Permaculture in the city

Last week's guest speaker, Kat Steele is an urban permaculturist. As half of the world's population now lives in the city - what goes on there environmentally is so important.

A few things I heard about that excited me ..

1) Sharing schemes where people in the neighbourhood share resources. No need for everyone to own their own lawnmower (as it spends most of its time sitting in the shed doing nothing apart from taking up space) - have one for a collective of people and share it around. So many ways to share and build community. eg - someone may have a garden, but may not have the physical health to look after it. Someone else may want to grow vegetables, but not have their own land - so person A invites person B to look after their land and they share the veggie harvest 50:50. Other schemes involve the group going each week or month to someone else's home and helping them with a project that would be too big for them to do alone. eg - one group member gets everyone to paint their hallway - with the whole team working it takes half a day and is a fun social event for everyone. The next time - a group member asks for help to clear out their attic and take unwanted goods to a charity store - the next group member may ask for help in planting a vegetable garden and on it goes ... Sounds like a great way to make new friends, be fit and make nice improvements to your environment.

2) Neighbourhood harvesting scheme. I believe this took place in Oakland. Some community activists took note of people who had fruit trees. The fruit tree owners were approached to see if they wanted to come on board. If they said "yes" then a group of people came round to help pick all the fruit. the harvest was divided up between the fruit-pickers and all the tree owners (so people got a variety of fruit) with an agreed percentage going to homeless projects.

3) Neighbourhood healthy eating scheme. Believe it or not, many disadvantaged people in urban areas do not have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. When I was working in Newham, I met a man who set up a project to deal with this. He went early in the morning to a fresh fruit and veg market, bought a lot of fresh produce and then went into "fresh food deserts" (places where there were no veggie shops in walking distance) and set up shop. Most of his selling points were in the middle of big, concrete housing estates. I met him at a healthy living project where we were introducing many people to smoothies for the first time. Most of the tasters were in raptures and one drinker claimed he felt "almost tipsy".

In the Bay Area, something similar is going on. A non-profit bought an ice-cream van, painted it in funky colours, filled it with organic produce from local growers, blasted out hip-hop music and went into deprived neighbourhoods. As well as distributing fresh food, the team also do healthy eating education. Sounds like one cool project!

4) Green roofs. OK, even my mum had heard of this one. So maybe I've had my eyes closed recently! A green roof is a roof where grasses and plants grow - basically like having a park or lawn on top of your house. It helps neutralise the co2 emissions in big cities and cool down city temperatures (caused by all that asphalt and concrete that hold the heat in). Apparently, large municipal buildings in the US are starting to go green on top - places such as museums and municipalities (I believe the mayor of Chicago is currently working on a green roof). I have a vision one day of being on a plane as it comes into land in a big urban area and seeing this amazing layer of green as we get closer to the ground - with city workers sitting on the roof, lazing in the grass, enjoying their lunchbreaks.. a whole new layer of green and nature above the ground .. yum !!!!