Tiffany Owens Reed  0:00  

Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host Tiffany Owens Reed, I am a writer at Strong Towns, and I've been hosting this show for now a little over two years, which is really exciting. I was taking a little bit of time off for getting adjusted to becoming a mom of two, which is really exciting, and I'm glad to be back. Today's episode is a little bit special. I'm actually bringing on someone that I've had on the show not too long ago. And by the end of our first conversation, we were kind of like, Hmm, I feel like we just got to the good stuff in terms of this one particular topic that we wanted to jump into in a little bit more depth. So we're bringing her back. Linda Appel Lipsius is the executive director of Denver Urban Gardens, a grassroots nonprofit that started in the 1970s when a group of neighbors came together to create a space for local Hmong women to grow their own food. In 1985 it became a 501c3, and since then, it's grown into a network of over 200 gardens and food forests. A Denver native, Linda returned home 18 years ago after several years of living and working in several big cities, including New York City, London and Washington, DC. She's been executive director at Denver Urban Gardens since 2020. In her role, she leads her team in supporting hundreds of community gardens around the city and launching various initiatives to help make Denver a greener, more food resilient place. If you haven't listened to the first conversation, I definitely recommended going back and listening to that show as well, just to get a more complete picture of her story and what she's doing in Denver, because it's really interesting. One of the things that came up in our first conversation was talking about permaculture. Linda definitely set me on a bit of a fun rabbit trail, kind of nerding out. I had never really heard about permaculture beyond it just being like a word. But as she was explaining some of these principles to me in our conversation, I was like, "Wait, so many, so many of these principles seem so transferable to the conversation about cities." So in this show, we're going to do a fun hybrid, talking about how principles of permaculture can shape how we think about our communities in our cities, because I think it's so transferable. When you think about gardens and food and plants, you're thinking of ecosystems, and I think it's the same when you're thinking about cities and neighborhoods. We should be thinking about them as ecosystems as well. So this conversation is not two permaculture experts getting together to give you the ultimate guide to permaculture urbanism, although that'd be kind of cool if we could do that. We just wanted to have a fun conversation. We're not going to talk about all 12 principles of permaculture. I'll put links where you can meet more about them. We're just going to kind of riff and talk about a couple of them and just share thoughts on how could we learn from them, and how could that shape how we think about cities. I think it's always fun when you find transferable frameworks to bring them over and see what creative ideas pop up. So that's the spirit of today's conversation. Linda, I'm so grateful that you're willing to join me for this fun adventure. To get things started, for people who've never really heard of permaculture, how do you explain it?

Linda Appel Lipsius  3:11  

First of all, just thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about this. So I define permaculture a couple ways, so it's a systems approach, really, to existing on this earth. So that's one way, that's the sort of bookish way. And then the other, how I define it and how I look at it is a lost language of hope. It's a way for us to live regeneratively on the planet. And I think just the last thing is it really approaches things that humans are supposed to be here, like we are part of the system, but we've sort of been doing it wrong. We've been doing it extractively instead of regeneratively, and it's just a different way to approach as a net positive contributor to the systems around us.

Tiffany Owens Reed  4:03  

I really think your first phrase is really helpful, kind of a systems approach. So obviously, the first context that most people will think of applying this would be in the context of growing food. There's a couple websites out there that kind of walk you through permaculture and the principles. When you read those 12 principles, you really do get this idea that it really is a systems approach. It really is a mindset to thinking about how to use scarce resources, how to allocate space, how to foster -- I don't know if interdependence would be the right word. It's really a guide to building an ecosystem that's resilient, that's not wasteful, that's productive, but that's also really creative in how you're thinking about all the resources coming in and everything coming out. What would you add to that?

Linda Appel Lipsius  4:52  

Yeah, I like what you said. It's responsive, it's iterative, and it really looks at the system. I feel like so much of how we exist in Western cultures is so singular, right? It's like we, the humans, are here to do whatever we want, and everything else around us doesn't matter. Permaculture is a way to look at it as we're part of it, and we need to be responsive to the other forces, whether it's nature or other, I don't know, species. We're just part of it. I do want to also acknowledge that the name Permaculture has came about recently. It's a fairly new idea. It is all based on indigenous practices. Nothing in permaculture is new. It's just a different way to package it. I just think it's really important to acknowledge that the origins are not in the development of permaculture.

Tiffany Owens Reed  6:07  

That's almost kind of similar to how we talk about cities. I feel like at Strong Towns, where I don't think any of the ideas we talk about at Strong Towns are like, new. They're not our ideas. I think in so many ways, we're just trying to get back to historical cities, how we used to do things historically. I think that's kind of the same spirit as to what you're getting at here. There is this intuitive, pre-modern way of approaching how we use the land, how we produce food, how we approach limited resources in a creative way to lead to abundance and productivity. Yeah, when I was reading about these principles, it really struck me as circular rather than linear, if that makes sense. Everything needs to keep feeding back into the system, rather than it being just input, produce, and then it goes away. I don't know if that makes sense, the idea of a line versus the idea of a circle, where every part of this process needs to keep feeding back into the system in a productive way. The other thing that struck me was that there seemed to be a really big emphasis on how you're not going to know the outcome from the beginning. This is not about outcome production. You're not trying to just produce a specific outcome. You're really taking it step by step, and you're listening and you're adapting, and you're learning, and you're making little tweaks along the way. It really just struck me as having this posture of, like, "yes, you are facilitating this process, but you're also learning from it." So really a lot of back and forth, rather than it being "we want this particular outcome, therefore, we are going to just put these inputs in and expect it to just run like a machine."

Linda Appel Lipsius  7:45  

Yeah. I think it's sort of human arrogance to say, "Come hell or high water, this is going to be the result." It's not how the world works, right? There's just so many other factors. That's just core to this, and then the whole regenerative term. Everything that we do should be rebuilding, sustaining, adding back to the system. Again, sort of going back to indigenous cultures, those existed for 1000s of years. Because there was such a respect and such an appreciation. Take what you need, take only what you need. So gratitude and. Yeah, so it's definitely a different approach.

Tiffany Owens Reed  8:40  

One of the Strong Towns principles is like, what's the point of a city? It's to exist. you know, it's not to win. There's no winning at being this. There's no point where it's like, "Congratulations, you win city! And therefore, everything will continue in this way in perpetuity." I think Chuck calls it an infinite game in his book. There's no point at which you get points and you're the winner. I think that's probably just something that's been kind of engineered out of our social consciousness, in a way. Because we do live in a world where it seems like everything is telling us that, A) you can predict and produce the exact outcome you want. It's is a very mechanical way of thinking, which is not terrible if you're working in a mechanical context. But I think also, yeah, we've just been cut off from the idea of scarcity or the idea of unpredictability. Like, I don't can food anymore. Women used to can food because this was just a way you thought about life. I think it has a lot to do with being cut off from the land, because we're not working with the land, we don't have to produce our own food. I think if you were, all of this would just be very second nature. It's like, "Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen with that harvest or with that crop. We have to be conscientious, and we need to be creative, and we need to be frugal. We need to be constantly thinking about how the ultimate goal here is to keep existing." It's a very different mindset.

Linda Appel Lipsius  10:09  

I think there's also a big curiosity element to it, right? Because we're taught to just not have curiosity too. It's like, we go in with sort of a direction. With this type of process, we're learning every day. But when we go in and think we don't have anything left to learn, that's a drag.

Tiffany Owens Reed  10:34  

One of the questions I feel is always running in the back of my head is, like, "what has gone wrong with the American city?" If I had a big whiteboard, I would put that on the list. It's like this lack of curiosity, treating cities as closed systems, where, if you just decide on the outcome you want and you put the inputs in, you should get that, rather than treating them as ecosystems where you're constantly learning, you're trying little experiments, you're seeing what works and what doesn't, and you're constantly thinking about the awareness of scarce resources. Uncertainty is the one constant we have. We can't predict exactly what's going to happen. Sometimes I look at decisions made in our cities, and I'm like, "How do you even describe this?" I really think it's a shift from thinking ecologically to thinking mechanically. They're totally different systems of thinking, and they lead to totally different styles of decision making.

Linda Appel Lipsius  11:36  

And engagement and complete participation as well. Yeah, for sure.

Tiffany Owens Reed  11:40  

I would like to hear a little bit of your story. How did you discover this whole world of permaculture, and how would you say it's shaped how you look at the world, how you do your work, or even if you found yourself applying these principles to other areas of your life?

Linda Appel Lipsius  12:04  

Yeah, it's kind of funny how I how I came upon it. So I lived in downtown Denver, which I mentioned, and I wanted a garden, I wanted some green space. I wanted to participate in a community garden. And at that time, there weren't any downtown. Across the street from me is a parking lot. And I was like, "Huh, could we do a community garden in the parking lot?" So this was in 2016 or 2017. I go to Denver Urban Gardens, the organization I run now, to see. In there, I found a link to the permaculture design course. And so it's just so funny, because, you know, I ended up at DUG, like, four or five years later. I was like, "oh, okay, that looks interesting, and I'll take it." So I signed up for the permaculture design course, or the PDC, that's sort of the typical standard course that exists all around the world to teach these principles. I was really just aching to learn and to find a way to bring nature into the city, because I love living in cities. So I did the course, and the way that it was structured here was over the winter, it was six months, it was a full weekend every month. The thing that I was struck by when I took this course was that, first of all, I had two small children, yet I was okay doing this. I was okay taking my weekend. You know how precious your time is when you have the babies. I was like, "Okay, I need to do this." I felt like I was being called. So I would sit in this classroom or be out in the field for a full weekend a month, and I felt like my soul was being fed. I felt like what I was learning in this class was like reawakening something inside of me. It was so bizarre. I wasn't checking my watch, I wasn't whatever. I was like, "okay, yes, thank you. Thank you for bringing this back up." So that just totally struck me, and it affected everything. It was so educational, it was so insightful. Some of it was about gardening and farming like we talked about. But some of the things that really struck me were more along the lines of social permaculture and water and the principles, and how do you apply the principles to your life? So it was very transformational for me. One of those life changing things.

Tiffany Owens Reed  14:54  

I believe it. I was up at a friend's house, reading through the website and getting so inspired. And I was like, "Oh no. What's about to happen? Am I going to join, like, a farm community, somewhere or something, start running around barefoot in linen?" It's so interesting, and I think it's because it really does get to something primal, about how we're meant to exist with the land. I think we really have lost something with losing our connection to producing our own food, but then how that spills over into building community with other people. If people experience a traditional built environment, I think something similar kind of happens. You're like, "What is happening?" Well, all of a sudden when you realize there's an option to just walk down the street to a bakery, or you can just hear children playing out the window. Or, like, I remember when I went to Europe, and I went to Rome, just staying in this little village, and it was like an artistic village, so that people all had their windows open, and you could hear all the musicians practicing. So it was just full of music, and there were just all the little shops, and life just had this -- okay, granted, two thieves broke into my flat and stole my phone and my camera, so I lost all my photos.

Linda Appel Lipsius  16:17  

That's rough.

Tiffany Owens Reed  16:18  

But Rome was so beautiful, and all of it was so inspiring. A couple times a year, I grieve the loss of those photos, but there was just something that clicked, that lined up. Like something about this just feels right, being able to see the interconnectedness of of people's lives, being able to hear the music, being able to see all the little shops, and see all the little layers, of intergenerational life. You see children, you also see older people. I don't know, just something about that visibility. I think there's something similar that happens when people start to wake up and start to look at the built environment and say, "Wait, why is everything covered in cement, and why are there no people out? Why do we never see people?"

Linda Appel Lipsius  16:18  

Yeah, for sure. Just specifically on that, it's interesting. I spend a lot of time in New York, and people look at it like, "Oh, New York is so awful," whatever. But I love it, and I'm trying to understand why I love it so much. I love it because the street is thriving. I love it. I was talking to my kids about this. Like traffic or walking, everyone's antenna are up. Even though it's totally packed, I feel safe driving there. I feel safe walking there, because everybody is so connected to each other, everyone has accepted and embraced the fact that they're in this ecosystem. It's unexpected, but it's exactly that. It's like, there's noise on the street, there's kids on the street, there's life is happening on the street. You go out here, there's no one on the street, and it's a drag.

Tiffany Owens Reed  18:00  

I went to school in New York City and lived there on and off for a decade, so I know exactly what you're talking about. Everyone always points to Jane Jacobs and her commentary on the street and calling it the ballet of the streets. That's what it felt like when you live in New York City. You wake up and you're like, "I'm just going to go buy eggs, but I still should wear a decently cute outfit, because I'm part of the drama." You walk out the door like "Does everyone appreciate my coordination?"

Linda Appel Lipsius  18:33  

And they do, but they don't. That's actually the beautiful thing.

Tiffany Owens Reed  18:39  

Exactly they're like, "We don't really care, but you do look fantastic. And also, if you didn't, we wouldn't notice."

Linda Appel Lipsius  18:45  

Also, it's like, "Hey, just be you. It's totally cool." Which is also really wonderful.

Tiffany Owens Reed  18:46  

I love the sort of subtle contradiction of everyone not caring, but caring at the same time. It's totally different here. Now I live in Texas, and I think it's just very different. I don't want to say anything that sounds really judgmental, but I do miss an excuse to wear cute outfits. I still wear cute outfits, but it's just different. Sometimes it's like "My outfit is so cute and no one's appreciating it! I don't have anywhere to go!"

Linda Appel Lipsius  18:47  

You look great.

Tiffany Owens Reed  18:54  

I remember telling my husband, "No, you have to take me out somewhere else, because this outfit hasn't gotten enough gotten enough social utility out of it."

Linda Appel Lipsius  19:24  

That's so great.

Tiffany Owens Reed  19:25  

That's a total rabbit trail, but yes, the street. I'm rereading Jane Jacobs right now. One of the points she makes is how modern urban planning had a totally different approach to the streets. They saw people on the street as a problem. And when you look at the story of how our cities were shifted away from the cities being so vital and full of life to these desolate places of of lifelessness, one of the parts of the story that can help explain that is how these influential planners, at a certain point in time, their attitude to the street was that it's messy, it's dangerous, it's unsafe, it's chaotic. We need to clean it up and put everyone in their space. And the spaces where your home, your car, your job, or the shop you're going to to conduct a transaction. Everyone needs to be contained as they move throughout the city, instead of life spilling out on the streets. I think people are starting to question that and push back on that. I think there's something unnatural about that, similar to what you're saying about what you were experiencing as you were taking that course. It sounds like, in a similar way, you were being reintroduced to a more human way of relating to the land. I think there's something transferable to that, when we're thinking about our relationship to the streets and our relationship to other people in the city.

Linda Appel Lipsius  21:00  

Well, you know, I think the Western philosophy is so individualist. It's all scarcity, right? It's all about me, it's all about what I own, it's all about what I control and my own safety. Then you look at what happens when you build an existence around that. The epidemic of loneliness, all the mental health stuff that's going on. We're seeing the manifestations, and we're seeing the danger of that now, because people are so isolated. Then you add the phones, and everyone just is in their rabbit hole the whole time. It's so dangerous. And we're social animals. We're not supposed to run our lives this way.

Tiffany Owens Reed  21:50  

The phones is like a whole other layer that we can't get into. That's a whole other part of this conversation. Okay, so I picked some of the principles, and I thought we could just riff on some of them that I thought were really interesting and super transferable to the conversation about cities. The first one I picked, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I picked, "observe and interact." I think that's principle number one. I think it goes back to what you were saying about permaculture being really iterative. You really have this attitude of observing and interacting with what you're discovering along the way. How do you see this playing out in the gardening world?

Linda Appel Lipsius  22:36  

Oh my gosh. I mean, it's everything, right? There's nothing cookie cutter in gardening or farming, because it's nature, and there's so many different inputs and influences in terms of soil conditions and weather and watering and all the things. So you just have to see what's going on in order to be successful and also learn. So I think that's really important. The observe side of it, I also think, is that people are so eager to just go in and do. With my team I've had a lot of conversations with folks, like, "Okay, something comes up, let's solve it." Like, no, no, no. We don't start by solving it. We start start by observing, feeling it out, and taking your time. When I arrived at DUG, I got there kind of with no playbook, just because of the circumstances that I came in with. I spent the first two months just talking to people. I didn't come in with a plan. How could I come in with a plan? I didn't know the organization. I needed to learn the history, I needed to hear from the team and what their ideas were, and then go. I think it's that patience, that lack of arrogance, of thinking we know everything going into a situation. Then you can sort of evolve. Then the interaction side is that sitting in your ivory tower and looking at what's happening without interacting and without engaging with the system doesn't get you anywhere, either. Or, it has bad results ultimately.

Tiffany Owens Reed  24:18  

Yeah. As I was thinking about this, it seemed like an echo of one of the Strong Towns principles. They have their four steps to advocating or thinking about how to help your city become a strong town. One of them is to humbly observe where your community struggles. That is the first principle for becoming engaged. It's like, where is your community struggling? That is a starting point for engagement and for conversation. Like you said, there is no cookie cutter, and that just could not be more different than our built environment. Everyone always says you can take a road trip around America and take a nap in one city and open your eyes in the next one -- hopefully you're not the driver -- and you'd have no idea where you were, because everything is cookie cutter. Unless you were in Santa Fe, you know where you are in Santa Fe. But I think for the most part, this is one of the challenges of our cities. So many of the standard practices and the norms and the industry guide really does treat cities as one size fits all. Like if this approach to traffic management works here, it should also work there, 4000 miles away or in a totally different region of the country. I think what this principle is reminding us of, and as you just put so well, is that, when you're thinking about your communities or your block or street or neighborhood, that first step of just taking a walk, of just actually looking. Because it's going to be different. The challenges of my street here in Waco are going to be totally different from your street in Denver. How could a solution that works in Denver work here? I'm not saying it couldn't, but I think it's really important to have that attitude of context being so important. The local context is important, the local community, the local story, the local political climate and infrastructure. How do we even make decisions about different things? What's even feasible? Even if it was something as simple as planting flowers or trees or something, it's going to be a totally different conversation depending on which community you're working in. So I think that starting point of actually taking time to actually see is absolutely critical.

Tiffany Owens Reed  24:18  

Yeah. As you're talking, I'm thinking about even personal interactions. People you know that sort of go in and you have a conversation, and instead of asking questions, they sort of come in with preconceived notions, and then things go off the rails. I don't know. It's just so important to always slow down and take in the environment and context and ask questions.

Tiffany Owens Reed  26:17  

I think going with that is a willingness to understand that you're going to have to be really patient. Even the well-intentioned urbanist who wants to make everything strong is still going to have to be really patient. Because there's not going to be a formula. There's not going to be just a quick checklist to make your town a strong town. You're going to have to do that initial work of understanding your place, taking walks around town, getting to know people. There is no shortcut. Thinking that cities are fixable by formulas is what got us here, rather than having that super hyper-local, contextual approach to thinking about problems and solutions. Okay, the second one I picked, which I think is actually number two, is "catch and store resources." So tell us how this plays out.

Linda Appel Lipsius  27:47  

Actually, what I went to on this is compost. Everything we do, we sort of only look on the front end. We don't look on the back end. We don't look behind us, and we don't look at things that we've already passed through. By doing that,  we're just losing resources, and we're also just losing the energy that we've created. So specifically to gardening, I feel like compost is so important. A lot of people just look at it as garbage. It's not. It's such an incredibly valuable resource for soil and to grow healthy, nutrient-dense food. So much potential is in it that people just don't necessarily realize. So, yeah, that's kind of where I where I go with that one.

Tiffany Owens Reed  28:47  

As I was thinking about this and thinking about cities, I thought about money and I thought about land. I'm not going to go deep into either of these. I was thinking about financial resources and how this attitude of catching and storing is the complete opposite of how many of our cities operate financially. It's actually the opposite of spending now and then playing catch up, what we call the Ponzi Scheme at Strong Towns. And then hoping for a grant or some type of federal or state intervention when things go bad, or some big deal that's going to save everything. So it's just a completely different attitude to how most cities operate financially, and that's all I'm going to say on it, because I'm not a municipal finance expert, and I know it's very complicated. But I think at the very least, it's important to think about. Are we catching and storing, or are we spending and hoping that one day we'll have the resources we need when we need them? Are we just constantly thinking about things from a perspective of debt, rather than preparedness? But again, not an expert, so I'll leave it there on the money commentary. But I was also thinking about land. I feel like in our cities, land is one of our most abundant resources, but also one of our most limited. And thinking about how we can use our land. How can we put our land to really productive uses? I think it's interesting how your story started with looking at a parking lot and thinking that could be way more productive, I wonder what could happen if we started looking at our cities, at the land in our cities, in the same way. I can't think of anything more wasteful and more antithetical to this principle than a parking lot, right? Like, that's a resource that's -- in my opinion, and I think a lot of people would agree with me -- a complete and total waste. So I think part of this is catching and storing, but it's also looking at the resources you have and thinking about how to put them to really productive uses. Then capture the productivity and the wealth from that, and reinvest that into more productive uses.

Tiffany Owens Reed  28:47  

Yeah, we just had an interesting conversation earlier this week about looking at our 200 garden and food forest sites across Metro Denver, and how we position these as resilience hubs. Right now, for six months of the year, it's where the gardeners go to grow their food. But these are sites that are in every single neighborhood, and they exist 24 hours a day, 12 months a year. How do we optimize those? How do we bring the community in? How do we make it so these are gathering spaces, organizing spaces, food distribution spaces, and really optimized, and help them kind of realize their full potential. So, yeah, I think it's many different ways to apply this one.

Tiffany Owens Reed  30:47  

That's also kind of pointing to that abundance attitude, right? I think it's interesting how it also leads to a type of generosity. I see this even playing out in my little mom's network here in Waco. There's kind of a little ecosystem where one mom doesn't need a certain age range of clothing anymore, and it goes to the next mom. Or then one mom finds out she's pregnant, so the other mom sends her maternity clothes. Or I made a toddler bread that my toddler decided to feed the cat, so I gave it to another friend whose toddlers really liked it. And then she gave me muffins. What I'm getting at there is that there's this sort of baked-in generosity when you start thinking about how to use everything we have productively. Because you don't want to waste it, so you start thinking "Who can we bring in to benefit from this, because we really want it to be as productive as possible?" Even if your generosity is not super coming from a place of altruism, I think there is something about gardening or when you get into these little networks and when it becomes important to you to keep using resources well and facilitate this circular system, this circular economy. I think one of the spillovers of that is you find yourself bringing more people in and finding people to share with. Because you don't want to waste it. You want to see this maximized.

Linda Appel Lipsius  33:13  

We had a community meeting a couple days ago, and the the term that just keeps coming to me is that "we have enough." We have what we need, and when we work together, it's gonna strengthen everything. I can't remember if said this, but something that rings so true in this work is undoing learned helplessness. We've just been taught that we have to sit and wait for food to come to us, for energy to come to us. We're just sitting and waiting and very passive. When you do that, when you convince people that they don't have enough, that they can't feed themselves and their families, that they can't repair their homes, or whatever, it just sucks the life out of a system. We do have enough. I mean, climate change sucks and is definitely making things way harder in certain places. I'm not going to deny that, but in most places, if we just work together, and if we just created a way to barter more, I think it's just gonna strengthen everything.

Tiffany Owens Reed  34:39  

Imagine what would happen if people realized they didn't have to wait. I guess it kind of depends on the issue you're talking about. I just think something so similar is so prevalent in the conversations about making incremental improvements in our communities. This idea of, "No, you have to wait for the consultant to tell you that you need a study," and then you have to wait for the big federal man in the big fancy suit to tell you what the rules are. And you can't make your street safer for your kids. You need seven experts to do that for you in 10 years. Civic engagement did not used to be so complicated and so confusing. It was just ordinary people solving problems of having multiple people in a shared space. At the end of the day, that's what it was. We've lost that, and it's all become exported to experts and all covered up in these confusing rules, and people just end up sitting passively, terrified that if they try to fix something, they're going to get in trouble because they didn't comply with some random rule that they didn't know existed.

Linda Appel Lipsius  35:46  

Or they're lazy, you know? I mean seriously. There's a group here, I may have mentioned this last time, called Warm Cookies of the Revolution. It's awesome. The first time I heard Evan Wiseman speak, he's just asking this group, "Why is it that you don't go to your RNO? Why don't you go to the city council meetings to talk about the streets, about safety, about the schools?" It is in our power to influence these, yet people don't go to those meetings. How can we just sit here and complain without stepping into our power? The fact that people don't do is kind of gross. We just point fingers. This woman I know who's from Singapore was saying that, there, it's mandated that you vote. I'm no expert on any of this stuff, but it was just so interesting. It's like, to get the benefits of a society, you have to show up. You have to put in your voice. So, yeah, how do we get back there? One thing I love doing is that I've started going to a lot of the RNO meetings -- registered neighborhood organization meetings. Every time I go, I am so tickled that these folks are coming out on an evening and spending two hours working on their community. It definitely gives me hope, and it's just nice to see.

Tiffany Owens Reed  37:19  

Yeah, that's that's something we need to bring back. I think that's where the real power is when it comes to redirecting the future of our cities. Like moving our cities toward a more resilient future. I think that's where it is. It's people learning to care and learning to not be intimidated by how complicated everything has become. Because I do think it is complicated, and it can be very overwhelming trying to figure out the right ways to become involved. It's very obscure.

Linda Appel Lipsius  37:49  

You're only going to do it by observing and interacting. You're going to figure it out.

Tiffany Owens Reed  37:54  

And it's iterative, and what's that other word that people like to use? Oh gosh. It's gonna slip my mind just when I need it. Emergent. You know that whole emergent approach where it's like, the next step will reveal itself over time. You're not gonna have to roadmap ahead of time, which is such a helpful framework when you're starting to get involved in your community. Just find one thing you can do and do that, and then the next step will emerge. Then you might need to pivot and try this and try that. Engagement is a process, not an end thing, and it should be something that keeps on going. I think we have time for one more, and I've been trying to decide which one I want to do. I want to do principle number eight, "integrate rather than segregate." I think you mentioned this a little bit. Oh, wait no, there was one you mentioned in the other show.

Tiffany Owens Reed  38:50  

It was 11. "Use edges and value the marginal."

Tiffany Owens Reed  38:51  

Yeah. Okay. So if you're listening to this, you have to go back and listen to our conversation so you can hear Linda talk about principle 11. We'll do principle eight, "integrate rather than segregate." I'll let you start. How does this play out in the gardening world?

Linda Appel Lipsius  39:07  

This is what makes an organization like DUG thrive. We have 200 sites in every neighborhood in Denver. We've got every demographic, every age, every background participating in different gardens, participating in a single garden. I just think that's what makes this organization so strong. Acknowledging that like every group, every gardener, has so much to learn from the other ones, and the fact that you're put in spaces next to each other, you're working together side by side, all doing the same thing. It just strengthens us. Everybody is sort of pulling in the same direction, with very different reasons for being here, with very different resources, with very different engagement with what we do. It's beautiful. We're not just this cookie cutter organization. We are here to do this in a certain segment, in a certain neighborhood. So I just think it gives us so much strength and so much vitality and so much legitimacy, just because there is so many different voices in the room. Yeah. It just goes back to that curiosity. Every day you have to, you get to, interact with people and experiences that are totally different from yours. It just strengthens you. It's the sort of torture testing. It's anti-fragility. It's all of that when you're not just in your safe space.

Tiffany Owens Reed  41:07  

When I read this principle, I immediately thought about our neighborhoods and this challenge of restoring them. So Jane Jacobs has this line in her book where she's basically like the one principle that she really wants to lean in on is this principle of diversity of uses. What makes a strong street? Diversity of uses. What makes a strong neighborhood? Diversity of uses. That's one of the drums that she will beat during that whole book. I think about our neighborhoods, and think about how , if you look at how zoning has been practiced in our neighborhoods, it's been the complete opposite. Rather than mixing uses and adding diversity and embracing differences, it's been all about taking everything and siloing it off into its own little zone and its own section. Even siloing people off based on their race or their income. We want everything to be neat and tidy and predictable. So I was thinking about, when you look at our neighborhoods, how can we restore them to the kinds of little ecosystems that have the type of diversity -- from a built perspective, like commercial and residential and public space -- to sustain the rhythms of normal human life? I don't think it's normal to have to have your life cut up into all these little silos and then you have to shuttle between them in this metal box. I don't think that's normal. I don't think that's natural. But you look at the neighborhood, and it's all segregated. We segregate homes from shops, from amenities, from coffee shops. I always talk about coffee shops. I don't think I've been on one episode on this show and not mentioned a coffee shop at some point. You drive through any new development, it's just going to be this sterile collection of cookie cutter houses, one after the next. So I read this, and I was like, "How can we bring back that healthy diversity, that healthy mixed use, back into our neighborhoods and allow small businesses to exist alongside homes? You make them stronger that way, in a variety of ways that we can't get into right now. But that's what came to my mind.

Linda Appel Lipsius  43:19  

And just super, circling back to the first conversation, when you have all of that, people are on the streets all day. Including safe spaces for kids in the evening. That's something that they're really pushing in Denver, to bring families and more residents downtown, more families specifically, because people are like, "Oh, downtown scary. I have to live in the suburbs." And it's like, "No, no. Downtown's amazing and wonderful and thriving and stimulating." I hope people bite. I hope people come down here, because we've been the only family down here for 20 years.

Tiffany Owens Reed  43:55  

Wow.

Linda Appel Lipsius  43:56  

Yeah.

Tiffany Owens Reed  43:58  

Linda, this has been great. This has been a great part two to our first conversation. Thank you so much for being up for this adventure of delving into how permaculture can shape how we think about our cities. It's been a lot of fun. I will definitely recommend to our listeners that you please go back and listen to the first episode. I always ask my guests at the end of the show what they like to recommend about their town. And Linda shared some great spots in that first conversation. We'll put links in the show notes to learn more about DUG. We'll put some links where you can learn more about permaculture. Linda just thank you so much. This was really fun. Definitely got me all revved up again to go look at my backyard and figure out what we can do with this.

Linda Appel Lipsius  44:39  

Awesome well, thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Tiffany Owens Reed  44:41  

This has been a productive Friday for you. You're like, I made one person realize they to go grow their garden.

Linda Appel Lipsius  44:48  

Well, I learned tons too. So thank you.

Tiffany Owens Reed  44:51  

Alright. If you're listening to this, thank you so much for joining us for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another episode. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  45:04  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.