Norway · Open project note · housing and landscape

Can a neighbourhood be designed as a living system?

Wording and precision revised on 12 October 2026. The source record retains the dates stated in the article.

Økotun began with private homes, small neighbourhood clusters, shared functions and a blue-green landscape weave. A multilingual search opened another question: what changes when the area is treated as a network of relationships that must work through daily life, seasons and changing lives?

Experimental Newsroom · Published 29 September 2026

A housing development can be drawn as a collection of homes, roads, green areas and technical systems. Økotun, a provisional LivingFuture concept developed by Bjørn Moe Aldema, is testing another starting point. Its current working model has about one hundred homes in five smaller neighbourhood clusters, one shared commons, fully private homes and a connected blue-green landscape weave. Site, land, economics and physical implementation remain open.

When Experimental Newsroom used permaculture as a source of inspiration, the clearest finding came from the search itself: the term reaches beyond cultivation. A 2025 review analysed 975 publications in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French. Across the languages, permaculture was strongly associated with design, agriculture and ecology, while community, education and sustainability also recurred. That opened a wider question about how people, labour, nature and governance can enter the same design.

From a function map to a geography of attention

Permaculture often places functions according to how much attention, visiting and care they require. Germany's Permakultur Institut describes zoning through intensity of use and frequency of attention. At the French Bec Hellouin farm, INRAE gives a concrete example: reorganising circulation around a growing area produced a substantial labour gain.

Transferred to housing, the question becomes richer than “where should the greenhouse go?” How many daily trips does a location create? Who makes them in winter? How far must an operator carry equipment? Which functions does a family meet on the way home, and which are deliberately kept outside private everyday life?

We can call this a geography of attention: movement, care, maintenance, deliveries and professional operations are layered onto the site map before form is fixed.

The threshold between private and shared

Økotun already uses a gradient from the private home through a threshold and a neighbourhood cluster to shared space and landscape. Cohousing research makes that transition more important. A 2026 ethnographic study found support, security and meaning in a self-governing cohousing community, alongside social burden, conflict and distress. Community can therefore be a resource with real costs.

The design task is neither maximum contact nor isolation. A threshold can offer a bench, planting, bicycle space and the possibility of a brief conversation. The same home must still be reachable without a social obligation. For Økotun, the principle can be stated simply: contact should be available and withdrawal legitimate.

Every benefit has a workload

A shared garden can provide food, learning, contact with nature and meeting places. A workshop can support repair, knowledge and sharing. Those same functions also create planning, cleaning, repair, coordination, budgeting and holiday cover.

Research on cohousing and household work shows why visibility matters. Collective tasks can be distributed more openly when the work is visible, while the mental load of remembering, planning and coordinating can remain hidden. This reaches a central Økotun risk: green and social value can look inexpensive when labour time is absent from the calculation.

Permaculture's idea of “yield” therefore becomes more useful when paired with a counterweight. Each shared function can be tested through six fields: benefit, burden, owner, frequency, visibility and exit. What does it provide? What does it require? Who is responsible? How often must someone attend to it? Is the workload visible? Can a resident opt out and still belong?

Multiple functions, with clear failure boundaries

Permaculture often seeks relationships where one element can perform several functions. Nature-based solutions make a similar promise: water management can also create habitat, cooling and recreation. A 2025 review, however, identifies a clear implementation gap. Expertise, funding, evidence of performance, stakeholder conflict and long-term governance help determine whether good intentions work in practice.

For Økotun this corrects the idea that more integration is always better. A rain garden can slow water, support vegetation and be beautiful. A water system involving hygiene requirements, animals, bathing and treatment needs separation where failure has different consequences.

A possible design rule follows: combine compatible functions; create more than one route to critical needs; separate functions when failure means different things.

Satoyama: nature also needs stewardship

The Japanese idea of satoyama opened another line of inquiry. Japan's Ministry of the Environment describes these as socio-ecological production landscapes shaped through human use and management. Valuable nature is therefore not synonymous with the absence of work. Some areas should be protected. Others may require mowing, grazing, habitat management, water management or active responses to overgrowth.

For Økotun this suggests at least four landscape regimes: protection with minimal human intervention, observation and light stewardship, actively managed habitat, and productive cultural landscape. Each needs its own rationale and line of responsibility.

Co-design without compulsory operational duties

An Indian study published in 2025 developed a participatory permaculture toolkit through repeated co-creation workshops with farmers over two years. Maps, visual aids and physical models were refined through actual use. Korean research on community villages similarly points to social environment, maintenance and management, regional context and economics as dimensions that must be considered together if a community is to endure.

This opens an important distinction for Økotun. Residents can have real influence over neighbourhood space, shared functions and everyday routes without thereby acquiring a permanent duty to operate water systems, landscapes, food production or technical infrastructure. Co-design and shared operational responsibility are different agreements.

What the evidence actually says

A study of nine commercially relevant permaculture sites in Germany and Luxembourg found higher soil carbon, lower soil bulk density and greater species richness for several measured groups than on local comparison fields. The researchers also stress that evidence on whole permaculture systems remains limited. A newer review of temperate food forests presents a similar picture: promising ecological and social possibilities, with fragmented evidence on production, economics and long-term effects.

None of these studies demonstrates that Økotun will work. They also establish no optimal size for a Norwegian housing development. Their value here is that they help turn attractive ideas into better questions and testable design choices.

What the search changed

Preserved: Private homes, voluntary community, smaller neighbourhood clusters, blue-green structure and professional responsibility for critical systems.
Enriched: Location should be judged through attention and labour over time, alongside function and distance.
Enriched: Thresholds between private and shared space become design objects in their own right.
Enriched: Every shared function gets both a benefit and a burden, with a visible owner and an exit route.
Corrected: Multifunctionality is useful when functions are compatible; systems with different safety consequences need clear boundaries.
Still open: Site, economics, demand, ecological baseline, housing mix and the real operating model.

From green housing to relationship design

The strongest lesson from the search is less decorative than the word permaculture can suggest. The question is larger than how many ponds, fruit trees or shared rooms a development can contain. It is whether the relationships between people, labour, nature, resources and responsibility are understandable enough to endure and correctable enough to change.

For Økotun, that means a shift from drawing objects to drawing relationships. It remains a design hypothesis. The next useful test is a concrete Norwegian site scenario where a conventional housing model and Tunvev 100 can be compared on terrain, water, nature, everyday movement, labour and operations.

Sources and limits

About the project and sources: Økotun is an unbuilt concept developed by Bjørn Moe Aldema. The project’s internal LivingFuture profile was checked before publication. External sources are used to examine design principles, counterevidence and transfer possibilities; they do not establish local feasibility, market demand or the effects of Økotun.

AI assisted with multilingual research, translation and language editing. Bjørn Moe Aldema holds human editorial responsibility.