Invisible structures

What invisible structures are

A site plan shows beds, trees, ponds and paths. It does not show who may use the land and for how long, who decides when the group disagrees, who does the harvest, where the surplus goes, or who will still know in twenty years why the swale runs where it runs. Yet these questions decide whether a design lasts. Permaculture teaching calls them invisible structures: the social, economic and cultural arrangements that carry a place as surely as its soil does.

Bill Mollison did not stop at the garden fence. He ended Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988) with a chapter on strategies for an alternative nation, in which he turned the same design thinking to money, land, work and community. David Holmgren later drew the field of permaculture as a flower with seven domains. Next to land care, building, tools and health, three of them are largely invisible: education and culture, finance and economics, and land tenure and community governance. For each, his site lists examples, from cooperatives and cohousing to community supported agriculture, local currencies and farm volunteer networks.

The point is simple. A perfect food forest can still fail if the lease runs out, nobody picks the fruit, nobody buys it or the knowledge leaves with one person. Invisible structures are designed like any other element: with an eye on what they need, what they give and what they connect.

How they work in the system

The three ethics of permaculture are the root. Earth care needs people who can stay with a place for decades. People care asks how human needs are met in simple, caring ways, from oneself to family and community. Fair share asks for limits and for passing on surplus. The last two are almost entirely invisible structures: a way of sharing the harvest, a circle in which work is exchanged, a course that is taught onward. For Terra Humana, people care has its natural anchor in rehumanization, the renewal of people as conscious and caring participants in the living world.

The principles apply here as they do to soil and water:

• Shared work and land. In a cooperative, members own and run a business together. The International Cooperative Alliance describes cooperatives as autonomous associations under democratic member control, and two of its seven principles are education, training and information, and concern for community. In community supported agriculture, households pay a farm in advance and share its harvest and its risk.
• Exchange circles. In a local exchange trading system, members trade goods and services in their own unit of account; in a time bank, an hour of help is worth an hour, whatever the work. Both turn skills that money overlooks into exchange.
• Shared knowledge. Mollison's design course was meant to be taught onward by its graduates. WWOOF began in England in 1971, when a London secretary, Sue Coppard, arranged a trial weekend on a biodynamic farm in Sussex; today it links volunteers with organic farms worldwide. A seed swap is the same idea for plants.
• Commons. Elinor Ostrom showed in Governing the Commons (1990) that communities have run shared pastures, forests and irrigation systems for centuries, among them the alpine pastures of Törbel in Switzerland and the irrigation communities of the Spanish huertas. Lasting commons share clear boundaries, rules that fit the place, a voice for those affected, monitoring, graduated sanctions and quick ways to settle disputes.

How to begin

1. Map the invisible. On a sheet laid over the site plan, note who owns, who uses, who decides, who works and who benefits. Gaps and overloads show quickly.
2. Start with relationships. Neighbours, local growers and craftsmen are the first network. Sharing a surplus is often the first step.
3. Begin small. A seed swap, a tool library or a shared harvest day teaches a group more than a large organisation founded too early.
4. Make agreements explicit. Write down who does what and how decisions are made before the first conflict, not during it. For legal forms, ask a qualified adviser in your own country.
5. Let the structure yield. A project that cannot feed the people who carry it will not last; obtain a yield applies to them too.
6. Review. Once a year, ask whether the structure still serves the land and the people, and change it if not.

An example from Sardinia

In Serramanna, in the south of the island, five friends who had studied and worked abroad founded Sardex in 2009, during the credit crunch that was choking small businesses. Sardex is a credit circuit among firms. Members sell goods and services to each other through a platform and receive interest-free credit lines in their own unit, worth one euro each, which they spend within the network without drawing on their cash. According to a report in Forbes Italia in 2018, the model had reached eleven other Italian regions. It shows what an invisible structure can do: the goods and the work were already there, and what was missing was a way for them to flow.

Common mistakes

• Designing land and forgetting people. Trees are planted, but nobody has the time, the right or the reason to tend them.
• Everything hangs on one person. Knowledge, keys and contacts gather in one head. When that person leaves, the system stops.
• Building too big too early. A large structure without trust between the people in it breaks at the first strain.
• Unwritten rules. Agreements made in passing are remembered differently by everyone.
• Closed knowledge. What is not shared is lost with the people who hold it.

Further in the TerraWiki

• The three ethics of permaculture and rehumanization are the foundation of every invisible structure.
• Tamera in Portugal plans land and community as one, and Wangari Maathai shows how groups of women planting trees became a movement.
• Integrate rather than segregate, use small and slow solutions and apply self-regulation and accept feedback work in groups as they do in gardens.
• Seed saving and exchange and the seed cycle show sharing in its oldest form, and the design process places people at the start of every design.

At Terra Humana

Terra Humana is itself an invisible structure: a non-profit foundation whose Italian name joins the renaturation of land with the rehumanization of people. Project Eden at Sa Medada has been meant for people from the start. The plans include a permaculture academy, spaces for encounter and seminars, and non-profit hosting of volunteers and researchers. This TerraWiki, open to everyone, belongs to the same intention: knowledge about land and its cycles is shared, not kept.