I’ve previously discussed the value — the indispensability — of taking a participatory approach to research, the coproduction of space, and land use change. I’ve proposed the 5D ecological compass as a framework and tool for working toward a variety of social, environmental, and political outcomes: true environmental justice, reversing (or at least stalling) climate change, and effecting a shift toward the next economy. In this essay, I discuss permaculture, a design approach which broadly attempts to create and shape human space in ways that mimic natural ecologies. It is my belief that permaculture has the potential to break out of a relatively niche community of practice and the ad hoc development of personal homesteads, to evolve into a movement which can literally — physically, socially, politically — change the world.
I frame my discussion within three of the most essential parts of the permaculture design process: the Scale of Permanence, Zones of Use, and the Sector Analysis, as a lead-in to ideas about how it can be deployed toward participatory development, and eventually to propose a schematic for organizing and self-governance at multiple scales.
Scale of Permanence
The Scale of Permanence refers to a framework derived from the work of P.A. Yeomans, an Australian inventor who developed a method of landscape design based on topography, hydrology, and other factors. The scale ranks these different factors according to how “permanent” — that is, how difficult they are to change. Throughout the permaculture literature, you’re likely to see some version of the diagram below, which plots permanence (conceived as amount of energy required to change a thing) vs. time.
Missing from the Scale of Permanence framework is any consideration of power, perhaps because the presumption is that the person(s) on whose behalf a design is being done, have ownership or stewardship rights over the land in question. Where the design runs up against the boundaries of that power of ownership — most often the property boundary — it becomes a limitation on what’s possible, or even worth considering. A good designer, of course, will recognize these limitations also as opportunities, but there is greater opportunity still in thinking beyond the property boundary and the boundaries of the individual, toward a more collectivist approach.
The traditional plotting of the different elements on the scale of permanence sees a proportional increase in time with every increase in energy. When we consider power, capital, and labor, any given element may shift temporally or energetically. The relationship between energy and time also changes with respect to the scale from the individual to the collective. Put a different way, where energy and time demands are high for any land use change, at the scale of an individual, these demands might be mitigated where this individual has greater capital or political power, which in turn enables them to direct the labors and energies of other people, whether through authority or by way of the market. On the other hand, where people ply their labor to a collective project, energy and time demands also decrease, without coercion or the mediating influence of capital.
For example, if we’re thinking about landform, second-highest on the scale, it only becomes more permanent as we expand our analysis geographically and temporally. That is to say, it is much easier to alter the structure of the land in someone’s backyard, than it is to change the terrain of a large public park. At the same time, this expansion changes the power dynamics of any design, as it involves more “stakeholders”, which in the purview of the state, usually just means increasingly powerful authorities.
In participatory design, an increase in power might correspond to an increasing set of decentralized decision-making bodies, like moving from the household to the BLOC (Block Level Organizing Committee) to the neighborhood assembly. Organizing people, or attempting to bring them to agreement, or consent, becomes increasingly difficult — the existing conditions more “permanent” — where there exists a strong culture of individualism, or a dominance of the private property regime, both of which are true within my own context of the United States.
When we consider the scale of permanence as “top down”, from most topographically or hydrologically or geographically or temporally fixed (resistant to change), this relationship is most pronounced at the smallest people scale, with respect to power. In other words, the individual, or the BLOC, experiences the landform or the movement of water as permanent in ways that large land owners or state authorities do not. Large scale land use changes, like deforestation, or massive public works projects, like dams, scale down in permanence with increases in power. Put simply, permanence and power have an inverse relationship, as illustrated in the diagram below.
In the traditional conceptualization, everything on the scale of permanence refers to the physical environment. This limitation that has been taken up more recently by various practitioners thinking through how social elements fit within the ranking. There is a growing understanding of how permanence is not only a material condition, but a social one. Which elements are included in this analysis vary widely, and so my contribution to the conversation should be understood as only one set of considerations. Because “aesthetics and experience” are themselves social characteristics, I have removed them from my modification of the material scale of permanence — likewise the “scale of power” — and included them on the social scale.
- Experience — how a person or community (wants to) relate to the land, encompassing both “aesthetics and experience” from the original scale of permanence
- Labor — the work that a person is able to do, willing to do, and has the “right” to do within the context of a particular land use project
- Property — the boundaries of individual land ownership, or stewardship rights, as determined and enforced by the state
- Land Use Authority — the “right” to transform land within any particular context; exceeds property ownership in cases of usufruct, adverse possession, or other informal actions
- Economic Mobility — a person or community’s ability to either improve or transcend their economic class
- Institutions — hospitals, universities, churches, and other non-state entities which exercise or mobilize power over people and their use of land
- State — the government entities with ultimate land use authority and the mechanisms which enforce them (e.g. laws, courts, police)
- Culture — the customs, beliefs, values, practices, etc. of any group of people, variable by context (race, class, geography), and which irrevocably shape the way people relate to each other and their environments
Sector Analysis
The Sector Analysis refers to considerations of the “uncontrollable forces” that influence use of a particular space, such as sunlight, wind, fire, and water. There is an obvious overlap with the scale of permanence, but the sector analysis is very specific in mapping how these factors will impact the specific site being developed. The designer will consider the amount of sunlight that will be received throughout the site, both in summer and winter, areas that are likely to receive higher winds and thereby requiring windbreaks (e.g. trees, hedges, walls), how the location and layout may make it vulnerable to fires, and how the water flows through the site based on location within the watershed, the slope of the land, and other variables.
I am interested in the idea that these forces are “uncontrollable”, because in fact the very purpose of sector analysis is exactly to control, or at least anticipate and redirect them — but only within the boundaries of the land wherein the owner or steward has the authority to do so. The design encloses the land within the bounds of private property held by an individual (or associated group), with everything else “outside” of that purview.
The most significant “uncontrollable factor” within this framing isn’t sunlight, wind, fire, or water, but people, either on the outside, or who can be expected to move throughout the site for any reason. The tacit assumption is that the other property owners nearby, attending to their own interests, will be either indifferent, disagreeable, or even hostile to the needs of the site. What’s also true is that the harder work of building relationships with neighbors, let alone organizing across a larger area, such as a town or watershed, for the fact that it is the work of years, if not a lifetime, falls well outside the charge of the permaculture designer.
Yet this is exactly the kind of work that is essential to shifting permaculture from a cloistered design philosophy to part of a strategy for participatory land use and management. This means that permaculture must leave the confines of private hired practice — or charity work disproportionately done by global north practitioners to (or at best with) global south communities — and enter the commons, become common, with at least the basic principles and processes known to as many people as possible.
This does not necessarily require training a whole generation of new horticultural, engineering, and water management experts. It may be more conducive to organizing, particularly given the limited capacity of the most resource-starved communities, for these knowledges to be distributed and coordinated through relationships into the cooperative design of larger systems.
Zones of Use
In permaculture, “zones of use” is what it sounds like: designating different parts of a given site into zones, based on how much (how often) the owner/steward needs to access them, whether to harvest a resource, or to tend to the land. Typically zones are numbered 0 through 4, with zero corresponding to the household, or the place where the owner/steward spends the most time, and 4 being those areas they will seldom need to access, such as a forested area left to re-wild. In the example of the permaculture homestead, zone 1 may be the herb garden right outside the front door, zone 2 the beds of annual and perennial crops to be harvested once a season, and zone 3 the young orchard which won’t produce yields for a few years.
However, if we consider zones of use not only with respect to the individual owner/steward, but through the lens of organizing or a collective approach to larger systems design, one person’s Zone 2 or 3 could be coincident with another person’s Zone 4, depending upon their proximity and their relationship to each other. If we carry this further and think about zones as polycentric and overlapping, then moving from 0 to 4 could represent an expansion from individual to collective use, and potentially shared governance.
Within the urban context, Zone 0 could correspond to an individual’s house or apartment, while Zone 1 could be the block or residential complex, Zone 2 the neighborhood, Zone 3 the sheds (food, water, energy, etc), and Zone 4 the ecoregion. Zones 3 or 4 in this case might even be reconceptualized as the commons, unsettling the private property regime altogether.
Governance of the zones expands from the cohabitants of the household, to the BLOC, to the neighborhood assembly, to the organization(s) stewarding the water/food/energy shed, to the bioregion: recognized here as both an environmental and sociopolitical unit. As zones expand and intersect, permanence does not merely concern the energy required to effect land use change, but the political power.
Bringing in the 5D Ecological Compass
Where the Five Dimensional (5D) Ecological Compass, which I have proposed for use in participatory research, planning, and mapping. is brought into a permaculture design process, its considerations of “scale” — spatial, temporal, and social in the original conception — could be also mapped to permanence. As already discussed, there is a clear correlation between “permanence” and time and space, and further modified by power.
The ecocompass framework explicitly considers the social and environmental past, which can inform the design process based on such things asa how long a particular topography or hydrology has been present. The point here is that “permanence” cannot be so neatly mapped in a linear fashion, but must consider a range of different relations across both space (physical and social) and time, as mediated by power, affect, and materiality. The “political landscape” affects our ability to change the physical landscape, to even do site or systems design, a manifestation of how power cuts across multiple scales. For example, where power intersects with “water”, questions emerge not only about the hydrology of the watershed, but the entities and laws which govern its maintenance and anyone’s ability to change it. These considerations are sometimes folded into “access” on the scale of permanence, but tend not to exceed the boundaries of the individual homestead.
The negotiation of power across social and spatial scales isn’t expanding or “scaling up”, but rather scaling across, or sharing power horizontally. This is in opposition to the typical concentric domains of power (e.g. city, state, nation, etc.) For example, the decision-making power of the people at the top of the watershed (geographically) could understand themselves as having an obligation to share land use decisions with the people downstream, on whose lives and livelihoods those decisions have a huge impact.
This all becomes more feasible where people come to understand their power within the hyperlocal context (e.g. the block), and for which there is more immediate accountability and/or consequences. Where people come into their own power, having decision-making power within their households, or on their blocks, perhaps they start to appreciate the value of building consent at larger scales. This logic of consent and collaboration can’t be imposed from the top down — i.e. by government — because that would be inherently contradictory.
Even though the permaculture design process usually thinks through the scale of permanence from top to bottom (i.e. from Climate to Aesthetics), for purposes of participatory development, it may be more practical to start from the bottom. For both affective and political reasons, most people can’t or won’t be interested in starting at the top, with “climate”, especially where the sense of agency shares an inverse relationship with degree of permanence. Put more simply, most people do not feel they have any individual power to change the climate, the flow of water through the watershed, or the overall topography of a region. But they can probably speak at length about what they desire in terms of how they occupy, share, and utilize space.
It has been my direct experience working with young people in Philadelphia that engagement on the topic of climate change was higher where they could see the more immediate impacts on their lives and livelihoods. Where permaculture informs a process of organizing, rather than just site design or even systems design, it has to meet people where they are, engaging with them in the areas, and on the subject matters that interest or concern them most, that have a social or material impact on their actual lives.
Starting at the bottom does not mean staying at the bottom, however, and eventually the design and planning will take a broader/deeper more systems-oriented view, scaling with the expansion of a corollary organizing project. “Climate” is empirically well outside any individual or even large group’s ability to control, and it is well understood that any movement on the municipal, national, or global scale requires deep and sustained organizing, including but not limited to coordination between governments.
Challenges and Opportunities of Governance
In most places, government is the supreme land authority, superseding even private property through mechanisms like eminent domain. Where officials are mostly unaccountable, or highly resistant to public pressure, as is true in my hometown of Philadelphia, participatory land use planning calls for a reorganization and redistribution of power. That is to say, direct democratic control over land use and high coordination within and across different scales. Where the current practice of municipal zoning is made more participatory, it could be function more like permaculture zones of use, modified to be polycentric, in order to bring local resources (food, water, energy) under direct democratic control.
Because permanence and power share an inverse relationship, it goes without saying that the state has greater ability to effect land use change than an individual. It also stands to reason that where people build real collective power, toward more participatory models of land use governance, the degrees of permanence might become lesser still, as suggested by the diagram below.
Such a state of organized community self-determination is a possibility being explored in certain places, such as with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or Rojava in Northeast Syria, but which we have yet to even approach here in the United States. The rest of this essay is devoted to conceptualizing how governance might look on the other side of that threshold.
As a brief tangent, I like to think of the “vanishing point” where all the domains of permanence converge, as a sort of singularity where collective power is maximized, as is our ability to transform our world in a way that is supportive and regenerative for everyone, all life, and the planet as a whole.
Because different geospatial units, such as neighborhoods, can be hard to define, with people having different ideas about what constitutes their boundaries, their size and shape can remain relative, flexible, and negotiated through a process of consent. This would mean that there are multiple governance bodies governing overlapping spaces, with shared members between them that together make up a yet larger “neighborhood”. Thus the “neighborhood” does not have to be defined geographically at all, but by the governing bodies. In the same way that the BLOC, the organizing body, is not the same as the city block, the geographic unit.
In the case of watersheds, even though their boundaries are relatively fixed and empirically determined: topographically, hydrologically, geographically, they should also include the social and political dynamics which govern the interactions between water and people, across domains of distribution, use, and impact.
Where the impacts of hydrological changes are most pronounced downstream, and most changeable (less permanent) upstream, it usually falls to a larger geographic authority (e.g. moving up from municipality to county to state) to intervene and mitigate or eliminate downstream effects, though they most often fail to do so.
This is a problem not just of government, but governance, which might be resolved where the people downstream and upstream are in communication with each other, and negotiate / share power / build consent around how land is developed, and the impacts of that development. If smaller decentralized bodies physically situated at the top of the watershed were able to make decisions over land and water, as informed by their understanding of the impacts of those changes downstream, these groups would collectively form a watershed-scale governance body.
Unlike watersheds, other “sheds” do not occupy the same geographic boundaries, but rather correspond to shared governance over the production, distribution, and consumption of these resources across ever larger spaces, and amongst a negotiated, even fluid, body of people.
For example, the “foodshed” consists of the land and labor which produce the food that people within a certain geography consume. The people who “own” the land usually have the largest say over how the land is used, i.e. what food is produced on it, but “food” doesn’t actually exist as such, until it is consumed, meaning that consumers also have an indirect “say” over what is produced, and thereby in how the land is used. The individualization of market logic, however, disintegrates the collective power that entails.
What if instead we consider the foodshed as a space for collective governance? What if we considered the environmental and social impacts of food production on not only consumers, but the workers — who are usually not the owners — and who often occupy a precarious or vulnerable social position, as is the case for the many undocumented immigrants working in agriculture, processing plants, and logistics.
Workers’ labor calories — the literal energies they expend — are ultimately converted into consumers’ food calories, and so this relationship could be more carefully navigated. There are also “downstream” effects, on people and nonhumans and environments that are neither owners, nor consumers, nor workers — those who happen to be within the geographic boundaries of production’s impacts. Where these impacts are global, and unequally distributed across geopolitical lines (e.g. global north vs. global south), accountability is difficult if not impossible. This, in my view, is one of many factors which make the case for the localization of food production.
At the neighborhood scale, multiple community organizations could leverage their collective assets and capacities in the form of “circuits” corresponding to the key resources of food, water, energy, and housing. A neighborhood assembly, a sort of community circuit consisting of multiple BLOCs, could govern the production and distribution of critical assets. Beyond providing direct services and material support to the community, the assembly helps to build and strengthen relationships within and between circuits and the community, and to provide logistical support to coordinate and distribute information and resources.
The food circuit might look like a collaboration between organizations at different locations within the foodshed: i.e. production (growing, foraging), distribution, preparation, service, and waste management. Similarly, the water circuit coordinates the collection, purification, storage, and distribution of water.
The energy circuit provides a secondary source of energy (i.e. detached from the municipal utility, as in solar microgrids), as well as sourcing materials and providing technical support to build and maintain this secondary infrastructure. The housing circuit may coordinate temporary housing for people in need, coordinate funding, labor, and/or training for home repairs, and assist in retrofitting existing housing for more efficiency and resilience.
Governance and coordination would be fluid and adaptive, with multiple organizations identifying their assets and capacities, accounting for any gaps therein to provision the community with the resources it needs to thrive. It also connects assets between nodes, such as sourcing food waste for fuel, water for food production, energy for heating and cooling.
Continuing development of the 5D Ecocompass framework has led to the addition of “flows”, which similar to the permaculture sector analysis, considers the movement of food, water, energy, other resources — and perhaps most of all, people — in and out of and between systems and scales.
Mapping the scales of permanence to the 5D ecocompass, particularly with considerations of power and affect (above and beyond the default of materiality), can help create not only a sector analysis, but an organizing strategy. All of this may help create a more concrete definition of bioregions, as an overlay/superimposition of both the geographies and sociopolitical organizing structures that can meaningfully move land use changes. A watershed, for example, may help to define an ecoregion, but it only becomes a bioregion where there is some nested and decentralized set of organizing committees which collectively govern land use at various scales.
At the city scale, there is coordination between circuits to create asset-based networks — again in the areas of food, water, energy, and housing — sharing information and (re)distributing any surplus resources where needed. At the same time, where a neighborhood node is compromised, a network of neighborhood assemblies route the necessary resources from the larger asset networks to fill the gap. Where an assembly itself fails, the asset networks also serve as a fallback to direct their particular resource(s) to the community with logistical support from other assemblies.
Altogether this socio-material infrastructure and collective governance comprise a kind of “dual power grid”. As its name suggests, this organizing formation could function in parallel to the state, a counter power formation capable of placing community needs under direct community control, and leveraging its assets, relationships, and shared political analysis to reorient state power toward the community’s own ends. This is not some dreamy prospect or a merely theoretical horizon, but a formation that, with variations across time and place, has existed for hundreds of years, if not the entirety of the history in which humans have self-organized into bands, tribes, settlements, and towns. [1]For more information on movements toward dual power in practice, see this archived reading list from ROAR magazine, which covers a wide variety of contexts from worker cooperatives to housing justice.
The various scales of collective governance need not correspond to the usual (arbitrary) administrative units, like municipal zones, zip codes, wards, city boundaries. Rather, within this formation, political boundaries may even dissolve, leaving existing bureaucracies to serve administrative and logistical purposes rather than exercising power.
Such an organizing formation can be built under current social and political conditions, making communities more resilient against stressors and shocks at multiple scales, especially — as we are witnessing at the time of this writing — where the state either fails to attend or becomes hostile to the interests of the people and our environment.