How to Design a PERMACULTURE NEIGHBORHOOD 

Add universal solar panels for electricity, biogas harvesting from blackwater, greywater collection, and community composting and you have a modern version of an ancient city.

This should be common knowledge for all city planners, architects, and especially government - amazing concept!

A wonderfully insightful presentation, yet again! I'd love to see you do another presentation on RETROFITTING existing neighborhoods that were badly designed (like most of them).

Garage is a must have especially in winter where roads need to be clear to remove snow/trees that fell/clean the sidelines.

I was about to comment the inefficient road placement right before you optimise it. We are moving to community carpooling which is way more efficient than everyone holding personal vehicles and save garage space makes a great sense. Here in Brazil, most territory is between tropics so I think adapt this format to a more "square like" homes may be more efficient to save energy.

As a young architect with an interest in permaculture (wrote my architecture thesis and designed a community center on the topic), I hope to change my own lifestyle and help others do the same. I just need to get my license and build the skills. Your videos are really great at explaining the topic, and I wish that I had found this channel a year ago.

I find 'garages' are more than 'car houses'. They are hard working adjuncts. The garage is where I keep my garden implements and large canners so they last longer and remain mine. They store work tools so my vehicles are lighter during my commute. The garage also serves as a comfortable place to process veggies for winter preservation and ferments. I keep my freezer there along with a minimally heated, insulated food storage room. The crocks are cooler in the garage than the porch, house or carport. Fermenting smells are out of the house. Animals and insects remain off my crocks here while they transform. The garage keeps my bike safe from nicking. I have room for project expansion. It conserves my work energy to leave the project out instead of being forced to put everything away nightly. My garage also gives me a place where I can get in and out of my car *safely* without slipping on the wet or sometimes mildly snowy pathways of my temperate region. This can be especially important for the disabled and the elderly. The vehicle avoids damage from frost and snow removal efforts, including snow plows. Well-made garages protect from overnight rodent damage to wiring a recurring issue in some areas. My neighbors lacked a porch so they would open their garage door, and sit in lawn chairs protected from the breezes and watch and visit with passersby. --A garage even adds to social connection, who knew! Garages are the modern day suburban barn and workhorse to our self sufficiency and resiliency efforts. Narrow reasoning is increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots, subtly taxing the environment in ignored ways. The one-(small) size-fits-all mantra drummed into the heads of students is poor logic. Assess the true purpose and usefulness before making denigrating epithets... Think your neighborhood at 6:44 is oriented wrong. It messes with the homes' solar aspects.

I’m very excited to be working with a design client on a full community design. We need permaculture development and redevelopment!

From a design perspective, this is awesome. The amount of efficiency and synergy baked into this is great. The problem is finding enough people, who are all interested in the lifestyle caveats that would come with this style of building, and are all looking to buy a home in the same place. Granted, you can incorporate most of these principles on an individual plot basis anyways, but nonetheless the benefits of all that synergy is lost because to find enough people interested in order to scale it seems unlikely

Great video. Thanks! I'm creating an 8-acre eco-village campground in Ecuador that will encompass a permaculture neighborhood design similar to what you've demonstrated. To make it a bit more complicated to address the needs of the campground park, here are some elements to incorporate. It will be a campground with full hook up RV sites, cabins, and area(s) for tents. I hope to direct all blackwater to a central biodigester where methane will be used for kitchen cooking - indoor and outdoor. So, once the location is mapped using a drone resulting in an accurate contour map and that is further used to make a Keyline design, I can determine where the ponds and roads will go - and the sites - then the central biogesting and methane production location can be determined. I am in the process of acquiring the property. Once done, I will get the contour maps of the 8 acres for further design work. If you know of anyone who knows about keyline design, biodigesters, installing septic pipelines, and other related matters, please let me know. I will have funds to hire such a person.

just to add to this. if you had the water storage containers be able to pump some of the water into a container in the roof of your building you could use it to flush your toilet. also you could have another tank that could be hooked up to your solar panels to slowly heat it up so you can have hot showers. this is a great way to save energy and water.

I love these new designs, & I'd like to see fewer new developments & more retrofits. I've dreamt about the many backyard fences already in existence being retrofitted for a rotating neighborhood grazing herd. This would take cooperation amongst the community, & that's a challenge.

In Vedic architecture, the five elements of nature are considered and vastu is used to improve mental and physical body of the humans inconcert with nature.

I had been drawing this out in more circle patterns, with common path ways for walking and biking and then circle based driving area on the a outside of a hub. Design each hub like its part of a network, then that work can barter and trade or help each other out as part of a bigger system. Love seeing this outlined so well.

One issue I have with the collection of run off water from roads is, especially in colder climates, the fact that during winter a bunch of salt is dumped on the roads. Does anyone know how these salinity levels effect plants?

Hi! I just tumbled upon this channel... THIS NEEDS TO BE KNOWN! What a genius!

In your first drawing you draw solar panels on the roofs. If those building had gable roofs instead of the hip roofs you drew, you would have more area oriented to the sun. Also, the gable end provides a place to install a vent fan to keep the interior cool.

Funny you should post this video because I was thinking of reaching out to a local “developer“ and pitching the idea of eco-Apartments, but I didn’t think to add edible plants into the mix. This is fascinating! The concept of all the backyards facing south is a great idea, the only problem I have with it is I don’t like the idea of a large community garden, because it doesn’t take human nature into account. I don’t want some “Karen- type” telling me that I can’t plant bamboo and because it’s community land going and ripping it out.

i literally have been drawing this design from seeing an ocean front in South Carolina!

A local shared food forest sounds so amazing... I wish this was the case every where

Garages are great spaces for working on equipment, like say, farm equipment. They're not just car houses, they are work spaces.

The way u teach visually is amazing from the drawings to the cool sandbox demonstrations great job keep up the good work

Highly satisfied that I found your channel and can learn from you. Thanks for posting.

You are the kind of people that we need in our government key positions for land management of the United States.

Intelligence and information. 2 key concepts so underutilized... My hometown ordered a traffic management study. Mainly how to re-setup street directions to get rid of permanent bottlenecks. When the study was done they said: "What does this people know about out town if they don't live here?". That was ~20 years ago. The epitome of stupid management.

This needs to be taught at schools

Exceptional and inspiritional content like this gives me hope, thank you very much.

Dude,😖 this is the😳 coolest way to educate & teach something. I😍💛e the huge see thru blackboard!

grow gardens not lawns

Thank you for making your hope-filled and informative videos, to whet the appetite of people who want to explore these ideas further

"There's double the amount of roads that their needs to be." When you eliminate those roads and put in a food forest directly south of those gardens, those trees can shade out the gardens. It could work with dwarf trees, but larger trees would shade out much of the garden, and potentiality solar panels.

Andrew Millison for president! Town planners, listen to this man!

Many of the small towns in my part of the central valley follow a similar pattern and you can see the amoebic off-growth of modern construction that often does not follow these principles and instead maximizes saleable units per acre. The old part of town will often have shotgun style houses arranged with knowledge of this "TEK". You can literally see the human mind disconnecting with the environment as air conditioning was added to dwellings. Its a fantastic real life historic mental map. The town centers have narrow streets and taller buildings to provide shade during the heat of the summer. Thank you for sharing and getting us thinking about our environment in an intelligent way.

Minus the neighborhood aspect, I like what you have here. It's just that I still need a wood lot for harvesting firewood; room for chickens, sheep, and cows; and a minimum of an acre of garden space per person in my house.

This permaculture concept will be observed by many civilizations beyond the sun, on a pale blue dot suspended in a beam of light. We are blessed. Thank you.

Definitely I will use this design in the Paradise to come. Thank you 😊

Long live earth! Long live plants! Thank you for your videos. Your ideas, along with many other's on youtube, allow me to imagine an utopia. Permaculture along with effective city design and flexible zoning bylaws can help create efficient livable communities that is both good on the habitat and on our wallet. At least it can exist in my dream.

This channel Will give unlimited benefit for all of the world.. Great teacher 😁👍

Maybe you are designing this for those dense suburbs, but you are missing out by not having a Garage. Garages are great work places (if your home isn't already large) as well as another collector structure for rain water and solar. Garages are also great for vehicles in winter, if you've ever lived through one. Suburb roads need to be plowed after all, which means no street parking.

I'm going to impose two requirements on your designs: 1. Every house must have an attached two car garage. NOBODY is going to buy a house in which they park on a street, walk at night through a food forest carrying their suitcase and shopping to their house. You just aren't planning around the humans foremost. 2. Every house must have enough dedicated sun-facing roof space to enable solar charging of the house plus electric cars. The owners don't have to have two cars, but they need usable, SECURE, non-heated space to work and store possessions.

I am loving learning about permaculture, but I'd like to understand how these designs support anti-islanding of the various habitat zones or wild areas. You say that this type of design is more in line with nature's water and light, but I'd be interested in how it can also support the larger fauna as well. Thanks for these wonderful lessons and visuals. :)

I really like seeing your ideas, designs, and reasonings

This is one of the most important videos on this topic. Thank you.

This becomes significantly more effective if you’re combining it with high density development or at least combine the homes into row houses, which are thermally much more efficient.

I need one that is titled, "How Permaculture Will Overthrow Tyrants". Thx.

I have a word to say about those swale paths. In a high-density, low-income neighbourhood, these will be crime hotspots, unless meticulous care is taken to ensure optimal lighting conditions. I live in an area that has similar features (except Brutalist and less optimised), and that's exactly how it turned out here (it quieted down a long time before I moved here, but the damage's been done and the state of the neighbourhood is dismal). I'm also not as confident as you are about the communal gardening. Whether it works would depend on several factors, mostly related to organisation/administration/cohesion of the neighbourhood. I've seen neighbourhoods where I'm confident it would thrive, and others where I'm confident it would end up an overgrown landfill (such as the one mentioned above, in fact that's exactly how the communal gardening spots look like here).

I absolutely love this idea. thanks. Only part I disagree with is a common garden that people share. Human nature, everyone assumes the other guy is gonna take care of it and no one does. And inevitably people will all fight over the harvest knowing to grab before someone else does. I like this same system but with individuals all playing specific roles and having specific responsibilities. Maybe that is what you meant. Not sure.

Love it! More and more people are def wanting to live better and in harmony with the earth and other animals and plant kingdoms! 👽✨💞

Good job again Andrew. As things started to get busy I had to time manage my YT watching. Finally finished the last 2 videos now just one more to go next week cheers have a good wknd ✌

this is great for retrofitting existing suburbs but i think we could do a lot better if we started from scratch

This is the one I wanted to see!! I love this and would love to see further into this with wildfire prevention and a larger community! One question, though, if you're taking away the homes for cars (smart...) and half the roads, where will people park? (I have back to the future going through my head... where we're going, we don't need roads.)

Road runoff contains brake dust antifreeze gasoline rubber you do not want that in anyting

I've had this idea for a long time now, to make just one large building for a lot of people, and instead of everyone having a little plot they won't ever use, cause we all know capitalism and overworking isn't going away, we can have one large garden/food forest/park. maybe even all around it. Parking lots can be designed around trees and pathways, making them more complicated for people who Have to have their car, and including a bus route that drives up to the building and back out. you could even have grocery stores and other commercial on the top middle and bottom floors depending on the size of this building. Common areas inside where things like indoor pools and other things can be built. People would have to give up having their own little garden space where their tiny dog can take a dump, but people would still move in if you make sure it remains affordable and the price isn't jacked up "just cause I can".

Vitruvius rides again. Wonderful. Astronomy and Design. Classic.

From an urbanist perspective there's an aspect in this video that we should alter for optimum outcomes and that is on-street car parking. You have correctly realised that space within your property is valuable and far too much of it is taken up for car storage, but offloading that storage into the public realm means that we need the paved part of every street to be 2x wider than it would need to be if the street was just used for transport and not storage. Storage of private cars in public space means that everyone, including those who don't own cars, is subsidising those who do own them. Road maintenance becomes more expensive because there's more road space to maintain, utilities (water, gas, electricity, etc) become more expensive because houses need to be further apart and the streets become more difficult and dangerous to navigate.

Make sure the angle of the roof is the same angle as ur latitude for maximum solar panel efficiency!

My one criticism is lack of parking. I live in an area with a lot of victorian qnd edwardian era housinh, which has no parking because cars werent around or were only owned by the rich. This has resulted in streets with cars parked both sides of the road all the way down. This means children are crossing the road without being able to look properly and without drivers being able to see them untill they are in the cars path. It also results in vehicles getting in each others way, including delivery vehicles and more importantly ambulances which get delayed. To deal with this I would do 1 of 3 things. 1. Mitigate the traffic issue by making the roads one way and create crossing points in the road. 2. Give people a driveway that can be converted to an amenity space for those without a car. 3. Create community parking nearby, (this would also allow for greater security as the car park could fitted with cctv for easily than every driveway. Leaving the road exclusively to pedestrians, cyclists, works and emergency response vehicles and those with permits for mobility reasons. This would ensure greater access for those that need it most and make a safer neighbourhood for children :)

Been really digging your videos! Thanks for the work you put into them. This is an interesting concept.

this is absolutely fascinating...so glad I found your channel!

This video has so many great takeaways.... definitely will be implementing alot on my homestead.

Dang! Just found this channel today but I instantly fell in love! This is so AMAZING! Thank you so much!!!!

Somehow, the uniformity of the permaculture neighborhood you show in this design still reminds me very strongly of the car-centric suburbs of North America. With added water storage and food-producing gardens and swales instead of useless lawns, but still very much designed from the same sort of Euclidean zoning mindset and nimby zoning laws which I saw demonstrated in NotJustBikes videos from his StrongTowns series (among others). If you are designing a permaculture neighborhood, looking to enable a sustainable lifestyle, you might also want to take a look at sustainable transportation options and what that means for neighborhood design. Good, solid Dutch-style bikes and cargo (e)bikes can work as good replacements for a car for most journeys, especially if you combine them with good, frequent public transport that has their own lanes - putting plenty of secure bike storage at bus stops gives a wider catchment area per stop, and allows the bus route to be more direct and faster. Maybe plan in an e-car recharger point at a small parking area for shared cars at the end of every second or third street, instead of making all the roads wide enough to park in front of each house? You could still go and get a car e.g. for a big shopping trip, load it up and unload in front of your house, but then put it away at the parking lot on the next street. It makes it something you do when you really need a car, not the default option you always pick first because it's parked right outside the front door. The streets can be a lot narrower, with chicanes (with trees, planting and where relevant swales) alternating on either side of the road. This does a lot to cool the area down as well as being good for water infiltration, but it also slows any car that needs to be on that street down to a speed that is safe for kids playing or cycling to school, wheelchair users and handcyclists, and safe for elderly walkers to cross. That makes them less noisy as well as less dangerous. This is an important element in creating a good social environment. But to get people to prefer using their bikes for short journeys you also need to plan the things people need to get to within easy biking distance (3 miles): zoning must allow and promote corner shops, primary school, primary care center with doctor/dentist/physio, daycare, hairdressers etc.who work from home, within or along the border of the permaculture residential neighborhood. It also means designing safe streets, traffic calmed and slowed by design, filtered to remove through traffic from residential and commercial town center districts, and providing solidly protected bike lanes and protected intersections where necessary on faster, wider through streets (protected with parking/planters/solid bollards or concrete barriers), while making the routes for cars less direct and fast. It's also wise to allow for gentle density, to allow for people of all ages and abilities to thrive in your neighborhood. Elderly people, people with disabilities, young people starting to live on their own for the first time, will probably not all want to or be capable of caring for such a large house and garden and water system, and maybe some of the swale. Put 2, 3, or up to 4-story apartment buildings on or near the corners, with ground floor flats for the elderly or handicapped, and a corner store or café, and flats above for young people, and maybe the shop-owner or employees. That creates enough gentle density for a good bus or tram service to serve the neighborhood, running to the nearest train station and town center (for access to the high school*, hospital and other services, and more diverse commercial district), as well as making the neighborhood more livable. * If possible, ensure that kids can safely bike to the high school on their own, with their classmates and friends, along separated cycle paths - that saves 1/4 of car trips (or nasty old diesel-spewing school busses causing pollution around the kids) and frees up their parents' time from playing taxi driver.

There is actually more than one neighborhood in Davis, CA, that uses permaculture design. Verona Terrace is much smaller than Village Homes, but it's designed just as you've drawn Village Homes but with some small garden spaces and paths to parks. And Village Homes is actually designed with community spaces, large gardens, orchards and a restaurant included. Village Homes, like most Davis neighborhoods, includes access to public parks and a bike path called the Greenbelt, which runs all over the city. The Greenbelt is a bike/walking path lined with trees, grass and bushes that meanders through neighborhoods connecting parks, open spaces, wildlife areas, shopping centers, and small and large playgrounds.

for those of us in the Desert would suspect you put gardens on the North and water/Trees to the south and not overshadowing the south facing roof, also including a garage for the same thing we all have them, a place to do work and store stuff you dont do in the house. who has room in a garage for a Vehicle?

One main concern I have with your development is that the houses on the north side of the street would have large road-facing windows and small yard facing windows, which most people tend not to like very much, especially in North America. I find this to be the largest reason why passive solar isn't readily adopted in my city. Also garages are a necessity if you own a car in my area, otherwise it can get hot and cold enough within the same day for engine blocks to crack (and batteries to start failing/catching fire).

The only bit I’m concerned with is, will the water being seeded into the ground from the swales, impact the home foundations over time? What if any steps can be taken to minimize any potential structure issues? Otherwise this is great I live in an EQ prone area so solid foundations are critical when the earth decides to move

now do one for an arid landscape!!

Very cool. Great information 👍🏾👍🏾

Fantastic next episode how to fix city parks with this method

This was helpful towards Buying or Building My House 🏡

I would throw in an Aquaponics/tilapia farm, chicken coop, and (since I recently saw an interesting video about it) attach a bottle to bottle beehive to some homes. Would be dope.

It would be awsome to expand to village design including how it interacts with zones

This is briliiant!! Love this!! Thank you for sharing!! You can use algae to produce energy and power an entire community with it; as well!!

I would also love to paint my roof bright white, it would keep my house sooo much cooler in the hot summer and I wouldnt have to turn on air conditioning as much

In Australia, most houses are West East oriented which is the worst direction. I am convinced they do this purposely so we use more power. They cant be this stupid.

The main problem is effort. 1 effort of the home residents. 2. The increase of construction complexity and cost. climate community could be smart and use our advanced technology and free market capitalism to get around the 2 main issues. 1st Robotic Farming. 2nd Robotic maintenance. 3rd mass timber construction. 4th factory Pre-built housing sections. 5th graphene enriched concrete. 6th Karbon reinforcement Bar. 7th Home Biogas 8th Tesla roof.

Gardens can’t be on the north side of a food forest unless the plants are shade tolerant. Food plants rarely are.

Great video! A lot of these elements can be added to retrofit conventional developments. For example rainwater harvesting, Grey water systems, and of course food forests and vegetable gardens. The adventurous can even add chickens!

I love you. My dream is to create a permaculture neighborhood

What a great application! Cool drawing and presentation. Really like it.

This is excellent, my only issue is that these are single family homes, I'd love a follow up video about higher density neighborhoods, cities, co-housing?

I love these ideas but think the biggest obstacle is getting reluctant homeowners to share land with neighbours. A new mindset is needed.

I would love to design something like this for my extended family. In our particular situation the issue IS money 😂 Awesome concepts though, and I'm really hoping (optimistically of course) that this becomes the future!

Great work as usual Andrew; excellent content!

These designs are still very car centric. We need to be building neighborhoods with sustainable transportation in mind as well!

How would permaculture be possible in a dense business/commercial district of a city? You tackle residential areas pretty well here but most metropolitan areas have heavy foot, vehicle traffic, dense building. How would you reconcile nature & modern architecture in that circumstance?

woot that pattern though right! do it on contour all across the land, I bet the tipping point is lower than we think to switch over to this vital source of food, and regenerative systems which can't help but replicate themselves with simple nudges from enlighten peoples. Keep growing your permaculture neighborhood out there folks, you are not alone globally. let's Go! Show don't tell too, as many references we can point to online the better.

5:02 All I can hear is Dora repeating the three landmarks on the way to her destination.

Interesting ideas, and I agree with the basic concepts of the video, but this design leaves out crucial elements needed for a healthy neighborhood and treats it somewhat as a isolated system, to the point that many modifications would be needed as time went on to make it more sustainable and efficient. First I feel like it was implied that those habitations are for single families, which is not a very sustainable way to house people (in many cases) and far from viable for the vast majority of places and populations. Maybe the intent of the video was to just deal with this specific case, but the fact that many places face population pressure and most people live in urban areas, makes it almost obligatory to include some sustainable solutions for denser habitation in a video about neighborhood design. Then, if you start putting more people in this system, comes the question of how would it deal with bigger demands for water , food , energy and waste management. Also how would it accomodate other land uses besides housing, like commerce and services, other workplaces, storage etc which the local population would need nearby. This also makes necessary a mixed use of the land, in order to increase sustainability and quality of life. And finally, that all necessitates to include some solutions for mass transit in the design, because every place is necessarily connected to other places far and near, and people would need and want to go there. If the objective is sustainablity and quality of life, cars should receive the least amount of space possible, and other ways of thansportation should be intimately integrated with the neighborhood. How would it accomodate trains, trams, subways, buses etc? Of course, maybe all that is outside the scope of the video, which is okay. But some consideration should be given to these and other elements, or else we are left with a platonic ideal of a neighborhood design, appliable only in rare cases in the real world. Having said that, I really enjoy your content, and it gives me inspiration for where and how I'm gonna live my life in the future, thank you for your work! PS: This made me realize that the intersection of permaculture and urbanism is a still little explored vast well of techniques, solutions and design possibilities. If people from both fields worked more together, the advancements would be tremendous.

Amazing ideas 💡 thank you so much

your ideas are great

@Andrew Millison Andrew.....Pookie : ) Hope I don t offend you by suggesting you show us the real Life pictures first. I think it might make it easier to grasp ,comprehend and remember more details of your subject. Like cooking shows do? Whatever you decide dearest man you are for doing such a great teaching! I'm spreading this info around in this area... Sending you a great puff of energy beneath those angel wings of yours Andrew man person with a Grand Mission !! Bless you Bless you Bless you with the very best support Life has to offer, in delivering this fantastic plan. Cheers my GOOd man.

Hey Andrew you're a fucking genius, when im done saving up and investing wisely imma need you to come to New Zealand and help me turn this into a reality. we have over 70% of our land uninhabited and I believe we could make a push together to change the world :)

very informative.. thanks!

parking cars on the street severely reduces their life due to being exposed to weather more also unsure about the second suburban plan mostly due to the accessibility of the second row of houses for emergency services is certainly thought provoking though

Excellent video

I tried like hell to set up and tiny house permiculture community for veterans.... Sure wish it would have worked out.

Looks like it could be a HOA nightmare if the community gets too big. It's quite nice though. As long as everyone subscribes to the underlying principles, it's great.

That’s great, how would you modify it for southwest where it’s too hot and dry to grow in the sun?

you are lacking any way to store the equipment for those gardens. I know we don't need garages for the cars but we at least need a shed and maybe a greenhouse for starts. but i like your idea