What is Zadruga Urbana?

Republication from Zadruga Urbana

 

“Zadruga Urbana” is a group of people who came together with the shared dissatisfaction for the current system of food production, who believe in the necessity for a collective movement to take the process into their own hands. We believe that collective gardens raise people’s awareness of producing their own food, consuming locally and being autonomous/productive, enabling individuals without land of their own to produce food with a sensitivity for their local natural environment.

Our group wants to bring people together to learn and promote the ideas to find solutions for change towards a more sustainable life regardless of previous experience. Everyone is welcome to participate in our gardens and network, to learn and share the skills of producing our own food. We aim to use local seeds and to fertilize our crop naturally.

Why Free? And why this manifesto may be of interest

We will refrain from an endless analysis and discussion of why this book, among zillions, may be of interest to us, but we have highlighted some key phrases that drew our attention.  It may be easy to bash the book or to praise it and we may do both in the future, but it may have to be done together with all of you who may have read it.  What's the value of us providing with a reason not to read it but remain confident that its criticism is as good as reading it yourselves?

Both myself and my courageous publishers, Permanent Publications, have decided to publish a free online version of this book, and the normal paperback version under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, for three reasons:

First, the ideas and practical tools contained within it should be free to whoever may find them useful, and not made falsely scarce by the mechanisms of the monetary economy.

Second, just as actions display our beliefs more honestly than our words, the ways in which ideas and practical tools are shared are at least as important as the words themselves. I wanted the medium to be fully aligned with the message.

Third, I wanted to release it under a Creative Commons licence because it felt fraudulent to have my name on the front of this book. As I said in the acknowledgements page of my last book, what are my words but “an accumulation of all that has come

Building a Home with the Earthbag Technique

Step-by-Step Earthbag Building
by Owen Geiger http://www.instructables.com/id/Step-by-Step-Earthbag-Building/

This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process.

For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. Barbed wire between courses keeps bags from slipping and adds tensile strength. The final plastered walls look just like adobe structures. Thousands of people are now building with bags to create their dream homes, home offices, shops, resorts, rootcellars, storm cellars and survival shelters. Non-profit organizations are building schools, orphanages, emergency shelters and other structures.

I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. As the director of Builders Without Borders at that time, I searched all available affordable, sustainable building methods and decided building with bags was the most practical. They’re flood resistant (used for flood control), earthquake resistant (passed an ICBO shake table test), bullet and blast resistant (used for military bunkers), and now engineer and code approved plans are available. Just search for earthbag house plans on the Internet.