The Tijuana Approach

For several miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, the wall separating San Diego and Tijuana is made from old metal landing pads used by the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War. The metal sheets driven upright into the dirt are six inches north of the actual border, a half-foot into U.S. territory, creating a very narrow no-man’s strip for about 20 miles. Its width is roughly equal to the length of a new pencil.

It is these forgotten spaces that fascinate Teddy Cruz. A San Diego-based architect who was raised in Guatemala and educated in Mexico City, Cruz believes in loose design: If you indiscriminately give unstructured spaces over to the masses, they will find a use for them. As San Diego sets itself back from the wall, Tijuana crashes up against it, using it as a backyard fence, a fourth wall of a house or a memorial shrine. He wants to bring that free-for-all functionality to el norte.

I drove my rental car across the border in late afternoon to meet Cruz at the Tijuana airport, where he was flying in from Mexico City. He was to give me a tour of what he calls “informalities” in the shantytowns and slums on the outskirts of Tijuana — the places that inspire him to create mixed-use housing projects in San Diego. He often tours Tijuana to watch the evolution of the suburbs. He knows Tijuana well, so I handed the car keys over to him. He promptly got us lost.

“I wanted to avoid downtown traffic, and I got into this,” he said, trying to navigate the knot of bypasses and ramps and detours to get to the rapida — the highway that will take us out of the city. “Tijuana is a labyrinth.”

We’d gotten caught in what makes Tijuana so interesting to Cruz. Compared to San Diego with its street grids, gated communities and downtown revitalization plans, Tijuana is a mess. Municipal oversight is minimal. Developers and maquilladores — large international factories — often get carte blanche to build however they please. But within the chaotic lack of planning are small fissures individuals can exploit.

When we broke free of the downtown snarl and headed to the edge of the city, Cruz pointed to a shantytown creeping up a large hill. These are parachuters — people invading unused land and building housing out of whatever they can find: Tires, garage doors, signs, pallet racks. When enough people invade, they petition the city to bring in services like a line of electricity. We drove for miles along one of these recently paved boulevards and passed hundreds of businesses — mechanics, day cares, barbers, pharmacies, pizzerias, groceries, shops of every description. It’s a sea of signage.

“Look at this!” Cruz said as he waved out of the window. “A huge economy of small businesses! In the informal organization of these environments there is a strong entrepreneurial energy.” Cruz was quick to concede there are a lot of problems in these shantytowns that don’t merit romanticizing, but “There is a lot of opportunity here, people shaping their own economies.” He pointed out a three-story mall with every unit occupied.

Cruz wants to give that power to people in San Diego. He is developing a high-density, mixed-use housing development in San Ysidro, about 15 miles north of the border. By haggling with San Diego city government to waive a number of zoning codes and building permits, he and a nonprofit community organization called Casa Familiar are planning a two-square-block compound of housing, parks, walkways, a community center and “informal” spaces with no pre-determined purpose. It’s those spaces that city planning departments are wary of. Cruz says these spaces will evolve into gathering spaces, small businesses and impromptu housing by the will of the residents.

A question, however, looms: Does anybody want to live in community housing modeled after high-density slums of Tijuana? There is evidence to suggest the answer is no. The American dream of a single-family home is strong, especially among new Mexican immigrants. Even to Mexicans in Mexico. As soon as those parachuters get city services, developers start building en masse. What they build are tiny McMansions — acres and acres of 250-square-foot boxes that look like neo-classical suburban homes in miniature, even with a two-foot setback and separated from one another by about eight inches.

“The developers are being intelligent — they are selling what people want,” said Cruz. “You are selling an individual house on an individual lot. That’s the dream.” The price for the dream is a neighborhood with no transportation services, no parks, no schools. It is still just a shantytown dressed up like a Levittown.

We drove up a hill to get a 180-degree vista of this development, and Cruz showed me how the American dream is evolving itself into a Mexican reality. To the right were the newly constructed beige stucco houses looking like a grid of Monopoly board pieces. To the left was the same development, but a little older. The older neighborhoods are more colorful, and the houses have expanded out from their faux neo-classical boxiness. They melded together as residents have created small businesses in the front and added housing additions to the rear. Property line distinctions blur. There are informal economies, and impromptu communities and unfettered interaction.

Cruz said the people will create what works, even as developers still sell the dream. “They are ignoring what makes these places vital — the willingness of people to co-exist in density.” The future of the architect, as Cruz sees it, is to design an urban process rather than a space. Give them a foundation, and people will make their own space.

Homework

There’s something perversely fascinating about educational policies that are clearly at odds with the available data. Huge schools are still being built even though we know that students tend to fare better in smaller places that lend themselves to the creation of democratic caring communities. Many children who are failed by the academic status quo are forced to repeat a grade even though research shows that this is just about the worst course of action for them. Homework continues to be assigned – in ever greater quantities – despite the absence of evidence that it’s necessary or even helpful in most cases.

The dimensions of that last disparity weren’t clear to me until I began sifting through the research for a new book. To begin with, I discovered that decades of investigation have failed to turn up any evidence that homework is beneficial for students in elementary school. Even if you regard standardized test results as a useful measure, homework (some versus none, or more versus less) isn’t even correlated with higher scores at these ages. The only effect that does show up is more negative attitudes on the part of students who get more assignments.

In high school, some studies do find a correlation between homework and test scores (or grades), but it’s usually fairly small and it has a tendency to disappear when more sophisticated statistical controls are applied. Moreover, there’s no evidence that higher achievement is due to the homework even when an association does appear. It isn’t hard to think of other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned – or why they might spend more time on it than their peers do.

The results of national and international exams raise further doubts. One of many examples is an analysis of 1994 and 1999 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data from 50 countries. Researchers DB and GL were scarcely able to conceal their surprise when they published their results last year: “Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships,” but “the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in [amount of homework assigned] are all negative.”

Finally, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the widely accepted assumption that homework yields nonacademic benefits for students of any age. The idea that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits (such as self-discipline and independence) could be described as an urban myth except for the fact that it’s taken seriously in suburban and rural areas, too.

In short, regardless of one’s criteria, there is no reason to think that most students would be at any sort of disadvantage if homework were sharply reduced or even eliminated. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of world schools – elementary and secondary, public and private – continue to require their students to work a second shift by bringing academic assignments home. Not only is this requirement accepted uncritically, but the amount of homework is growing, particularly in the early grades. A large, long-term national survey found that the proportion of six- to-eight-year-old children who reported having homework on a given day had climbed from 34 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1997 – and the weekly time spent studying at home more than doubled.

SH of the UM, one of the authors of that study, has just released an update based on 2002 data. Now the proportion of young children who had homework on a specific day jumped to 64 percent, and the amount of time they spent on it climbed by another third. The irony here is painful because with younger children the evidence to justify homework isn’t merely dubious – it’s nonexistent.

So why do we do something where the cons (stress, frustration, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, a possible diminution of interest in learning) so clearly outweigh the pros? Possible reasons include a lack of respect for research, a lack of respect for children (implicit in a determination to keep them busy after school), a reluctance to question existing practices, and the top-down pressures to teach more stuff faster in order to pump up test scores so we can chant “We’re number one!”

All these explanations are plausible, but I think there’s also something else responsible for our continuing to feed children this latter-day cod-liver oil. Because many of us believe it’s just common sense that homework would provide academic benefits, we tend to shrug off the failure to find any such benefits. In turn, our belief that homework ought to help is based on some fundamental misunderstandings about learning.

Consider the assumption that homework should be beneficial just because it gives students more time to master a topic or skill. (Plenty of pundits rely on this premise when they call for extending the school day or year. Indeed, homework can be seen as a way of prolonging the school day on the cheap.) Unfortunately, this reasoning turns out to be woefully simplistic. Back “when experimental psychologists mainly studied words and nonsense syllables, it was thought that learning inevitably depended upon time,” reading researcher RC and his colleagues explain. But “subsequent research suggests that this belief is false.”

The statement “People need time to learn things” is true, of course, but it doesn’t tell us much of practical value. On the other hand, the assertion “More time usually leads to better learning” is considerably more interesting. It’s also demonstrably untrue, however, because there are enough cases where more time doesn’t lead to better learning.

In fact, more hours are least likely to produce better outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved. Anderson and his associates found that when children are taught to read by focusing on the meaning of the text (rather than primarily on phonetic skills), their learning does “not depend on amount of instructional time.” In math, too, as another group of researchers discovered, time on task is directly correlated to achievement only if both the activity and the outcome measure are focused on rote recall as opposed to problem solving.

CA of MS points out that it isn’t “quantitative changes in behavior” – such as requiring students to spend more hours in front of books or worksheets – that help children learn better. Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation.” In turn, these attitudes and responses emerge from the way teachers think about learning and, as a result, how they organize their classrooms. Assigning homework is unlikely to have a positive effect on any of these variables. We might say that education is less about how much the teacher covers than about what students can be helped to discover – and more time won’t help to bring about that shift.

Alongside an overemphasis on time is the widely held belief that homework “reinforces” the skills that students have learned – or, rather, have been taught -- in class. But what exactly does this mean? It wouldn’t make sense to say “Keep practicing until you understand” because practicing doesn’t create understanding – just as giving kids a deadline doesn’t teach time-management skills. What might make sense is to say “Keep practicing until what you’re doing becomes automatic.” But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?

The answer is behavioral responses. Expertise in tennis requires lots of practice; it’s hard to improve your swing without spending a lot of time on the court. But to cite an example like that to justify homework is an example of what philosophers call begging the question. It assumes precisely what has to be proved, which is that intellectual pursuits are like tennis.

The assumption that they are analogous derives from behaviorism, which is the source of the verb “reinforce” as well as the basis of an attenuated view of learning. In the 1920s and ‘30s, when JW was formulating his theory that would come to dominate education, a much less famous researcher named WB was challenging the drill-and-practice approach to mathematics that had already taken root. “If one is to be successful in quantitative thinking, one needs a fund of meanings, not a myriad of ‘automatic responses,’” he wrote. “Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings.” In fact, if “arithmetic becomes meaningful, it becomes so in spite of drill.”

WB’s insights have been enriched by a long line of research demonstrating that the behaviorist model is, if you’ll excuse the expression, deeply superficial. People spend their lives actively constructing theories about how the world works, and then reconstructing them in light of new evidence. Lots of practice can help some students get better at remembering an answer, but not to get better at – or even accustomed to -- thinking. And even when they do acquire an academic skill through practice, the way they acquire it should give us pause. As psychologist EL has shown, “When we drill ourselves in a certain skill so that it becomes second nature,” we may come to perform that skill “mindlessly,” locking us into patterns and procedures that are less than ideal.

But even if practice is sometimes useful, we’re not entitled to conclude that homework of this type works for most students. It isn’t of any use for those who don’t understand what they’re doing. Such homework makes them feel stupid; gets them accustomed to doing things the wrong way (because what’s really “reinforced” are mistaken assumptions); and teaches them to conceal what they don’t know. At the same time, other students in the same class already have the skill down cold, so further practice for them is a waste of time. You’ve got some kids, then, who don’t need the practice and others who can’t use it.

Furthermore, even if practice was helpful for most students, that doesn’t mean they need to do it at home. In my research I found a number of superb teachers (at different grade levels and with diverse instructional styles) who rarely, if ever, found it necessary to assign homework. Some not only didn’t feel a need to make students read, write, or do math at home; they preferred to have students do these things during class where it was possible to observe, guide, and discuss.

Finally, any theoretical benefit of practice homework must be weighed against the effect it has on students’ interest in learning. If slogging through worksheets dampens one’s desire to read or think, surely that wouldn’t be worth an incremental improvement in skills. And when an activity feels like drudgery, the quality of learning tends to suffer, too. That so many children regard homework as something to finish as quickly as possible – or even as a significant source of stress -- helps to explain why it appears not to offer any academic advantage even for those who obediently sit down and complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. All that research showing little value to homework may not be so surprising after all.

Supporters of homework rarely look at things from the student’s point of view, though; instead, kids are regarded as inert objects to be acted on: Make them practice and they’ll get better. My argument isn’t just that this viewpoint is disrespectful, or that it’s a residue of an outdated stimulus-response psychology. I’m also suggesting it’s counterproductive. Children cannot be made to acquire skills. They aren’t vending machines such that we put in more homework and get out more learning.

But just such misconceptions are pervasive in all sorts of neighborhoods, and they’re held by parents, teachers, and researchers alike. It’s these beliefs that make it so hard even to question the policy of assigning regular homework. We can be shown the paucity of supporting evidence and it won’t have any impact if we’re wedded to folk wisdom (“practice makes perfect”; more time equals better results).

On the other hand, the more we learn about learning, the more willing we may be to challenge the idea that homework has to be part of schooling.

The Wages Of Sin

The British plundered gold wherever they went. The following is what's left of it:

"Some of Britain’s gold reserves held in the Bank of England are cracking up because they were poorly made. The deterioration could temporarily cut the value of the country’s 320-tonne reserve, which is held by the Bank on behalf of the Treasury. A Freedom of Information request by trade journal Metal Bulletin revealed that cracks and fissures had appeared in some gold.

The bank is said to be in discussions to establish exactly how much of its hoard is involved. The quality of gold in the UK is defined by the London Good Delivery (LGD) standards laid down by the London Bullion Market Association. The affected bullion, originally "imported" in the 1930s and 1940s, falls below the proper LGD standard. This is due to the poor refining processes used at the time, which is thought to be the cause of the deterioration. A Bank of England spokesman insisted the problem was only superficial and not an issue of the gold’s purity. But the affected gold would attract a lower price were it to be sold now and the bank would have to re-refine it to bring it up to standard.

Gold is held by the Bank of England as an insurance policy in case of turmoil in the world’s money markets. The complete British reserve is currently worth around £4 billion."

This final tranche is impure and hard to refine. Don't touch it.

Note: Gold will be no support in the post-industrial world. Forget your fixation with it, wherever it is.

Traversing Cultural Barriers

Born and raised in the cosmopolitan climate of Beirut in the sixties and seventies, Rabih Abou-Khalil leaned to play the oud, the Arabian short-necked lute, at the age of four. In the Arab world this instrument is as popular as the guitar or the piano in the West and is the composer's instrument par excellence. The Lebanese civil war forced him to leave his country in 1978 to study classical flute in the German city of Munich, where he was tutored at the Munich Academy of Music by Walther Theurer. The analytical preoccupation of the European dassical tradition enabled him to grasp Arabic music from a further, theoretical position, opening his eyes to the possibility of operating simultaneously within musically divergent systems. Whereas Arab instrumentalists were content to imitate human voice techniques, Abou-Khalil set out to explore new ways of playing his instrument. Music critics have even recommended his accomplished technique as a "study for jazz guitarists"; his ballads, on the other hand, rekindle memories of the poetic dawn of Arabian culture, without ever sounding even remotely traditionalistic.

Rabih Abou-Khalil has asserted himself in the avant-garde as a composer as well as an instrumentalist. This is not just because he is ahead of his time - but because he also questions what others might pursue without further reflection. With his original composing technique, his unconstrained, yet daring approach to classical Arabic music, he has found a musical language entirely his own. Commissioned by the Südwesrfunk (Southwest German Radio), Abou-Khalil wrote two unusual compositions for string quartet in his own rhythmically and melodically charged style. The maiden performance with the Kronos String Quartet was the highlight at the Stuttgart Jazz Summit in 1992. On his CD, "Arabian Waltz", with the Balanescu String Quartet he successfully integrated the string quartet - for centuries the domain of European classical music - into his musical language.

What superficially appears to be a chance encounter between opposing instruments and a seemingly antagonistic dash of talents from different musical worlds is in fact the result of a well pondered upon concept. Under Abou-Khalil's guidance these undeniable differences by no means descend into Babylonian confusion. On the contrary, cosmopolitan musicians from different cultural backgrounds draw inspiration from their shared intuitive understanding of the serious challenge they face in interpreting Abou-Khalil's music. The intellectual and emotional identification with these compositions unleashes charges of enthusiasm in each of the players, inciting new heights of musical mastery. Yet the temptation of individual one-upmanship is never as strong as the collective innovative endeavor and exploration into uncharted terrain. The highly varied works by Abou-Khalil - all nonetheless derived from this very elixir - now stand in their own right, extending so far beyond convention that they somehow elude all fixed categories. Abou-Khalil's music thrives on creative encounters and not on exoticism. From a combination of diverse cultural elements something very personal and coherent emerges. Thus it would be fruitless to mull over descriptions such as Orient or Occident, jazz, world music or classical.

Commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra to write music for orchestra, Abou-Khalil wrote works that were performed in London and Chichester. For another project for the German city of Duisburg he chose to collaborate with the Ensemble Modern, one of the most renowned orchestras specializing in contemporary music. "While working with Rabih Abou-Khalil, I was starkly reminded of a saying by Herbert von Karajan: 'Do not play the bar along with the music, play across the measure'." That was how Dietmar Wiesner, the flute player of the Ensemble Modem, summed up his impressions from the rehearsals: "Unbelievably fine, irregular rhythms, masterfully formed into melodic chains that remain in a floating condition, never setting to land, and thus reaching a high level of charm that relentlessly pulls the listener into its magic."

Music Review - Jan Garbarek

Jan Garbarek (born March 4, 1947 in Mysen, Norway) a Norwegian tenor and soprano saxophonist, active in the jazz, classical, and world music genres. Garbarek was the only child of a former Polish prisoner of war and a Norwegian farmer's daughter. Garbarek grew up in Oslo. At 21, he married Vigdis. His daughter Anja Garbarek is also a musician.

Garbarek's sound is one of the hallmarks of the ECM record label, which has released virtually all of his recordings. His style incorporates a sharp-edged tone, long, keening, sustained notes strongly reminiscent of Islamic prayer calls, and generous use of silence. He began his recording career in the late 1960s, notably featuring on recordings by the American jazz composer George Russell (such as Othello Ballet Suite and Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature). If he had initially appeared as a devotee of Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann, by 1973 he had turned his back on the harsh dissonances of avant-garde jazz, retaining only his tone from his previous approach.

As a composer, Garbarek tends to draw heavily from Scandinavian folk melodies, a legacy of his Ayler influence. He is also a pioneer of ambient jazz composition, most notably on his 1976 album Dis. This textural approach, which rejects traditional notions of thematic improvisation (best exemplified by Sonny Rollins) in favour of a style described by critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton as "sculptural in its impact", has been critically divisive. Garbarek's more meandering recordings are often labeled as New Age music, a style generally scorned by more orthodox jazz musicians and listeners, or spiritual ancestors thereof. Other experiments have included setting a collection of poems of Olav H. Hauge to music, with a single saxophone complementing a full mixed choir; this has led to notable performances with Grex Vocalis, but not yet to recordings.

After recording a string of unheralded avant-garde albums, Garbarek rose to international prominence in the mid-1970s playing post-bop jazz, both as a member of and a leader of Keith Jarrett's successful "European Quartet". He achieved considerable commercial success in Europe with Dis, a meditative collaboration with guitarist Ralph Towner that featured the distinctive sound of a wind harp on several tracks. (Selections from Dis have been used as incidental music in several feature films and documentaries.) In the 1980s, Garbarek's music began to incorporate synthesizers and elements of world music. In 1989, he provided the score for American film Teen Witch accompanied by John Taylor, Terje Rypdal, Miroslav Vitous, and Peter Erskine along with an orchestra. In 1993, during the Gregorian chant craze, his album Officium, a collaboration with early music vocal performers the Hilliard Ensemble, became one of ECM's biggest-selling albums of all time, reaching the pop charts in several European countries. (Its sequel, Mnemosyne, followed in 1999.) In 2005, his album In Praise of Dreams was nominated for a Grammy. He did the music for Kippur.

In addition to the selections from Dis, Garbarek has also composed music for several other European films, including French and Norwegian films. Also his song "Rites" was used in the American film The Insider.

Permaculture

The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture and is an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationships found in natural ecologies.

Permaculture design principles extend from the position that the only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that are fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth's ecosystems.

Modern permaculture is a system design tool. It is a way of:

1. looking at a whole system or problem
2. seeing connections between key elements (parts)
3. observing how the parts relate,
4. planning to mend sick systems by applying ideas learnt from long-term sustainable working systems.

In permaculture, we are learning from the working systems of nature to plan to fix the sick landscapes of human agricultural and city systems. We can apply systems thinking to the design of a kitchen tool as easily to the re-design of a farm. In permaculture we apply it to everything we need in order to build a sustainable future. Commonly, initiatives that are taken tend to evolve from strategies that focus on efficiency (for example, more accurate and controlled uses of inputs and minimisation of waste) to substitution (for example, from more to less disruptive interventions, such as from biocides to more specific biological controls and other more benign alternatives) to redesign -- fundamental changes in the design and management of the operation. Permaculture is about helping people make redesign choices: setting new goals and a shift in thinking that affects not only their home but their actions in the workplace, borrowings and investments. Examples include the design and employment of complex transport solutions, optimum use of natural resources such as sunlight, radical design of information-rich, multi-storey polyculture systems. This progression generally involves a shift in the nature of one’s dependence -- from relying primarily on universal, purchased, imported, technology-based interventions to more specific locally available knowledge and skill-based ones. This usually eventually also involves fundamental shifts in world-views, senses of meaning, and associated lifestyles. My experience is that although efficiency and substitution initiatives can make significant contributions to sustainability over the short term, much greater longer-term improvements can only be achieved by redesign strategies; and, furthermore, that steps need to be taken at the outset to ensure that efficiency and substitution strategies can serve as stepping stones and not barriers to redesign...

Core Values

Permaculture is a broad-based and holistic approach that has many applications to all aspects of life. At the heart of permaculture design and practice is a fundamental set of ‘core values’ or ethics which remain constant whatever a person's situation, whether they are creating systems for town planning or trade; whether the land they care for is only a windowbox or an entire forest. These 'ethics' are often summarised as:

Earthcare – recognising that the Earth is the source of all life (and is itself a living entity) and that we recognise and respect that the Earth is our valuable home and we are a part of the Earth, not apart from it.

Peoplecare – supporting and helping each other to change to ways of living that are not harming ourselves or the planet, and to develop healthy societies.

Fairshare (or placing limits on consumption) - ensuring that the Earth's limited resources are utilised in ways that are equitable and wise.

Everyone needs to eat and drink, and it is the issue of food production where permaculture had its origins. It started with the belief that for people to feed themselves sustainably they need to move away from reliance on industrialised agriculture. Where industrial farms use fossil fuel (gasoline, diesel, natural gas..) driven technology specialising in each farm producing high yields of a single crop, permaculture stresses the value of low inputs into the land and diversity in terms of what is grown. The model for this was an abundance of small scale market and home gardens for food production with food miles being a primary issue.

The Permaculture Design Innovation

The core of permaculture has always been in supplying a design toolkit for human habitation. This toolkit helps the designer to model a final design based on an observation of how ecosystems themselves interact. A simple example of this is how the Sun interacts with a plant by providing it with energy to grow. This plant may then be pollinated by bees or eaten by deer. These may disperse seed to allow other plants to grow into tall trees and provide shelter to these creatures from the wind. The bees may provide food for birds and the trees provide roosting for them. The tree's leaves will fall and rot, providing food for small insects and fungus. There will be a web of intricate connections that allow a diverse population of plant life and animals to survive by giving them food and shelter. One of the innovations of permaculture design was to appreciate the efficiency and productivity of natural ecosystems and seek to apply this to the way human needs for food and shelter are met.

O'BREDIM design methodology

O'BREDIM is a mnemonic based on Observation, Boundaries, Resources, Evaluation, Design, Implementation and Maintenance.

Observation allows you to first see how the site functions within itself, to gain an understanding of its initial relationships. Some people recommend a year-long observation of a site before anything is planted. During this period all factors, such as lay of the land, natural flora and so forth, can be brought into the design. A year allows the site to be observed through all seasons, although it must be realised that, particularly in temperate climates, there can be substantial variations between years.

Boundaries refer to physical ones as well as to those your neighbours might place on you, for example.

Resources would include the people involved, funding, as well as what you can grow or produce in the future.

Evaluation of the first three will then allow you to prepare for the next three. This is a careful phase of taking stock of what you have at hand to work with.

Design is always a creative and intensive process, and you must stretch your ability to see possible future synergetic relationships.

Implementation is literally the ground-breaking part of the process when you carefully dig and shape the site.

Maintenance is then required to keep your site at a healthy optimum, making minor adjustments as necessary. Good design will preclude the need for any major adjustments.

Patterns

The use of patterns both in nature and reusable patterns from other sites is often key to permaculture design. This echoes the pattern language used in architecture which has been an inspiration for many permaculture designers. All things, even the wind, the waves and the earth on its axis, moving around the Sun, form patterns. In pattern application, permaculture designers are encouraged to develop: 1. Awareness of the patterns that exist in nature (and how these function) 2. Application of pattern on sites in order to satisfy specific design needs. The application of pattern on a design site involves the designer recognising the shape and potential to fit these patterns or combinations of patterns comfortably onto the landscape. We can use branching for the direction of our paths, rather than straight paths with square angles. Or we may use lobe-like paths of the main path (these are known as keyhole paths) that minimise waste and compaction of the soil.

Permaculture zones

Permaculture zones are a way of organizing design elements in a human environment based on the frequency of human use. Frequently manipulated or harvested elements are located close to the house in zones one and two, while less frequently manipulated elements of the design are farther away from the house.

Links and connections

Also key to the permacultural design model is that useful connections are made between components in the final design. The formal analogy for this is a natural mature ecosystem. So, in much the same way as there are useful connections between Sun, plants, insects and soil there will be useful connections between different plants and their relationship to the landscape and humans. Another innovation of the permaculture design is to design a landuse or other system that has multiple outputs. A useful connection is viewed as one that maximises power: that is, maximizes the rate of useful energy transformation. A comparison which illustrates this is between a wheat field and a forest. “It is not the number of diverse things in a design that leads to stability, it is the number of beneficial connections between these components.”

Layers/'stacking'

In permaculture and forest gardening, seven layers are identified:

The canopy
Low tree layer (dwarf fruit trees)
Shrubs
Herbaceous
Rhizosphere (root crops)
Soil Surface (cover crops)
Vertical Layer (climbers, vines)
The 8th layer, or Mycosphere (fungi), is often included in layering.

A mature ecosystem such as ancient woodland has a huge number of relationships between its component parts: trees, understory, ground cover, soil, fungi, insects and other animals. Plants grow at different heights. This allows a diverse community of life to grow in a relatively small space. Plants come into leaf and fruit at different times of year.

For example, in the UK, wild garlic comes into leaf on the woodland floor in the time before the top canopy re-appears with the spring. A wood suffers very little soil erosion as there are always roots in the soil. It offers a habitat to a wide variety of animal life which the plants rely on for pollination and seed distribution. The productivity of such a forest in terms of how much new growth it produces exceeds the most productive wheat field. It is in this observation of how more productive a wood may be on far less input of fertilizers that the potential productivity of a permaculture design is modelled. The many connections in a wood contribute together to a proliferation of opportunities for amplifier feedbacks to evolve that in turn maximise energy flow through the system.

Polyculture

Polyculture is agriculture using multiple crops in the same space, in imitation of the diversity of natural ecosystems, and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. It includes crop rotation, multi-cropping, and inter-cropping. Alley cropping is a simplification of the layered system which typically uses just two layers, with alternate rows of trees and smaller plants.

Guilds

Permaculture Guilds are groups of plants which work particularly well together. These can be those observed in nature such as the White Oak guild which centers on the White Oak tree and includes 10 other plants. Native communities can be adapted by substitution of plants more suitable for human use.

The Three Sisters of maize, squash and beans is a well known guild. Guilds can be thought of as an extension of companion planting.

Increase edge

Permaculturists maintain that where vastly differing systems meet, there is an intense area of productivity and useful connections. The greatest example of this is the coast. Where the land and the sea meet there is a particularly rich area that meets a disproportionate percentage of human and animal needs. This is evidenced by the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lives within 100 km of the sea. So this idea is played out in permacultural designs by using spirals in the herb garden or creating ponds that have wavy undulating shorelines rather than a simple circle or oval. Edges between woodland and open areas have been claimed to be the most productive.

Perennial plants

Perennial plants are often used in permaculture design. As they do not need to be planted every year they require less maintenance and fertilisers. They are especially important in the outer zones and in layered systems.

Animals

Many permaculture designs involve animals. For e.g., chickens can be used as a method of weed control and also as a producer of fertiliser. Agroforestry combines trees with grazing animals. The animals should be treated as friends, co-habitators and co-workers of the site.

Annual monoculture (anti-pattern)

Annual monoculture such as a wheatfield can be considered a pattern to be avoided in terms of space (height is uniform) and time (crops grow at the same rate until harvesting). During growth and especially after harvesting the system is prone to soil erosion from rain. The field requires a hefty input of fertilizers for growth and machinery for harvesting. The work is more likely to be repetitive, mechanised and rely on fossil fuels.

No pattern should be hard and fast and depending on the design considerations they can be broken. An example of this is broadscale permaculture practiced at Ragmans Lane Farm, which has a component of annual farming. Here the amount of human involvement is a key factor influencing the design.

Energy

Applying these values means using fewer non-renewable sources of energy, particularly petroleum based forms of energy. Burning fossil fuels contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming; however, using less energy is more than just combatting global warming. Food production should be a fully renewable system; but using current agricultural systems this is not the case. Industrial agriculture requires large amounts of petroleum, both to run the equipment, and to supply pesticides and fertilizers. Permaculture is in part an attempt to create a renewable system of food production that relies upon minimal amounts of energy.

For example permaculture focuses on maximizing the use of trees (agroforestry) and perennial food crops because they make a more efficient and long term use of energy than traditional seasonal crops. A farmer does not have to exert energy every year replanting them, and this frees up that energy to be used somewhere else.

Traditional pre-industrial agriculture was labor intensive, industrial agriculture is fossil fuel intensive and permaculture is design and information intensive and petrofree. Partially permaculture is an attempt to work smarter, not harder; and when possible the energy used should come from renewable sources such as wind power, passive solar designs or alternative fuels.