5 Best (and Worst) Places to Build a Home or Village
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 พ.ค. 2024
- Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison presents on best and worst locations for building housing in the landscape.
#5 Best - 00:39
#5 Worst - 1:52
#4 Best - 2:29
#4 Worst - 4:01
#3 Best - 6:21
#3 Worst - 6:23
#2 Best - 6:46
#2 Worst - 7:55
#1 Best - 8:46
#1 Worst - 9:28
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On the last point: It never ceases to amaze me that we've known how to build walkable, livable cities for thousands of years, but suddenly after WW2, the popularization of the car makes so many people just forget how to plan properly
It wasn't that people simply "forgot" because there was a new technology.
There were unimaginable fortunes spent on propaganda & lobbying to _make_ people forget. The extent to which the auto industry went to destroy public transit & reshape the collective consciousness in the US is mind-boggling...
Like so many things in American history, the public good was destroyed to supercharge private profits.
@@dr.zoidberg8666 don't forget there was also an ideological struggle during cold war, in which "the american dream" of private households with their own backyards, garages, cellars and driveways were proposed more as a counter to the communist communal housing, however more costly and uneffective that kind of deurbanisation might be.
@@jaredrl06 That is _literally_ not true. We built walkable cities for humans & not cars. We built robust public transit. We built vast rail systems.
The Auto lobby destroyed it all so that they could corner the transportation market at the expense of everyone else.
Edit: Here's a brief/entertaining explanation of the process: th-cam.com/video/oOttvpjJvAo/w-d-xo.html
@@jaredrl06 actually, a lot of older North American towns were built quite walkably, and were subsequently converted into highways and parking lots. One good example is London, Ontario
@@jaredrl06 this is a really great demonstration of the aforementioned propaganda working its magic
As someone interested in worldbuilding and learning more about the existing experiences of sustainable living, your channel is very informative!
Literally the exact some reason I clicked, I literally didn't know any of these things. My head just went boom.
me. xD
Worldbuilding squad! Yeaaaah
World Building Supps
If you haven't already, also look up Artifexian
A lot of old cites in Europe are in the in bend of a river: in old times this was a easy way to be protected from 3 sides from an invasion. Luckily today flooding is a concern of higher interest.
Well they did surround themselves with large walls that could probably keep the water from a flood outside the city.
A lot of European cities also had canals and that can help with flood mitigation.
The old town of Bern is a classic example of this, the river Aare makes almost a full loop or noose shape around it, and the narrow open side used to be one massive star fort. Some of those fortifications still stand today, even though the city has now multiplied in all directions.
Constantinoples strategy was not a river but a whole strait
and having nowhere to flee
As someone who lives in a tropical zone, you do have to worry about the sun facing side, but for the opposite reason. Basically rooms that receive the sunlight till' sunset become impossible to be at. Walls get warm, air gets hot (fans you send you hot air) and the place super uncomfortable. Great video btw! :D
I live in central Europe, and it frustrates me that they forgot about the value of head space in rooms and the ability for a draft dragging out hot air!
Even after they switched from open fires to chimneys they managed for houses to stay cool, but with the 20th century, they tossed aside all common knowledge and now, I can get up to 40°C and we have no AC!
Plus, being 7ft tall, I miss the ceiling height of older buildings...
In north Europe, houses are built to keep warmth in.
You can imagine how bad the summers tend to get in the sun facing side.
I don't think you even care about which side faces the sun during the winter, because it is more about snow reflecting light all-around than the few sunlight hours that don't warm you.
@@CulturalBarbarian I tell you something funny: I currently live in Switzerland and snow is rather rare! There is bamboo, palm trees, and even some banana trees planted by my neighbours! Especially, the latter must be protected from the cold, but it's feasible. I just wonder why people plant things ranging from plants found in the Mexican desert, to swamp cypress. Neither of them are optimised for the climate. Also, it fluctuates a lot from very dry to very moist, which makes it tough even for temperate plants.
@@CulturalBarbarian also, modern homes completely disregard sun, wind and rain direction. They only care about how to cram as many buildings into a street as possible.
It's not uncommon that you drive to work and once you leave the garage the sun blinds you and the ramp is slippery and in the worse case connected to a frequented road or has some stupid S curve to it.
We can make absolutely great designs and build to last centuries, but 99.9999% of the architecture is junk food level.
Exactĺy. I was thinking we want to do the opposite since we neee to keep cool.
Here in southern Brazil where the landscape is composed by grassland and smooth hills, people used to build on top of hills because that's where they could watch their cattle in the surrounding area, my family was one of them. Also, lower areas get frost more often in winter (cold air flows downards) which kill crops, and may have deficiency in wind flowing which made the place hotter during summer. River sides also have higher humidity and attract a lot of mosquitoes and insects while hill tops are more hospitable. Water, however, was always a problem. Most of the cities built around these parts are located on hill tops.
Casarão dos Patrão no alto da coxilha
You can solve the misquito problem by putting up bat houses. Like birdhouses but for bats, size them for insect eating bat and they will keep your mosquito population down.
@@DaDunge Do you have any reliable source where i can find information about it?
His reason for not being on a hill top is wildfire defense which isn't very applicable in some environments/ecologies.
É os guri dos pampa
Building near a river:
It is also worth noting that over time rivers will change course. When a bend in a river reaches apex it will start to erode the inside of the bend and whip away a sand bar. It is natural for rivers to change course over time. It has to do with the fact that water flows in a wave pattern and this is evident in the constant bending of a river back and fourth. This is also affected by the type a land the river flows through.
My home is on the outside of a riverbend. It's not a bad place, but you do have to keep in mind that the river will try to erode away at the steep slopes that tend to occur there, so you should build all permanent structures a little ways back from the bluff.
Its weird, but I live in baton rouge part of Mississippi but once you get up to the north of BR, LA/Mississippi state border its more steep lands to the east of the river and plains to the west.
Im sure that 500 years plus ago, back when the river could sway back and forth this this narrative may have be shaped so that east of Mississippi would be plains and west of Mississippi would be bluffs/steeper lands.
Idk, maybe the Appalachian plays a part of this.
I just know somewhere in my heart that the Mississippi's main flow should be down the atachafalya, but BR and New Orleans means theres more financial incentives. Also the homes/cities between Lafayette and BR would be flooded and BR would lose its port status, likewise with NOLA. But at least in this hypothetical world, they wouldn't flood.
Im not too sure about the ebb and flow of Mississippi outside my state just yet. Theres so much more geology I'd love to delve into, especially the way the river flowed before we geo engineered the river and its tributaries.
Times are like rivers : calm and strong, or turbulent or fast. I wish I knew better chaos' theory because there is a trick with those flows, but I don't get it.
There's a couple of things that I love about your videos. Firstly, you explain everything in an easily comprehensible manner and keep it concise. In addition, you always have great visualisations to go along with it. You're a great teacher Andrew!
Agreed. That was very educational.
1:50 this is mitigated in very wet and relatively cool climates such as those found in northwestern Europe, the British Isles for example where wildfires are very rare, incredibly small and typically a result of extreme mismanagement. You can see this in more traditional anglo-saxon settlements, often on top of canyons and hills in wetland and floodplain landscapes. Using the floodplain for rich summer grazing then bringing livestock back to the uplands during the wet winters. They never suffered from wildfires, it's too wet for that.
That's a good observation but I'm not sure it applies anymore. I live on the west coast of North America, in the Pacific Northwest rainforest, and already we're seeing drastic climate changes that make it so that our coastal rainforests are burning for the first time now. As far as planning sites go, this needs to be included in the calculus for these areas as they shift away from that "very wet/cool" status in the summer months.
@@TheIrreverent Absolutely agree and it is a major concern in the 25 year environment plan the UK government has created. But in Britain we are predicted to get even wetter than we are. One main concern is with flooding. So I think it would make sense for us to build more in the uplands. Especially when we have historically built far too much in the lowlands and created a massive flood crisis....
@@TheIrreverent forest mismanagement is a major contributor to the wildfires though. When you don’t clear dead trees out from the woods it becomes a tinderbox
@@anonperson3972 Not only wetter but the winters are going to be a lot colder. Once the Atlantic is disrupted, it's going to get a lot colder. London is further north than Quebec City, Winnipeg and Calgary. It's been a long time since the UK saw winters that reach -40 degrees centigrade.
@@anon2427 depends on the biome
Note: Villages and towns are very commonly found on hilltops. This is because even though the hilltop is not the best site to build in terms of accessibility, it is a highly defensible position. And in the past, that was often of essential importance.
Furthermore, fortresses and castles, which are also commonly found on hilltops, often tend to develop settlements around them. So even though hilltops are not the most optimal sites for settlement in many regards, they are nonetheless one of the most common sites where people settled historically.
If all the nearby forests have been clearcut, then there is not much risk of wildfire.
Rome was built on seven hills.
@@davidvondoom2853 Actually yeah good point
In Europe basically every hilltop had a settlement in ancient times.
@@rogerwilco2 well, it grew to envelope seven hills. Originally it was built on the side of 1 hill, facing toward the river Tiber. Once you start getting to the stage of City building, most of this advice becomes irrelevant, only things like exploiting sunlight and staying away from floodplains remain useful.
"But we are really talking about normal people here", best line in the video, Andrew! Anyway, always super informative. The PDC is getting better and better, congrats!
The slight pause and glare at the camera right before the delivery of that line was even better.
I too laughed hard to that comment!
His delivery was effortlessly hilarious!
I will say that cities were often built at the top of hills for the same reason of defensive advantage, but yeah, if you're not building walls battlements that doesn't apply.
It may be a good choice if you're in a very wet and flat area, where the risk of fire is low and basically everywhere nearby is floodplain, so every bit of elevation you can get is good, but that's more for when there's so little hill height to begin with that people are going to start questioning if it's big enough to call a hill at all.
LMAO!
This'd make a perfect prehistoric, semi-educational 'city-builder' game. You'd have fun growing a small community while also learning the hard way that building on a floodplain at the base of the north-facing side of a mountain wasn't the best idea. Such games do already exist in abundance, but there's usually limited consequences for building anywhere you like.
i would love a game that functions like this but also like one hour one life, where essentially it would be 3d and it would simulate living in a small community(with other players) and throughout the course of your short life you support the village and have to take factors like this and more into account if you wanted your community to be successful.
Have you got any recommendations?
As a Western-Norwegian: "Let's build on all the worst locations we can ever think off"
But finally I learned why they never build houses ontop of the hills and mountains here! I have always wondered why they'll build a 50-man apartment complex on a rocky 45 degree mountains slope, rather than placing it ontop of the mountain instead.
You should Visit Bergen sometime, or Norway in general. Especially along the west coast. They seem to have gone against everything you said and opted for all the worst options xD
lol
Mountains in Norway ? Too cold. I prefer the South of Europe ! :-)
In Norway weather it is not easy to live and build cities top of the mountains!.
Because winters people can become isolated from the snow and slippery conditions.
I think Bergen, simply outgrew perfect settlement placement. The older houses are more or less south facing, close or at the slope break. Bryggen and Festningen are a matter of protecting and controlling the habour.
Houses in Laksevag for example are all newer. I think considering their constraining topography, they did pretty well.
A Norwegian sees this video and just goes "Alright, bet"
Came for D&D world building: stayed for the real world trivia!
As someone who has a Degree in Outdoor Education, and a Sub-Major in Geography, I am very impressed in the detail and accuracy of this video. I do not know this mans background, but he has a plethora of knowledge in this field. Well done!
Thanks Clark. I studies Ecological Design at Prescott College in Arizona, and got a masters degree in Horticulture. But have primarily studies all things about Permaculture in the 20 years since college. Permaculture is a multidisciplinary design science that delves into a great many topics related to designing sustainable human settlements.
@@amillison amazing! Thank you for bringing knowledge to people about this area! Keep it up
Your point about the inside of riverbends being natural floodplanes was eye opening to me as a Dayton Ohio native. In 1913 our entire downtown area was (and most of it still is) on the inside of a bend directly down river from a confluence of the two largest rivers in the area. Naturally, in 1913 the entire city flooded and we ended up having to invent a revolutionary levy system just to make up for the fact that our founders weren’t exactly thinking ahead.
You answered a question I have had for decades. I Studied the settlement of my home town and could never figure out why the homesteaders picked the place they did for their house. Thank you.
So valuable! It's a shame in recent development this knowledge has been ignored due to technical progress. But nature remains stronger.
or its because people dont build their own houses anymore they just buy them from a developer that doesnt give a shit about them
5 Worst: On top of a hill or mountain is quite decent defence. Now in modern times it`s unlikely you have a relatives murdered or enslaved by a raid. Like the vikings did. Or the cosairs. Or riders from the stepps. Or knights during feuds/war. Depending on time/place you should account of other humans as a threat. Then diffrent placement makes sense. Like building building on top a mountain. Or in a flood plain to take nr. 3 Venice - maybe that part of the settlers were survivors of plundered rome had something to do with it.
Venice was protected by a salt water marsh. This way it was protected from land and it had access to the sea for trade and transport, the Venetians became famous traders and Venice sold salt which was a very expensive and useful produce.
Flooding is really the trick. Around where I live, forest fires aren't an issue, but flooding is and in a flood the best place to be is the top of the hill.
The slope break idea is basically how Seoul started. Mountains to the north, river to the south, far enough from the mouth of the river to get fresh water yet downstream enough to carry shipments via tidal flow. Its low, wet subsistance farms occupied both sides of the river floodplains, including where today's Gangnam is. The oldest city center is probably the most resilient place to seasonal rain and flood in Seoul.
Number 4 is actually useful for tropical climates too because we have to AVOID sun as much as possible, so that's the place to run away from
I've been on TH-cam since 2007 and I believe this is one of the best channels I've ever stumbled upon. Your quality of work is excellent and the way you visualize the information is very creative and unique. I'm actually pretty blown away.
Thanks so much! I hope to make a lot more videos in the coming years.
And exactly that lesson around 6:00 was learned again at terrible cost this year in germany.
People having complacently settled on the inside of a bend in a river, in a steep valley.
Then torrential rain came and had the river cut straight through and over those low inside banks, flushing away whole villages .... particularly those buildings built more recently, disregarding that rule.
Quite a few very old houses were (more or less) spared because they were placed properly, escaping even a 500 year flood (pre-climate change, that is).
9:51 exactly
I'm all for building on the flood plain - as long as they're compelled to use stilts. No problem.
A lot of European cities were intentionally built on the flood plain and evne had ditches that could be intentionally flooded in the last direction all to make them harder to attack. Of course old houses of flood plains are all built with a fair bit of extra foundation to prevent flooding.
The effort put into this video is incredible! Love these little plants and the topographic map! Best channel on TH-cam.
Your videos was extremely clear, and I love how concise you made each point! I'm in college studying urban planning, and sometimes I get caught up in all the complexities of modern society, like affordable housing programs and such, that I forget the roots of where and how housing should be built: not everywhere! Again, awesome and informative video!
In spent an year living in the US a few years ago, and it stroke me as a very que thing the way most people live far away from the city center, with very large properties. It does look very nice with the amount of trees in these areas, but it makes it basically impossible for someone to live there without a car, and a public transportation system generally inexistent due to how ineffective it would be in this setting
look up the channel not just bikes to learn even more about how US development is stupid. great channel
@@freewheelinghorn because US development is all about sending white people to as far as inland, and force them to breed rapidly. that's how they captured the native lands. they still have the same culture.
Because F--k other people, that's why. I had a house burn down in the city that was three houses down from the idiots who set their house on fire. And then theres the crime and noise...screw that. I will likely never live in the city again.
@@asoka7752 what the fuck are you on about...
Go live in central New York City. You'll love it there with all the people 😉
thanks man, this video was very useful. Me and my buddies were, you know, just hunting and gathering, minding our business and Greg (a member of our group) started talking about putting grain in the soil to get more food. We were really worried about the acampment location and now we have a good ideia on where to start!
Ive watched half of this video and had to stop to like, subscribe, and send the link to some friends. What a fantastic content, super easy way to make complex things easy to be understood, and absurdly valuable information! I plan to watch all your videos before buying my land and starting my permaculture project!!
Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
Idk how or why TH-cam recommended this video for me but I'm so glad it did. Such a cool thing I've never thought about and your topography table thing is such a great visual aid. Hope to be seeing more of you!
A very well articulated piece of content regarding homesite selection. Thanks for putting this out there.
6:30 During the Recent floodings in Germany, one Part of a Small town was completely wiped out when a great flood happened, That part was on the inside of the River-bend and where it was there is now a Giant area filled with rubble and debree.
Say'd area had no Protection against flooding (no drainage/ overflow tunnels) and the bridges leading to the Area were not designed for Major floodings, as such during the flood, they functioned as Dams after being filled with debree, only to break and cause a catastrophy downstream.
I visited the area a couple of times and it will never be the same.
Hundreds of years of culture gone in 1 day.
Don't build inside the River-bend
Look at satelite-images of: "Germany (Eifel) Flooding 2021 before and after"
If you want to see it.
Thank you. This answers so many questions for my future tiny house and permaculture dreams.
I'm really glad TH-cam recommended this channel. This video was so beautiful, I love learning about human behavior with respect to the environment and how it can be best used.
IT would be very interesting to see you layout out the "perfect village" (permaculture, clustered housing, ideal aspect etc). I am working on a project like this and it would great to see your perspective on what an ideal community would look like.
What an absolutely fantastic video this was. It's not often that someone can teach me something I've never heard of or considered before in this space, and you just did it for 10 mins straight. You are quickly becoming one of my favorite channels.
Love your model visual backups. Great video as always. Another consideration is temperatures. Top of the hill is windy and cold in winter and can be hotter in summer (could be a problem) and down near the river, apart from flooding is much more colder, dank, misty. A comment from your wildfire video: The river Y is what I meant about the forest being shaped in a y. It tends to lead the wild fires around the houses and not directly towards them.
All of the good places are already taken.
And in case ye are wondering, the best places are at the estuary of mayor rivers, or slightly upstream of on an island in the river.
I love the inputs about clustered housing and I agree. This may sound like a strange input, but in order to move this direction, we need to address noise control. I'm a real estate agent and investor - I also have had the luxury of living in many different countries including Germany and South Korea. Americans are noisy and disruptive... Many buyers are looking for a location that provides peace and quite. We need to be able to provide that serenity in our villages without loud music and noisy vehicle exhaust.
Funny observation. Thanks for sharing.
Not just bikes did an episode about the noise the car makes and how cities around the world differ in this.
The culprit of this trend is America’s hyper-individualism. Most cultures have a degree of communal respect, in that they see themselves as part of the greater community. Americans do not.
So we get the mindset of “I can do what I want, how I want, when I want.”
@@Arielelian which is an AWESOME mindset.
@@Arielelian hell yeah brother 👍
This was the first time of getting a video from this channel, recommended to me and at first, I clicked on this, because I thought this was going to be about the videogame "Minecraft". Then I saw the bird's-eye-view of your table and I was instantly interested in learning more! I'm so glad I stayed and watched this, because I learned a lot from this, you explain everything in such a clear and logical way, WITH actual, physical props, I loved it! I've subbed, hoping to learn more! Thank you so much for making this type of content!
The additional .1 millisecond pause and blink after referencing the high ground, I love it 2:22
just discovered this channel. the quality and the knowledge is so great, omg i'm going to watch everything thoroughly
Very logical points on the need for clustered housing models! Especially the part about desiring to be spread out in order to view nature, while simultaneously destroying and consuming more nature in the agrigate. Subbing all the way.
Andrew, this is very useful and interesting content thank you for putting this together!
I'm lucky with my project in Yakima County, WA, I'm on the North slope of Yakima Ridge and the only time of the year that I lose direct exposure to the sun during a few times of the day is the weeks surrounding the winter solstice. I have a very large water shed 15-20% average grade with little obstruction on the South side of the homestead. Thank you for all the information you are sharing... this is the reLOVEution of conscious action and sustainable futures.
Regarding castles:
1) in their day, they would not be surrounded by trees or any vegetation that would give cover.
2) another thing media keep getting wrong is that each castle is supplied by multiple towns, if not a city and each city requires multiple towns and each town requires fields. Thus, there was little nature around castles.
3) most castles were not on mountain peaks, but hilltops at best, or on ridges below the summit. Quite often they were also built on plateaus on otherwise steep slopes. Even despite the risk of floods and landslides, they preferred it over being exposed on the very summit.
Fluvial geomorphology, one of my favourite subjects when I was a school teenager. For some reason the shape and dynamics of rivers and coastlines was fascinating. Loved the video. I came across permaculture many years ago, so the ideas are familiar, but you presented it brilliantly. Also this was great worldbuilding content. Subscribed.
Petra, Jordan, is in a canyon but its location is great. Paris, France, is on all sides in a flood plain AND on surrounding hills at the same time: great location. You are talking about new settlements. Building on rocky terrain is more reliable, including in case of an earthquake.
Is this a suggestion or criticism?
I’m in the process of building a custom fantasy map of The Shire/Hobbiton, and your images and information have helped me immensely.
Similar motivations for TTRPGs brought me here.
Ok yes amazing presentation but also this sand table with the color projector is freaking genius.
You Sir, are true gold! So sad that the YT algorithm promotes so many non-values over what really matters..
Sun Tzu recommends that you camp on a south facing slope well up from wetlands or river to avoid insects that carry diseases. The south facing slope will get sunlight early in the day and be warmer than the north facing slope. Sun Tzu chapter 9
So glad I found your channel. Best information on TH-cam. You'd be top of my list for a survival team.
I used to visit my grandpa in Corvallis every year. Very interesting info; thanks for sharing.
4:55 Fun fact: The German city of Hamburg is most likely named after this. Ham is an old German word for riverbend, so Hamburg means "castle at a river bend". So next time you're at McDonalds, you can feel smart for knowing how your foods name originated in settlement geography over a millennium ago.
Hamburger has got nothing to do with the city of Hamburg as far as I know. the concept of minced meat fried and put in bread is of mongol origin.
@@DaDunge the food doesn't come from there but the name does. Same as how you call sausages wieners even though I'm pretty sure they're not actually from here
@@majorfallacy5926 Pretty sure the ham is hamburger is because is was originally made from ground ham.
@@DaDunge it's not and it wasn't. Burger also wasn't originally an English word, it's a back-formation from hamburger.
@@majorfallacy5926 Yes it is, Europe got hamburgers from America. It's not a traditional dish anywhere in Europe, at least not under the name Hamburger. I guess you could call it a fricadelle with bread. No idea wherever you got the -burger suffix from but the concept has nothing to do with hamburg.
Look my family is from Hamburg no one in Hamburg claims the food Hamburger has anything to do with Hamburg.
And why would we American junk food hasn't got squat to do with our fine city. Don't blame this crap on us, this is all you.
Thanks! I was just about to build a home and/or village!
I really appreciate your videos, always straight to the point. Hope to put most of it in practice soon here in temperate Argentina.
Just discovered your channel and I’m thoroughly enjoying your videos! Im an urban planning student and everything you said is exactly what I am learning in my classes!
Well done Andrew! Thanks for this and all you do.
My pleasure! Thanks for tuning in :-)
Thanks for the Teachings. Just to share : Salem original name is Sailam in Tamil, We have a District called Salem in Tamilnadu, India. Meaning = Place full of Mountains
Very interesting--thank you! My youngest daughter was born in Salem, Tamil Nadu.
@@formidableflora5951 Nice to hear. Also My wife's native.
My first video I'm seeing of his. Love it!
Also I enjoy how many times he tells us in different ways to chill out.
if this was a class in school, I'd be in it and never bored. love your channel! although just watched a couple and skimmed through titles...so much to learn..someday id like to build a permaculture garden and house design.
Thank you, Andrew, for yet another SUPERB instructional video! You are a great gift to our shared bioregion (the Willamette Valley), our shared state (Oregon), and our shared planet (Gaia).
People live spread apart for a reason. Clustering is definitely not for everyone. But I think working towards making people responsible, in some fashion, for the production of the energy that they consume is a step in the right direction.
i love the real world examples. they really help with understanding
Incredibly insightful, and neatly presented. Thanks Andrew!
I wonder, for people who didn't have experience settling in new places, how much of pattern of housing was a result of survivorship bias? As in, houses with poor heating and flooding risk didn't last long and we only get to see the optimal places that survived to this day?
I'm from the Netherlands, our language does not have a word for slope...
this makes me happy because it remembers me about the village of my grandmother, Louredo, in the valey of the Miño river in Galicia, I sometimes go there to help my parents with the vines
I never thought I would find exactly what I've been looking for for a long time, I'm so grateful.
Hi Andrew, what is that table with clay that does those isometric lines for you? very interesting
Great video! "The only way is to lower consumption", i agree, position and clustering helps a lot, but people need heat and eletricity, cause more often work remotely. Please can you react on best place also for solar, water and wind energy generation? Also where to plant trees and which to cut :) And where to position a root zone waste water treatment :) Thank you!
Ok I watched more of your videos, you have great videos man :) thanks for sharing! i like this one th-cam.com/video/f-sRcVkZ9yg/w-d-xo.html
@@ondrejmisak Thanks! Some of your questions are answered on these videos: th-cam.com/video/V3tpaIf6Jcc/w-d-xo.html , th-cam.com/video/RDCFbfcRcUE/w-d-xo.html
I don't know how the algorithm got me here but this is exactly what I need since I am planning to build a house in a hill. Thanks. This is really informative.
I know this is opposite conventional wisdom, but I love north facing large windows (in northern hemisphere) because the light coming in is not harsh (ie no direct sunlight). I know that this perhaps is bad from an energy standpoint though.
me too. but personal preferences maybe beyond the purview of this video
I am living in western Ghats in india. Last 4,5 years in Ghats 1000 to 2000 people die yearly by extreme rainfall and landslide.
Me, a brand new watcher:
I immediately love that the first best location listed is at the slope break. And the reasoning is because its on the boundary of two different biomes. Such as woods and plains. Or grassland and fishing area.
I play Don't Starve, which is a survival video game that involves a lot of resource foraging and management. I always build camp on the boundary of at least 2 different biomes for this exact reason. The easy access to different types of resources.
It's amusing how video games can take after real life.
Wow, I went to school at OSU in Corvallis Oregon. Hearing you randomly use that in your example blew my mind lol
Damn this will be essential for Minecraft
4:20 Another good reason to build at that part of the mountain in a hot climate is because the sun light hit less to the houses and there are much cooler, right?
Yes. In a very hot climate, the North side is better for cooling.
Very interesting video. I love the presentation with the sand table and projection map. Great stuff.
Amazing production quality! The sandbox diorama really helps to visualize the concepts. I'd bet it's fun to do as well.
6:22 a German town was in the news earlier this year, Altenahr, because it was heavily hit by flooding. That town is built entirely on the flood plain inside the bend. And then people make surprised Pikachu faces...
It's not just Altenahr though. Bad Neuenahr and Schuld to name just a couple are all located on the inside of the bend. They are acustomed to yearly floods and tend to handle them very well. Also this type of flood only happens every couple of houndred years, the last one being 140 years ago so I'd argue it's basically the same as building your village on the slopes of a volcano, and a s far as I'm aware nobody tells Naples (Italy) to move away from Mt. Vesuvius. And to be fair, the Ahr valley is pretty much a canyon with steep mountainfaces on the outsite of the river bends, so its either living on the flood planes or ladders instead of roads.
Flooding was less of an issue then invasion when it was made most likely
Thank you my minecraft villages will flourish
It's Saturday morning and I am watching a tutorial on where to build a village. And I am liking it
Great video and I love the topo light table! Perfect use for it!
Your videos are sick. You're like a Bob Ross encyclopedia. I watch all of your videos and have a fragile grasp and understanding of any of this. Quick question. I saw some guy poopooing the heck out of swales on farmland in favor of a keyline plow. Can swales really F-up an area under certain circumstances? Anyways. Your drawings are great
Keep em coming please. Thank you sir.
Mattski, thanks for the kind words :-) The swales thing is really a site-specific question. Short answer: yes, swales can be the wrong thing to do in certain circumstances. Like for example, you can waterlog a field so you impede access in springtime (in the PNW where I live). I could go on a lot about what situations are and are not appropriate for swales versus keyline plows. But you have to start with the "why" first: What exactly are you hoping to accomplish for a given location?
@@amillison I kept looking at your response's PNW, thinking, "What the hell does that mean?". I'm from North Jersey. 16 miles outside of Manhattan. Pacific Northwest with an extra W. I get it. Anyways. I've been living in Gladstone, OR outside of Portland since the spring of 16. I should know these abbreviations by now. . Permaculture really fascinates me, and I just found out about it a month or so ago. Your's certainly are my most watched. What can I say. I'm a pictures guy. Your drawings make things easier to understand. Thank you for your response. Keep em coming please.
Sick or slick?... Swales are ideal when rainfall is inconsistent. If rainfall is consistent and abundant and you can grow trees, swales aren't necessary. They can cause mudslides in the above example.
@@annburge291I meant sick. It's like when you hear someone use the word bad but it really means good. It's commonly used in New Jersey that way.
Great vid, thanks!! There’s one big factor you seem to have neglected to mention - but I can understand why you might be apprehensive about talking about it here, & I can imagine you wouldn’t want people to be too frighten… but it’s def a big consideration when deciding about where to make your house or village , and that is: you’re gonna want to make sure not to build too close to any areas that harbor evil forces. Whether that be a haunted region from which stories abound both remarkable _and_ profoundly unspeakable, or it’s the habitat of unknown monster-like creatures (which can be anything from ravenous, apex hyper-carnivorous cryptids to assorted demonic beings, phantams, & ghoulies), or even just a location that itself harbors dark forces, channeling malevolent energies from surrounding lands and amassing them as a sort of catchment basin of evil itself… then that’s PROBALLY a place to avoid putting your house or village.
Otherwise thanks for doing a great job a , of video thx
i am an architecture student and i find my geography lessons really boring. You made it interesting and fun to watch thanks !
i thank my recommendation gods. I am doing a project on Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements in the Netherlands and this video really helped me visualise and understand where and why people picked certain spots to live. GREAT VIDEO
Glad this helped! Good luck with your project!
one should not forget, that clustering is much of a cultural thing. back in the days it meant that you have to walk a considerable distance to reach your fields. still people eventually went for it. in Europe people started to cluster in the early high middle ages again after being spread out in the landscape for a few hundred years.
The black death put a damper on clustering for a while, because a ton of the clustered people died.
@@jadedandbitter did they really stop to cluster? Didn't they just fill in people from the countryside?
@@aaron.aaron.v.b.9448 you think all the country people were in a rush to fill the places of the people who had just died horrible deaths? It took a few generations. Subsequent generations moved back into the cities but my understanding it was like two generations on before urban populations really recovered.
@@jadedandbitter that's interesting. I did not know that it took so long. And at least to my knowledge people still lived in settlement clusters like villages and did not spread across the countryside.
@@aaron.aaron.v.b.9448 it wiped out up to 90% of the population of urban areas. Affected cities were effectively depopulated, with bodies left lying where they fell because nobody could dispose of them without dying themselves. Mongolian Marmot strains of Pneumonic Plague are ridiculously nasty, with the Black Death being the all time champ. People think of the plague as being stuff like the bubonic plague, persistent and deadly but slow spreading and controllable-the Black Death was airborne with a 99% mortality rate for those infected, killing in 24-48 hours from point of infection (often without symptoms for much of that period). It went through the world like a Reaper's Scythe, fast, vicious, and sparing nobody, only stopping when it burned itself out/weakened into more bubonic prone strains. Over 1/4 of the worlds total population died. (Source: Plague, by Wendy Orent)
Anybody close together just got wiped out due to the airborne nature and high mortality rate.
Sadly the lower cost of living by clustering backfires and raises the costs of living in any city.
That's a separate issue from clustering but rather zoning and property speculation.
Thanks man, I was really wondering where I should build my village for a while now.
10:01 Nahalal! 😁
I literally lived next to this place over half my life and recognized its famous circle immediately!
You said that it was the car that enabled people to spread out, instead of clustering in villages. But really, it was law and order administered impartially, so that the culture was what we would call an 'open,' or 'safe,' culture. In other words, when people are constantly having to defend against attack by either national enemies or some kind of warlord/robber baron, they cluster together for mutual defense. When they feel safe from such attacks, they are much more likely to spread out. The car makes it less inconvenient to be spread out, but it's not really the enabler. If you look at different countries around the world, consider what was going on when those towns and villages were built -- were the people in constant fear of attack? Or did they feel relatively safe, and able to build homes outside of a defended, walled village?
It is true that, in some respects, it uses less of some resources to build clustered communities. But I think a case could be made that more of other resources would be used. For instance, if a family is farming, they may have to travel quite a distance from their kitchen door to get to their farm fields, or to their section of forest. There are also the social considerations -- there are benefits, in that it's easier to step next door to visit with your neighbor, or spend an hour at the pub chatting with the guys. There are also increased opportunities for friction, if your near neighbor happens to be a jerk, because it's harder to avoid them.
I'm not necessarily against clustered communities, but I don't think the benefits are quite as cut-and-dried as what you said in the video. Seems like people ought to do a lot of thinking and considering and research before making a decision.
Thanks Kathleen and that is good feedback and something to think about. Best regards, Andrew
The thing about clustering is that there's evidence that higher social density can cause an increase in mental health problems.
excellent video!
that 20 degrees E/W i imagine would decrease a little bit as you go further from the equator, and that sunshine harvesting becomes more important
note: video includes to not build in the floodplain
First of your videos I saw. It's informative AND entertaining AND relaxing. Loved it!
It's not just about building a better house that we Americans need to learn. We need to cluster our houses and apartments and build villages. I'm trying to start an intentional permaculture community here in Maine, and some city folks moved in, but don't understand this. I've been to India and seen what real villages look like, but these people are electing to sprawl and drive with little concern for the environment. I didn't know I would have to explain this. I want to work with people who already understand this.
I'm not sure I totally agree. I mean it does make sense to cluster for sure but a lot of people that want to move to that lifestyle want to live sprawled out regardless whether it's the best option. I'm currently in the beginning stages of planning a small permaculture community. I have to choose now if I cluster or sprawl. It's not such a simple choice like you make out.
@@martinkendrik7776 sprawlers need not apply.
Came for the fluvial geomorphology. Stayed for the based fuck-cars discussion at 8:43
This is very helpful info. I'm planning on retiring on a land in SE Asia and your videos are a great resource.
Wow, amazing explanation! 👏 The way you presented!
While I respect your work to the highest degree and have learned much, I have to question several aspects of the "clustered houses" thing. Human mental well-being is frequently overlooked in discussions around the green agenda and it almost always assumes that certain aspects of "sprawl" are unavoidable or inescapable. I live way out in the sticks. The roads in are dirt, not even gravel. There are no pipes leading to or away from the property. There is no electricity to the property, currently. The house and barn were built almost entirely from materials sourced from the surrounding hills. The buildings, aesthetically, improve the landscape, imho, or at least certainly aren't degrading the views (unlike the windmills and everything else popping up some miles away). Long argument short, there are ways to balance all the trending variables without unnecessarily stacking people on top of each other. The case can be made that in a future where people will almost certainly be emotionally distanced from one another on an unprecedented scale (based on all of the research regarding screen/device time and current government and corporate motivations), the case can me made that it is absolutely critical to encourage people to spread out, live in nature, preserve our ancient knowledge and traditions, etc, and provide a reminder what actual human dignity looks like. I hope that my tone hasn't conveyed anger, rage, condemnation, what have you. I'm probably more jaded than anything else. For those that this resonates with, I hope that you find the courage and strength to be the change, if you aren't already doing so.
Thanks for your thoughts, Cletus. I understand that we are already in a very spread out development pattern in many places, and we're not going to undo that, and there is no shame for anyone living in spread out housing. I think the "clustered housing" concept applies to your situation in the efficiency of just clustering the various structures on your property for lower of infrastructure materials and costs and having a lower footprint of road surfaces. So the concept applies to the individual property as well. When I thought of who I was talking to in that particular segment, I imagined people planning a new development or ecovillage, where I see it as a common mistake that people just don't consider in the planning stages.I do think that people are generally healthier when they have to interact with other people on a regular basis. But there are certainly personality types that are really better suited to isolation. So I hope people think of my ideas on this as general, and not personal or dogmatic.
@@amillison Admittedly, I was in a bit of a rush when I commented and only afterwards did I realize that by the end of my little rant I had made plenty of poor assumptions. It's just a reflection, I suppose, of my increasing disgust with the direction of society with certain people/institutions (Klaus Schwab et al) at a helm they seized and having hijacked the language and character of systems, such as Permaculture, for their own benefit and to clear detriment of the overwhelming majority. There was, however, never any doubt in my mind as to your own values, shared values.
New neighborhoods CAN benefit from cluster building... but it does not mean they WOULD: they mostly build for max money gain without much consideration to mental health of ppl, and any environmental issues are *very* far away in their agenda too (otherwise road run-off would be utilized for side trees watering long ago, for example), aka "small plot - stick as many houses (looking into each other windows) as you can".
Globalists scream for climate & environment, while doing nothing practical to tidy up THEIR own mess - average human & local businesses have very little effect on both... unlike corporations.
Cluster building is beneficial only with like-mined individuals or with several family generations living together... otherwise, you may get very unpleasant human climate around you, with regular squabbles & rumors & stink-eyes, etc.~