Weekly learning round up 🪐✨⚡

Week of June 20th

🍵 the theme of this week seems to be: urban utopia 🍵

1. The current world of Permaculture

There are many eco-villages around the world that are already living in the solarpunk future we all dreamed about.

I find the website of Findhorn eco-village in Scotland to be the most informative, as it details how the community functions.

Notable systems

• their food supply comes from Cullerne Gardens — so they don’t grow their own food despite the self-sustained communal garden fantasy.
• their wind turbine supplies 100% of energy for the community.
• their sewage processing is done organically with bacteria, algae, living organisms…etc

The residents have the lowest ecological footprint in any part of the industrialized world.

2. But as I am contemplating this model of living, what Jason Benn said also resonated:

“ppl on here are always talking abt urban villages and rural homesteads when what they really want is to live in a college town”

“I too am confused about the collective cultural boner we have for returning to antiquity. Farming is obviously miserable hard work, and college towns are where many people make their lifelong best friends.”

that’s why he is building The Neighborhood in San Francisco

• a federation of diverse houses with shared purpose, spaces, and resources.
• create an intergenerational campus full of radical agency, inspiring people, and unplanned encounters with friends.

Honestly that sounds a lot more fun than any eco-villages. But I also see an opportunity for building in sustainable practices. When living in a large collective, it’s a lot easier to implement initiatives like buying bulk locally in farmer’s market, sharing rides and general supplies…etc

There’s only one problem…

3. The problem of unsexy

It’s tedious to practice sustainability. It’s not cool to nudge your roommate for the tenth time to wash the take out box and put it in recycling. It’s not attractive to be “that guy” on slack who create polls for “should we get solar panels?”.

To counter this problem, I always go back to Bjake Ingel’s idea of “hedonistic sustainability”.

• we have this misconception that sustainability is a moral sacrifice
• when it should be a design challenge
• how do we make a sustainable city more enjoyable than one’s that’s not?
• how he does that with architecture?
• for example, he build a ski slope on a clean power plant in Copenhagen, the slope also allows excess water to naturally flow to the facade of the building, which waters the giant planters made with recycled plastic. The plants then acts as shades and ventilators for the offices. Fun, practicality and sustainability are all built in.

but what about non-architects, is there something we can do?

How do we make day to day sustainable practice more fun?

…and that’s probably what I would reflect on next week :)

Thanks for reading!