When
Bill Mollison first developed the
permaculture concept, he was working primarily in Australia, where, especially then, there were far more small farms than in the US. So many of the ideas were first worked out at farm scale. But most of the people who refined these ideas lived in cities and suburbs, and so a lot of concepts and techniques were applied at much smaller scale. Most of the
books on
permaculture, other than Mollison's, are focused on homeowners and those with less than an acre of
land (often far less). My own book is for people with 1/4 acre or less. The principles scale down (or up) very well; ideas like "design from patterns to details," "catch and store
energy and materials" or "each part
should serve multiple functions" all work at any scale. You just change the techniques and strategies used. And many specific techniques, like keyhole beds, herb spirals, and guilds, are geared toward the small
yard. So it's very useful for small yards and community gardens.
One of the most powerful ideas is that of zones: Zone 1 is the area very close to the house (or whatever the center is), which holds the things you use every day. So for anyone, farmer or urbanite, that will be a social space, salad bed, herbs,
water source, maybe
compost and
chickens, etc. It might be a 20-foot space around the house, and along the most-used paths. Then zone 2 holds things we use a couple times a week: fruit
trees, production garden beds, cut flowers, tool shed, and so on. Larger properties have zones 3 and 4 as well, but
city lots usually stop at zone 2. The inner zones are intensively gardened, heavily mulched--they are just
dense with activity. Farms deal mostly with outer zones, residences with inner ones. So scale is to some degree a question of which zones you focus your energy on. A farmer will spend all day in zones 3-4. For a city person, zones 3-4 are where you work and shop and meet friends.
