Essay: Analysis and synthesis; Re-drawing permaculture site sector analysis

Written By Will Power

When visitors first arrive at our property, they usually first remark on the slope (our gentle areas are about 12 degrees) of our south-facing two acre hillside in the Hunter Valley. The conclusion drawn is that our views are great, and we must not have any water retention, “lucky” they say, “with all the rain this year”. Just the same, others again comment on the aspect, and how unsuitable it must be for growing. Which it could be, for some specific species in particular places. The truth, however, is that neither of these assumptions bears fruit. We do in fact retain water on our property, and the aspect certainly does not bother the perennial sub-tropical and temperate plantings that are now three years established on the hillside. Though these observations are fair, we have undertaken our own over a protracted period. It is these long-term observations that allow for the details that the patterns belie. Over time, and it is time that is crucial here, our understanding of the site conditions have grown as a working model of combined effect of elements and energies, not the above observations in isolation.

Getting to know a site, large or small, has conventionally been achieved through a site sector analysis. This is typical in design and architectural fields, and has been usefully deployed by permaculturists to interpret the energies moving in, through, and out of a site. Essentially, an arbitrary point towards the centre of a property is usually nominated on a site plan or map, though sometimes over the top of the home, or key growing space, is more precisely used. Arcs of influence are then drawn on the map, indicating the movement of the sun through the year, from where wind approaches, the location of neighbours, traffic, pollutants, wildlife and so on (you can read about the many influences on a property in my post NOTES: 100 THINGS TO ASK ABOUT YOUR PROPERTY, until you end up with an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sectors in an overlay on the property. It works well, marking areas of the property affected by these factors, and does a particularly good job of indicating where energies enter and exit the homestead’s sphere of influence.

After a couple of years of carrying out permaculture methods as a professional designing other’s properties, I have already come up against some shortcomings of the site sector analysis, especially when communicating the energies of a site to the client. I have instead come to adapt the site sector analysis approach, and decided that going forward, I am going to employ a shift in language. Words carry intention, and I hope that these changes reflect more than semantics or wordplay.

First of all, the approach of a site sector analysis, puts the site at the forefront. Practical as this may be, it focuses on the place and renders the living members of the ecology as secondary. I have said it before, and so have others; permaculture is not a solely environmental approach. It is inherently self-serving, helping us set up self-sustaining communities. It is about people as much as it is about planet. Any process that employs some sort of agriculture will have environmental concessions.

Now, of course, you have to start somewhere, and the physical space indeed grounds us in our approach. It appears logical, and practical, to begin by looking at a space and interpreting what we are working with. Reading the landscape, as they say, and subsequently working with nature, not against it.

A flaw in this approach is that is only half the picture. The humans inhabiting the system are an enormous influence, and for the culture to become as permanent as it can be, the specific individual’s presence needs to be heavily weighted when making design considerations. The second flaw, implicit in this approach is that is separates the people and place. It treats the two as separate entities in analysis, the deep-rooted conceptualisation in our western culture, that we exist alongside nature. That we can ‘work with it’.  This opens up a whole other realm of conversation, but for the sake of brevity, when it comes to nature I like the phrase ‘we are a part, not apart’.

Instead of just the site, what we are resolving to understand is the context or situational nature of the system we intend to design. It follows, that we could begin using language such as ‘context’ to hold both the site and its living entities as one whole. The need for approaching a contextual-based system, rather than a site dominant-based system, became ever apparent when I was engaged to design a preliminary concept for a garden before a site had been confirmed. As a community project, I could understand the context of who would use the site, what the system needed to deliver, but aside from being fairly certain it would be on marginal land, I could only shape the preliminary design process based on these known elements. It of course could remain only a preliminary design, requiring the rest of the whole to complete the context, which would then determine how the elements would react to the introduction of stacked patterns - the present energies - of the site.

Starting with an understanding of the reciprocity of space and time, and the interactions of a place’s inhabitants, shifts the lens with which we approach the design to a whole context. Now, yes I know that consideration of the people in the design is part of a Site Sector Analysis and, arguably, these considerations are always at the forefront of an effective designer’s mind. My question however, is why not teach others to frame the set-up of the system like this from the beginning?

The use of sectors does have, and introduce, limitations to our planning efforts. It is an understandable supposition that it is necessary to assign straight lines and geometry when we go about organising a place. We begin analysing each part, and reflecting it in a communicable manner.  Once we get on the ground though, we realise that the arc of sunlight is interrupted by the topography, a tree-line, a structure, or so on. Similarly, the wind approaching from the south-east sector actually gets funnelled by the fence-lines either side of the driveway and never actually reaches the house, rendering the narrow end of the sector a far different micro-climate than out at the arc on the boundary.

As we are working with a greater context than the site, the drawing of sectors begins to look more and more arbitrary, though we must retain their important function, which is to indicate the presence and movement of energies. Sectors can neatly show overlapping effects and stacking patterns, so alternative drawing methods must reflect the same, just in a more precise, and at the same time all-encompassing, fashion. Tangly, I know, but to simplify, the intention of sectors in the first place was to create a visualisation of patterns.

Finally, students learning to understand permaculture systems could be better taught whole-systems thinking with a final shift in language. Once familiar with principles such as working from patterns to details, proximity, and stacking functions across time and space - it becomes evident that learning to develop permaculture systems is all about the understanding of relationships. Therefore, it stands to reason that conducting an analysis of a site, or context, and its patterns actually works against our intention, or, perhaps more truthfully - analysis is just not what we have been doing at all.

When we consider a context and begin harnessing the combined effects of patterns to make choices such as siting pathways and making plant selections, what we are really undertaking is synthesis. To place a mulberry tree, we are looking at how this component functions in conjunction with the chooks, the sunlight patterns across the seasons, the movement of water after it is planted, and more. We are looking at the combined outcomes of planting, and simultaneously not planting that tree, in both the short-term and long-term, with seasonal variation, and with consideration to the various consequences depending on the point in a sequence of linear progression it is implemented. Synthesis, the combination of components to form a connected whole, is what the entire understanding of a place and its people is all about.

Going forward, I am going to continue to develop my approach to performing the Site Sector Analysis stage of a design a little differently. As I mentioned, after having completed the analysis of numerous sites over past couple of years, I have continued to find problems in how the approach conveys information and what it actually captures in the first place. I will instead be approaching the beginning of a design with a Contextual Patterns Synthesis, and experimenting with visualisations of these concepts.

Place is important to me, and I believe all design should sit gently in its environment. A system should complement and nurture the natural qualities of that which it is part of. For the design to be successful, reading the people and the place together is essential. The map is never the territory, and a drawing in time cannot effectively capture both the beautiful and devastating changes that time can, and will, impart. I think the nomenclature of Contextual Patterns Synthesis better captures the integrated nature of permaculture design, and frames the approach from the beginning as one of holistic, truly ecological thinking.

Paterson,
November, 2022

Will Power
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