles: A nonprofit organization, TreePeople leads people towards greening the city, restoring watersheds, ecosystems and neigborhoods. People can turn their yard into a wildlife or bird refuge or create an orchard that produces a surplus to share with food banks ,in the process creating an urban forest. |
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| | * The Citizen Pruner, New York: People can get trained in tree care and pruning, and be able to take care of trees, whenever and whereever needed. |
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| * Vertical gardens: Commonly seen in many western cities, vertical gardens act as good insulators and a source of food. They also increase the life of the structural wall behind. Vines are one of the most common plants used to create vertical green facades. | * Chickens in a City: Depending on the location, people may be allowed to keep chickens in their urban yard! The City Chicken - a website, which includes every answer plus city by city listing of regulations for keeping chickens makes this possible! |
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| * City farms: In New york, numerous vacant plots have been converted into city farms where communities grow there own food. These range from apples to pears. Further, by using graftign techniques, fences can be made entirely out of such plants. In Melbourne, the city farms also play the role of community education centres, which is a brilliant way to introduce kids to aspects of food production. In Davis, California, through the allocation of areas for directing rain water into catchment basins, //swail areas// have been created which over the years have now transformed into productive fruit farms. | === Europe and India _ urban farming === |
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| * Cooperative Arrangements: In Santa Fe, a community group is applying for a variance from the city to start using a small open space in their neigborhood for keeping chickens and bees and to plant an orchard. Combining their negotiating power helps with getting a variance, and distributing responsibilities as well as financial burden of setting up a productive environment ensures its stability and long-term success. | * There are numerous contextual divides between European and Asian backdrops: |
| | * Soil conditions and appropriateness of native plants |
| | * Traditional knowledge, role of medicinal plants and type of relationship with land |
| | * Role of plants in daily life(religion/festival/marriage/birth/death) |
| | * Type of staple diet |
| | * Overall seriousness of the problem, opportunity and public perception, level of awareness and character of the city |
| | * City's interdependence on rural areas |
| | * Growth index of the city, population density and character of local communities |
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| * Co-Ownership of Assets: In Albuquerque, a group of people that live near each other decided to downsize and now own one truck, which is shared by several households. | {{:perma16.jpg|}} {{:perma24.jpg|}} |
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| * Grafting Fruit Trees: In limited spaces one can still get a variety of fruit, when using a technique of grafting. A desirable variety (early ripening, or developed for storage, etc) is grafted onto an existing rootstock, resulting in trees that bears several types of fruit (now, apples don’t become oranges, but there can be several different apples on the same tree!). | * Cities in India are well served by the produce from rural areas within and without the city. A unique and striking feature is the existence of urban villages which serve not just agro-produce but also dairy products to the city. Such intepenetration is a unique defining trait of Indian cities and holds great promise for an integrated and interdependent design response. |
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| * Worm Composting: A plastic bin with holes can house a family of red wiggler worms, who will be happy to eat your kitchen waste (eliminating it from the urban waste stream), and these critters will make it into good odor-free compost. | * Approaches and techniques like seedballing, moss graffiti, psychogeography which happen in a bottom up way are interesting "interest generators" in numerous cities in Europe where the awareness is high and 'creating greens' is high on public agenda. However, in India, a more structured and policy level, community centric approach is needed. |
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| * The BackYard Forester, Los Angeles: A nonprofit organization, TreePeople leads people towards greening the city, restoring watersheds, ecosystems and neigborhoods. People can turn their yard into a wildlife or bird refuge or create an orchard that produces a surplus to share with food banks ,in the process creating an urban forest. | * Agriculture in urban India is a means of sustenance and earning money. It is often done by the poor/migrant communities. With the political emphasis on 'rural agriculture' in India, the positive contribution that production within the cities can make has hardly been acknowledged and is still not acknowledged because of the shocking pace at which cities are growing. In the Indian context as in much of the rapidly developing world , a shift has to happen at a market/commercial level or a public policy level much like in Cuba. This is proved in certain cases where the people have created successful business models around the agro business within cities. The cities have such momentum in terms of 'growth' and infrastructure development, that we might need to propose a product which people can buy off the shelf and use in their growth ! |
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| * The Citizen Pruner, New York: People can get trained in tree care and pruning, and be able to take care of trees, whenever and whereever needed. | {{:perma17.jpg|}} |
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| * Chickens in a City: Depending on the location, people may be allowed to keep chickens in their urban yard! The City Chicken - a website, which includes every answer plus city by city listing of regulations for keeping chickens makes this possible! | * What are the growth symbols/patterns in urban areas? We have an opportunity here, to design responses which will directly impact the situation, related to real estate, construction, mass production, modular systems, transportation and architecture. Responses which soften the 'corporate sheen' which cities have come to symbolise and at a scale which can become ubiquitous _ **ubiquitous planting**. How can we do this ? As per recent statistics the planet adds 73 million humans to its tally ! Can we add 73 trillion plants every year ? http://www.worldometers.info |
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| === Orient vs Occident_ traditional farming === | === Orient vs Occident_ traditional farming === |
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| see [[tradition farming notes]] | see [[traditional farming notes]] |
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| === Possibilities for urban permaculture kits === | === Possibilities for urban permaculture kits === |
sanjeev