Permaculture Design: the ethics and surveying an industrial estate
The brief was not to do a permaculture design for the industrial estate, Warwick Bar, but to contribute permaculture design process and thinking to developing a 5 year sustainability strategy, concentrating on small scale, short term interventions.
With any piece of design, I go back to the ethics and the design process. The three permaculture ethics are :
Earth care
People care Fair Shares
Any piece of permaculture design aims to meet all three ethics in the design. The rationale of that is that if this doesn’t happen then the design will not be durable in the long term.
Bringing this understanding of the ethics was important in developing the sustainability strategy for me, for example working on reducing pollution while people on site feel unsafe and working in cold rooms, doesn’t really work. The design challenge is to come up with solutions that will work using the design process and principles.
Using the ethics had a direct impact on the design of the work that I did on the Warwick Bar, I wanted to the process to be very participatory to meet the ethic of people care and fair shares, with the idea that the earth care would be better as a result. The design process that I used for this project was SADIM:
Survey: One the first day I spent some time walking around the site, we then got started on interviewing tenants. All the findings were typed up to then analyse them for themes. That evening we went to a local residents group meeting to introduce ourselves and encourage them to come along to the session.
On the second day lots of interested people like canal enthusiasts, students from the university, residents and tenants came along. The first task was establish the boundaries and identify the current tenants.
Base map of the site with an overlay of current tenants.
When then went out to observe the site and some people took photos along the way.
We surveyed people’s understanding of the site using mental maps
We looked at historical maps, and marked on overlays to show the changes over time.
We captured people’s observations in the form of mind maps.
With all this information, we were ready to move on to the analysis phase.
hedvig's permaculture adventures 
