Updating the Integral Urban House Chapter 1

8:02 AM in 1, Aqua, chapter, house, integral, the, updating, urban

The Integral Urban House, published in 1979, is one of the truly seminal books in urban homesteading.  The book records the experiments of the houses residents as they remodeled the house and site to minimize waste generation and resource consumption while maximizing on-site production of food and energy.  The book gives an outline for a very methodical and calculated optimization of those goals, and lays out expectations for limits on the degree of self reliance one can expect from a city lot.  Although it was published almost 35 years ago, The Integral Urban House is still one of the most comprehensive and detailed guides for becoming as self-reliant as ones circumstances allow.  The methods developed by the authors are quite keen on conserving space, but the main concepts are applicable regardless of ones available geological surface area.  However, although the philosophies and motivations have stood strong since the books original publishing, one big catch is that, since 35 years ago, the technology and resources available to aspiring homesteaders (urban or otherwise), have changed dramatically.

The books original cover.  A reprint in the 1990s had a green-colored version

We thought, therefore, that it would be a worthwhile endeavor, although immense, to work our way through the book and rehash the authors research with insights from the modern era.  We also wanted to add perspective from a colder climate since the book (and even many modern urban homesteading books) are somewhat centric to areas with mild winters.  (The Integral Urban House was in Berkeley, CA).

The real meat of the book starts in part two, with chapter four covering energy conservation.  The first three chapters mainly describe the motivation and approach, which dont need much updating.  In the interest of completeness, well cover those as well, but with a more descriptive take.  On the docket for today: Chapter 1: Beginnings.

The chapter starts by pointing out that the book is more about the ideas of transitioning from linear to cyclic systems than the authors implementation of the ideas on their specific space in Berkeley.  The authors mention several other similar projects throughout the country, including the Ouroboros house in Minnesota, the East Eleventh Street Project in New York (mentioned here), the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Washington, DC, and (not mentioned but pertinent) the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts.

From there, the authors get into the motivation for the book from the (now standard) angles of peak oil is coming (the book was published in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo), what would you do if society implodes?, and modern technology has flooded our bodies with carcinogenic chemicals while allowing us to eat unhealthy food and be lazy.  Those angles are nowadays a dead horse still being beaten, but they were quite fresh in the late 1970s.  Regardless of ones position on the availability and consequences of fossil fuels, the point was (is) that the urban lifestyle as typically manifested, was (is) shortsighted, polluted, and unsustainable.  Since the authors also feel that few urbanites could, should, or have a desire to de-urbanize, it might be tempting to interpret the theme of the book to be something like how to make the best of a bad situation.  But its not really that.  Other huge driving forces for the authors were the psychological and economic liberation that accompany self reliance, especially if the self reliance comes in a setting with limited natural resources.  As architects, engineers, and scientists, the authors also embraced the challenge of developing a house that was both a habitat and life-support system.  The authors further acknowledged that the urban environment provided a high concentration of like-minded folks to help their community-scale projects, such as waste recycling, gain momentum.  And above all, the authors wanted to provide a model that others could work from in their own houses and communities.

The authors recognized that their ultimate goals for the house would require lifestyle and behavior changes, and identified nine factors that they observed to influence their ability to make such a change:

1. Cultural/personal taboos, e.g., working with human wastes
2. Urgency of making the change, e.g., reducing water consumption during a drought
3. Sustained awareness, e.g., frequently seeing dead plants during a drought
4. Family/community support, e.g., having a community recycling infrastructure when starting to recycle
5. Stress induced by not making the change, e.g., overflowing garbage cans because recyclables not sorted
6. Information availability on options for change
7. Immediacy of rewards for making the change
8. Self image
9. Concrete models available

Clearly, the internet has changed the game for many of these factors since abundant information and models around the world are now available with the click of a few buttons.  The internet can also provide a sort of community support and make the end result of both making and not making a change more visualizable, which can in turn influence ones self image, ones opinion of the rewards, and the stress one experiences from not making the change.

The authors also adopted a process for taking a desired change from conception to practice, which included perception of a problem, articulating the solution, visualizing different approaches to solving the problem, selecting and affirming the best approach, and finally implementing the change.  The internet has also changed that:

Differences between the approach to solving a homesteading-related problem as practiced at the Integral Urban House in 1979, and what  (some) modern homesteaders do in 2013.

 
Have you read the Integral Urban House?  What did you think of their approach?  Do you know of other integral houses?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Updating the Intergral Urban House Chapter 2

2:18 PM in 2, Aqua, chapter, house, intergral, the, updating, urban

Back in November, we started working our way through The Integral Urban House, a seminal book on urban homesteading, with the objective of updating the books excellent but 35-year-old data.  We took a few month-break but were back and ready for some Chapter 2 action.


Chapter 2 is an introduction to the material and energy balances of the IUH, and also the trippy graphics that characterize the book.  The authors give a high-level overview of the energy flow through their homestead in terms of btu/week, the IUHs nitrogen cycle in terms of lb/week, and a number of other nutrients.   

On their 0.2-acre lot (in Berkeley, CA), the Integral Urban House was able to produce 43% of their food and 44% of their energy needs (for five adult humans) while drastically reducing their outputs to the sewer and landfill. ¹Wikipedia, ²EPA

These graphics are remarkable for two main reasons--the visualization of energy and nutrients as resources to be recycled (and ways to recycle them) instead of inputs and outputs that flow linearly through the homestead system, and the degree of quantification achieved by the authors (thorough even by todays standards!).  Along with cyclically-flowing resources, the authors also discuss the benefits of a certain degree of redundancy for generating these resources and capitalizing on the byproducts of their use.  For example, heating by passive solar energy when its sunny, but having a wood stove for cloudy days, and having the option to send organic wastes to worms, chickens, or compost (if both the worms and chickens are full).  The same concepts were being simultaneously pioneered by Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, and Sepp Holzer, and introduced decades earlier by Joseph Russell Smith (Tree Crops book linked here), Toyohiko Kagawa, and Masanobu Fukuoka (among others).

Perhaps an update to this chapter would be a carbon balance and cycle.  Not just in terms of CO₂ consumption and emission, but soil and plant carbon balances.  Many homesteaders, both urban and rural, are continually on the search for high-carbon substances for balancing compost composition, increasing soil organic matter, firewood, building materials, etc.

It seems that a significant fraction of sustainable living can be attributed to high-fertility soil, which can often be attributed to organic matter imports from outside the homestead property.  These materials are wonderful amenities now because they are readily available, cheap (or free), and often considered waste by non-homesteading-minded folks.  But for true sustainability, shouldnt the organic materials come from the homestead property itself?  Surely if everyone tried to live sustainably, the hundreds of pounds of free horse manure and old cedar fence panels from Craigslist (way more exciting than it sounds) would quickly vanish, accompanied by an eventual decrease in the soil fertility/sustainability of a given homestead.

The natural follow-up question is, what is the minimum acreage required to make a carbon-neutral homestead possible? The answer to that question will obviously vary widely by region--five acres in northern Georgia will produce way more carbon than five acres in the Nevada desert.  But if, like in the Integral Urban House, we convert everything to units of energy and compare with other studies, we can come to a ballpark (or at least average) number.

Figure 2-4 of the IUH says they import 150 thousand british thermal units (kbtu) as non-vegetable food, 1,250 kbtu as fuel (petroleum, natural gas, electricity, and wood), and use about 5,000 kbtu as solar energy to grow plants.  Then they import another 196 kbtu as vegetable-type groceries, 120 kbtu as animal feed, and 19 kbtu as meat groceries, bringing the grand total to 6,615 kbtu per week, or 343,980 kbtu per year.

The famous Billion-Ton Study, published by the US Department of Energy in 2005, said that of the 2.263 billion acres encompassed by the US, around 50%, or 1.132 billion acres, is suitable for biomass production (pg. 20).  This amount of land could produce 1.366 billion tons (3005.2 billion pounds) of biomass (feedstock for fuel for them, but approximating food, fuel, etc. for us) per year (pg. 17), with some modest assumptions about yields and recovery costs.  Since the combustion energy of biomass is conservatively around 6.45 kbtu/lb, that means that it should be possible to produce 8,565.4 kbtu per acre per year.  Dividing the number for the IUH by the number from the DOE gives 40.2 acres for the IUH to be perfectly balanced.  There were five people living there, so that works out to about 8 acres per person. (Using the upper range of 8.20 kbtu/lb for biomass combustion drops that number to about 6.3 acres per person).

Crude calculation for minimum number of acres required per person for homestead carbon neutrality, based on an IUH-level lifestyle and diet.

That number represents an average across the US and is a little higher than the number derived by a Swedish university organic farm last spring of a little over one acre per person.  However, the Swedish study used a base case of 80 acres, which isnt infinitely down-scalable: it wouldnt work to grow 1/6 of a cow on 1 acre, for example.  The Swedish study also put a high emphasis on food calories regardless of source, which strongly emphasized dairy and de-emphasized vegetables and meat.  Therefore, although our calculation here is a little more crude, 8 acres per person is probably more realistic, and maybe even a little low if one wants to produce his own grains, dairy, and building materials self-sufficiently.  Also, dont forget to take advantage of direct solar and wind energy, which have efficiency ceilings considerably higher than photosynthesis (which produces biomass).

Chapter 2 of the Integral Urban House ends with a hopeful wish that, much like hot rodders in the 1970s or silly television in the 2010s features folks competing to have the most aristocratic vehicles and houses (or rides and cribs, if you prefer...but tyrannosaurus rex eggs?), future mainstream endeavors will feature a sort of contest to see which crib can be most integrated and sustainable.  The authors might be disappointed with how far the mainstream has come in the last 35 years, but maybe theres a glimmer of hope?

Plus, theres always the internet, with its endless fountains of sustainability inspiration!

Have you measured the balance of energy and resources on your homestead?  How sustainable did you come out?  Whats the size of your homestead and how much organic matter do you import?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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