Project Hierarchy to Urban Sustainability

This is the first blog post in what we hope will be a long-running and regularly updated blog about Urban Sustainability. So, for starters:

What is Urban Sustainability?

“This image was taken in downtown Portland to portray the mixing of mother nature and man made elements.”

Urban Sustainability is living within your means and capabilities inside the often densely crowded urban environment that most humans now inhabit. It means not depending on one source for all of your very critical needs on a day to day or month to month basis. It’s a diversification of your asset streams where the assets in this case are food, water, tools, and other daily/weekly/monthly necessities. It’s a different way of looking at your interaction with the world. It’s a hardening and bolstering up of your lifestyle so that your existence can be called robust and stable in this often chaotic and turbulent financially driven world.

Those are all fine and ideal phrases, but the practical meaning of Urban Sustainability is being able “to do for yourself and your loved ones.” That’s it. That simple. That pure. If you loose your job tomorrow, can you still bring food to the table? If after loosing your job, the lawn-mower breaks, will you be able to fix it or improvise a solution? Can you provide pure water for your family if a municipal line breaks or if the whole plant goes down? What about if your country spirals into a massive depression that lasts for a decade and you can’t find solid work for 5 years?

“Image gathered from public domain. Photo of the earth from space”

Sure, these are worst case scenarios, but lets bring it a little closer to home. How much of your monthly income goes to buying those things you need to survive on a day to day basis? We are talking food and water. How much? If you are like us, then it isn’t as much as your shelter but it is the next biggest thing. It eats into your income and saps your buying power. You spend maybe a third of your work life making sure you have food and water. Unfortunately, that’s money that is gone…you eat it up and…well, you get the picture. Not only is it dangerous to be reliant on one source for these basic and vital needs, it just doesn’t make economic sense. If you could provide a substantial portion of your own food and water for yourself and not have to pay anything but an initial investment for it, then why wouldn’t you? It just makes good sense.

So that’s what Urban Sustainability is about. It’s being able to support yourself within the constraints of your environment on a continuing basis. We don’t live in the woods and neither do most people we know. We aren’t hippies but we like to make things that are useful, fun, and educational. We think the environment is important for a very selfish and egotistical reason…we live here and we would like to continue! Further towards the point, it is not feasible in this day and age for all of us to live like hunter-gatherers. There just isn’t enough room, much less enough people who actually want to live that way. We want to live in our urban settings, next to our conveniences and amenities but not rely on them. We want to have our cake and eat it too!

“Yours truly, the creators of this blog…. P&S or S&P.”

Now, who are we? “No one really special” is the short answer. Our names are Pam and Stan. We live in Portland, Oregon. Pam is a Structural Engineering Assistant at a small company. She just graduated from college with her B.S. in Civil Engineering. Stan is a Mechanical Engineering student at Portland State University. We are younger, both in our twenties, and are full of enthusiasm for this sort of project. We think we bring a unique skill set to the table and we will attempt to leverage those skills in order to show you how to live sustainably in an urban environment.

So, what will this blog consist of?

Each week–or maybe several times a week–we will post an article detailing a topic of interest or a portion of a build. We want to go through both theory and practice in developing this concept of individual Urban Sustainability. We will give both high level discussions of ideals and technology as well as low level detail about acquiring, building and installing systems to insure your existence. Included will be detailed plans and drawings as well as many pictures of how things are done.

During this process we would like your feedback on how we are doing, how we can make things better, and ideas for other things we can do. We want to be very involved with the wider community because these kinds of ideas in isolation don’t mean anything. We want to get out into the word and and see what others are thinking and doing. This means active community involvement. We intend to take user suggestions and implement them in a real and immediate way in all our projects. We know that many people out there have specialized knowledge in fields we know nothing about and we want to take full advantage of that.

Our project ideas: