Enhancing Urban Sustainability Through the Application of Permaculture Principles

With high percentages of impervious ground cover, contaminated storm water runoff, and increasing resource consumption, urban development contributes to the degradation of the local ecosystem and also reduces the capacity of that ecosystem to remediate itself. Permaculture, which can be loosely defined as a 'design system for creating sustainable human environments,' is based on common observable principles found in nature. In permaculture, practitioners learn from the working systems of nature to plan to fix the damaged landscapes of human agricultural and city systems.