Permacultural adaptation deals with the fictional but very real scenario of global catastrophes and their cultural impact and transformative influences. Looking at the images of the last Tsunami in Indonesia and its devastating impact on urban structures we decided to create a project for the aftermath of such a global event.

The scenario predicts that a global impact will at one scale not lead to the reconstruction of the existing urban structure but radical alter our perception of urbanism and will lead to a self sustaining new form of communal agricultural living. We are taking this prognosis to develop an evolved urban farming concept based on the idea of a self sufficient traditional familiar farming situation.

Narrative background or scenario is London after the Thames Barrier broke and the center of the former british empire lays in ruin. At this point the british government decides to abadon the former capital. The former terretory of the city of London  is devided amongst the new sedlers who’s project is the transformation of today’s cultural buildings into a projected situation of urban farming, mutations of use and symbiotical relationships between culture and functionality.

One of these sites is St. Paul’s Cathedral, which becomes a self sufficient algae farming unit. The construct follows the ideas of permaculture where “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children” (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society‘s reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth‘s ecosystems.

Author: Tobias Klein, Dietmar Koering, Philip Uttermoehl