Robin Francis; Sustainable Human Settlement

There are all sorts of reasons that we are attracted to the concept of sustainable human settlements. The term eco-village has really encapsulated that in a way that immediately communicates to most people the preferred direction that we really need to go. A lot of people do equate permaculture with only gardening and farming systems, what’s really important beyond just the garden and the farm is the broader land use planning, patterns that we impose on our region and the way that we meet our needs. It’s really in the meeting of human needs and greed’s that we have created a lot of the disasters and huge problems that are our challenge as we face the future. Permaculture was one of the first methodologies that really addressed the issue of sustainable design, not only in terms of food production, but also looking at how we cane create a sustainable culture.

Over the years Permaculture has grown from, well the principles a still constant but the application of those principals have expanded and there is a lot of work particularly in the areas of eco villages and sustainable human settlement design by regional development and planning and urban renewal and we have very exciting projects happening around the world. This is defiantly the area of my greatest passion, I am a passionate person, passionate about many things but for me the whole thing about sustainable human settlements is what we need to address. It’s particularly important in countries like Australia where we’ve got a largely urbanised society, Over 80% of our total population live in urbane areas, not only our big cities but places like Lismore, we’ve got the pressure of development, not only in our major cities but when we start to look at the brick venereal sprawl to the east of us here over the hills of Goonellabah we find the same problems in terms of planning and the resulting social problems that we get in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, we also find that in the third world we also have problems to where the village has been ignored and countries like India, most of Asia, the population there 80% of the population used to live in the villages and with more and more focus being on green revolution, on export crop, on urbanisation there is this constant migration of people from rural villages in to the cities, and for example an Indian a villager living in the village, they relocate to Bombay living in the slums of Bombay, there resources consumption goes up 25 times. That’s 2,500 %.

These issues that are common threads around us. The other scene immerging over the last 25 –30 years particularly the last 30 years has been the intentional community movement. So we have got three decades of experience to draw from there and it’s important that we are very realistic, that we honestly reality test the things that we do and put into place, so that we can learn the lessons from our mistakes so that we can avoid repeating them in exactly the same way, we might find new way to make them but that’s part of the learning process and so that we can start to look at what’s happening else where, so that we can pull good ideas from there and really start to create things that are sustainable. When I travelled in the early seventies it was the whole village culture that really captured my imagination when I was travelling through not only Asia but also through Europe and I think the village is something that slipped the planning vocabulary in Australia. We’ve got towns and cities and that’s it. These smaller human settlement orders are very important and we will just briefly look at a few of these things this morning.

As a species we have got very special and specific needs and tendencies and over the past 100 years the whole thing of community has fragment in society at large and mainstream Australia today is very isolated and insular. Most people, there social skills are gained from watching Neighbours and soapies on TV because they don’t have real life people they can relate to outside the workplace or if they don’t have a work place where they can interact with other people they are exceptionally lonely and we are building new suburbs that have no social heart they have nowhere to bring people together we are mono-culturing our human settlements in the same way we monoculture our crop lands and we end up with the same sort of disasters not only the environmental ones but with all those over layers of social and economic ones.

It was interesting, a few years ago 1993, I spend a few months in New Zealand and not only taught a permaculture course there I was giving quite a few presentation to many of the city councils there in the North Island and the Auckland regional council and some public presentation to communities on the fringes of Auckland where you’ve got the creeping urbanisation coming out and it was really interesting< one little place called Whitford, a small village, beautiful little village quite a large rural population around it, being what they call mansion country, you know the sort of rural residential 2-5 acre lots starting to occur where people are building these Hollywood type houses and it’s really destroying the rural atmosphere of the region and not far from Whitford there is also major urban density expansion happening and there's a big mall being set up and things like that. Now back in the little village of Whitford, which has a general store, it’s got quite a few little services and facilities there, somebody applied to the local council to set up a bakery in the village of Whitford because there was a lot of people within the village that could walk to the bakery to pick up there hot bread and a lot of rural people could drive to the village to pick up the things they needed. Council knocked the application back because there a hot bread shop going in the mall 10 ks down the road you don’t need a bakery in whitford, and these are the things that undermine community. They had been looking too much at the big picture, expansion, development and they had forgotten about the things that create community.

A mall dose not create a sense of community but a village centre dose. And so we have to really look at the scale of things and keeping things in human scale is really important. Keeping things assessable, the connection to other places I think this is one of the biggest lessons we have to learn from the intentional community movement of the seventies and eighties where one of the main things we wanted to do was just get right way from society so our big tendencies was to find large acreages for low dollars per acre miles away from anything and we wanted to be very insular and have our own little sustainable, self reliant lifestyle in isolation, but we are not really insular beings, we are not insular communities and so one of the issues that we have inherited are the problems of socio economic isolation. It’s not only a phenomenon of the intentional community movement, as Australians we tend to be land greedy, we want big acres. Because it’s a big country, we a little bit socially, I don’t know but we have never really grown up with a village culture so we have never realise what a village can offer us. People get disenchanted with urban and urbane living and they want a sense of community or they want some sanctuary and so that they think the big acreage is going to do it for them. So we get the same or very similar socio economic issues arising with the hobby farm phenomena and the rural residential estate.

These issues have been acknowledged by the planning department for sometime so back in the early 1990’s, I worked with Peter Cummings we did a major study for the planning department, of the issues around rural residential and came up with a new approach to planning rather than a new formula. We will touch on a few of these things as we go through, and I suppose just to get an over view, when we are looking at eco villages and sustainable human settlements, it’s really important that we are looking at and planning things which are human scale, that are full featured, we need to address the needs of the whole human life style and both the alternative movement and the mainstream planners have been guilty of not addressing this at all, we tend to be very immediate and when we set up a community we tend to be in our twenties and early thirties, and you think that you are going to stay young forever and you forget that you are going to age and you forget about the different needs of kids at different ages and their lives, they grow up and become teenagers and their needs are changing constantly, the needs of the ageing. We are going to have an incredible ageing population here. It’s interesting when you look at the demographics of say the Nimbin area.

You’ve got this column chart, you got this big blister of baby Boomers that are going up a notch every time there is a census, it’s going up another notch to an increasing ageing bracket and many of these people are already looking for somewhere else to live because they can’t deal with maintaing the acreage they have, the nice little alternative cottage they built back in the early seventies is getting a bit difficult as they go on the waiting list for a hip replacement and they can’t climb up the ladder to the sleeping loft anymore and they need to have their car right next to the house because they can’t lug their shopping up that pathway anymore, and the next generation there’s communities now where the young kids are going and buying new land and setting up another community and in another 10-15 years time all the mums and dads are getting older, so we could end up with communities of geriatrics that can’t take care of themselves on their communities and their kids have done exactly the same thing and created another socio monoculture with another community. We need that diversity of age groups and to plan our settlement to meet the human needs through out the human life cycle.

WE have the same problem with our mainstream planning, the number of suburbs that were built in the Sydney’s and Melbourne’s that were built for a particular socio economic group and nuclear families with 2.4 kids and then all the kids grow up and leave home and their off with their own life and you have all these middle aged people that don’t need a 4-5 bedroom house anymore. The schools start closing down and then the adult population in the area, it’s needs are changing in terms of health and other services and so the monoculturing of settlements has been a really big issue and I still think it’s being under addressed by our planners and by developers and designers. The cost of commuting is a really big thing when were in isolation. I did a two day workshop with a community down in the Bellingen area after 20 years I think there way on 3-4 completed houses 23 adults living on there most of them living in caravans and sheds and things like that and feeling very sorry for themselves and feeling fully oppressed by their poverty and after we had delt with things like how to grow food and how to deal with the lantana and so on, on the second day I said that we are going to focus on the invisible structures, were going to look at the economic side of things, were going to look at the social side of things, were going to look at your government systems today because if we don’t address those and we only talk about growing food and conquering lantana it’s not going to be a sustainable community. So I passed around a little piece of paper and asked each household to write down what it cost them to keep their car on the road and when we tallied it up, We weren’t counting replacement costs, it was just the basic costs, $55 thousand a year was going out of that community just on motor cars and that just really shocked them, They said "that’s a house", that’s a house a year going into green house gasses> so when you start to tally things up like that suddenly you’ve got a different perspective on things.

To solve that though we really have to start to look at ways we can start to share resources and we can cooperate more efficiently and rat ionise the motor car. There’s a lot of verbiage about energy efficiency in the home, about having solar water systems and stand alone power systems, passive solar designs and all that stuff but did you know that in Australia we consume as much fossil fuel for our motor cars as we do for all our domestic electricity consumption. Nobody’s talking about ration isling our motor car use, their all focusing on the solar panels and stuff because that’s safe, it doesn’t effect me or challenge the way I pattern my life and the way I jump into my car.

So I think it’s really important, we can be selective beings of sustainability, but we really need to address these things if we are going to create systems that are going to work long term. So when we look at things like proximity the further away we are from town centres the more we need to build self reliance into the individual community and we have to seriously look at things like meaningful employment and lively hood because social security dependence has a negative impact on the human being we need to participatory, we need to have a value on our life and the value of our life is measured by our value to the community and the service and skills that we bring into the wider community and when we don’t have that ability to give and interact and receive for what we do.

So we do get a lot of people who are I suppose subsidised by Social Security for doing incredible social and community work, that is often not acknowledged by people the they are doing it for or by society and they are given a hard time by the burocracies because their not out there looking for areal job although certainly there are a few little alternative now, but they are things we need to address because not having a valuable input into the wider community is a very erosive thing in terms of our social systems and the individual. We have fallen down terrible with our economic planning and once again we have tended to mono-culture things and there is certainly good approached like alienation but then it’s become incredibly prescriptive and people can no longer easily work next to where they live and when we are looking at things like Eco=villages on the village scale, it would be good if we could build in a lot of home business enterprises or collective stuff. But working from home has it’s own consequences of isolation, so we need to look carefully at how we can create workloads and how can people working from home how can they very easily move into a environment where there’s other resources and networks that they can share with other people that are operating home businesses so they are not totally in isolation.

Can we have administrative centres where there somebody who’s got good secretarial and accounting skill that takes care of a lot of the stuff that everybody’s duplicating and it’s locking up time that they should really be spending or would rather be spending on their particular profession and skills and then that provides somebody else with a job and start to a node where by people are meeting and connecting with each other and breaking down those things of isolation. There are many strategies that we can develop for these sorts of things but there issues that often go unaddressed