Permaculture for Regional Planning?

Hi gang,

I'm wondering if anyone can share resources or examples of official Regional or Community Planning that has a strong emphasis on permaculture/ecological/resiliency design?

How does the "planning" profession engage with ecological design?  

Thanks for any tips

I'm looking for the same information. What city are you thinking of and what are some obvious regional issues that this idea could be intended to fix.
There is the National Green Infrastructure certification program in the US, that recently went national, so you could get an official certification for building "green infrastructure" which includes a lot of permaculture concepts for watershed and storm runoff management. Www.NGICP.org I believe.
I'm in Pittsburgh and the local bureaucrats are dragging their feet on setting the training program up here, otherwise I would have it.
Government agencies that manage infrastructure and environmental problems would be good to talk to. Roads, pollution sources, flooding problems, water lines and sewage infrastructure will all greatly benefit from regional permaculture projects with properly planned watershed management.

Examples...
In Pittsburgh the PWSA is attempting to start a training program to build green infrastructure like swales, constructed wetlands, and water sinks/dry wells to manage the flooding in our valleys from storms.
As far as public works, it's a step in the right direction, but the scope and limited intentions behind the projects isn't enough to qualify as actual permaculture in my opinion...

A really good question in my opinion. We have thiese two organization that are indeed quite intertwinedin Northern California. I suppose I am not easily satisfied and feel we should have such better results than we have had. However it is impossible to attribute such shortcomings upon the organizers or the participants and general permies, or again my faulty expectations


http://permacultureconvergence.com/northern-california-permaculture-convergence/

https://thexpollinators.com/

Is anyone following the work of Charles Marohn who has launched a national effort called Strong Towns. It's interesting and I think the permaculture world should interject itself into what the growing ST movement is doing.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

Here's a portion from their "About" section from the website.

The Strong Towns approach is a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must:
+ Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience;
+ Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn;
+ Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation;
+ Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today;
+ Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances.

Hey Dan,

I'm a big fan of Chuck and Strong Towns. strongtowns.org
And the Congress for the New Urbanism. cnu.org
And the Incremental Development Alliance. https://www.incrementaldevelopment.org/

I followed closely those groups and was involved quite a bit for about ten years.


To borrow a star wars reference, it feels like those groups (and others) are, with permies, all a part of the rebel alliance. We're all trying to grapple with enormous problems, and the problems are so huge that our starting points are often worlds away from eachother. And the world is so big sometimes these different groups don't even know about one another.


Added bonus, Chuck's early podcasts are much like Paul's early podcasts: an engineer podcasting in their car as they drive between places. They are some of my favorites.