Investigation of the potential of permaculture as a tool to increase urban resilience

Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. Rapid and intense urbanization can make cities vulnerable to disasters, stresses, and shocks and cause economic, social, and environmental costs. Some of these costs are difficulties accessing basic services, the sustainability of natural resources at risk, air, soil, and water pollution, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. The rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions leads to climate change, which causes many problems in cities, including the "heat island" effect. Another risk that climate change may pose is irregular precipitation regime and, as a result, more frequent and intense floods and droughts. There may be sudden events like those affecting urban life, knowns as shocks. According to the studies and publications of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the Governorship of Istanbul, and the World Bank's data, the most important shock that and threatens our country is the earthquake. There have been many earthquake events until today, and a devastating earthquake is predicted to occur in Istanbul. Another shock that threatens cities is epidemics. Experts state that after COVID-19, other pandemics may happen in the future. All these factors pose a threat to the sustainability and resilience of cities. Urban resilience against these can be increased using strategies to improve the urban environment, such as permaculture. Permaculture is the science of sustainable living design based on learning from nature and working with natural elements. It can be applied to any settlement scale, including cities, and conditions in virtually any region of the world. Since permaculture was officially introduced in the book "Permaculture One" in 1979, its popularity has increased, and its applications have begun to be seen in various parts of the world. There are also good examples in our country. However, it is mainly seen in application case studies in the scientific literature. Developing permaculture literature in this direction will be an important step, especially since studies based on numerical data are very few. This study aimed to develop a measurement based on expert opinions to calculate the impact of permaculture areas on urban resilience. The first step was to determine all the indicators, sub-indicators, and variables of urban resilience from the literature. In the second stage, expert opinions were gathered, and the most important variables related to the three main threats – climate change, earthquakes, and epidemics – were determined. These parameters are costs (input costs, labour costs, energy costs, cost of water), added value (service water production, drinking water production, the rate of turning solid wastes into resources, energy production), water (drought rate of the region, amount of water passing to surface flow, irrigation efficiency, quality of water produced in the area), soil (amount of carbon retained by the soil, water retention capacity, amount of organic matter in the soil, electrical conductivity of the soil, acidity of the soil), plants (local/exotic ratio of cultivated plants, carbon sequestration rate of plant material, how many people can the area feed), inclusivity (the area to be designed within the scope of universal design principles, the area to offer activities for users of all age groups), educational function (contribution of visitors' sustainable and resilient living knowledge). In the second stage, the importance weights of each variable to be used in measurement were determined using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). In the third stage, value ranges were determined so that each variable could be measured in the field, that is, scaling was done. Thus, a measurement table was created. In the final stage, measurements were made in the Beykoz Ecological Park and Permaculture area, which was selected as the research area in Istanbul, to check the functionality of the measurement table and to obtain numerical data on the impact of permaculture on urban resilience. According to the measurements made, it has been determined that this area provides 64% of its potential contribution to urban resilience. This demonstrates the positive impact of permaculture on urban resilience with numerical data.