THE INTEGRAL URBAN HOUSE

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Consider our earlier example. An electric heater can only be an electric heater, and a garbage truck can only be a garbage truck. However, a window admits light, provides a view, may be a place to sit, and can also be a solar collector. An attached greenhouse can be a solar collector and storage system, a place to grow seedlings and winter vegetables, the location for a hot tub. A garden or planting boxes, however small—together with a composting bucket—take the place of the smelly garbage can and the noisy garbage truck . . . and, besides processing waste nutrients, provide a source of beauty, food, and flowers and can be the focus of many pleasurable leisure hours.

Urban dwellers tend to become insensitive to the microclimate variations of their habitat in a way that farmers can never afford to do. When you begin to raise some of your own plants, particularly when these plants are to produce food that will sustain you, you become aware of your outdoor living spaces in a new way. How the sunlight and shade move and the winds blow are once again significant. Small, warm, protected areas are cherished. It becomes a challenge to make productive use of cool, shady, or otherwise "waste" spaces. Compost bins and dry-leaf storage areas may fit with the rabbits on the north side. A mat for sunbathing can share a wind-break in the corner of a sunny balcony with containers of tomatoes. Because of the small scale involved, you will discover a great many ingenious methods for modifying temperature, humidity, and wind that would require far too much labor and too many materials for the farmer.
With the physical variables of light, space, and climate attended to, the more subjective considerations must come into play as one plans a food-raising program. A key element is time, one of the most limiting constraints for an urban person.

One of the ideas behind the integral urban house is that food production, organic-waste management, and energy and resource conservation are all easier, less time-consuming, and more attractive than in a traditional home where these systems are not designed into the flow of daily life. Since we are assuming that the residents will be following more or less urban lifestyles, it is taken for granted that they will be earning all or the major portion of their cash income outside the home. The challenge of incorporating some home-scale food production into the normal work schedule is one we think can be met by overall design and planning of the systems and the adoption or invention of time-saving techniques.

A great time-saver in the garden is the planting of seedlings rather than seeds outdoors. Traditionally, certain vegetables have been considered difficult to transplant: beans, carrots, beets, and peas, for example. However, if these vegetables are raised indoors in containers open at both ends, the transplanting shock will be minimal, since the roots hardly need be disturbed at all. We have successfully transplanted all the common garden vegetables after raising them indoors in the manner recommended. However, some plants, such as corn and carrots, are best started outdoors simply because of the numbers of plants that are normally used. Seeds that are planted in the ground directly can be soaked overnight first to speed germination. If the seeds are tiny, as with carrots, they may be mixed with sand for easy, even sowing.

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