Recently I decided to follow the instruction "Think Global and Act Local", and to that end I have started to try and change my buying behavior (local produce, buy less, buy services instead of things), and my living style (shorter showers, recycling, drink tap water instead of bottled etc) and also started to think about what we could do to our (rented) house to reduce our energy and water usage.

I'm an Urban Designer, so when I think about our house, I naturally begin to think about the relationship with the other things around it - the street outside, the laneway behind, the stormwater system, the street trees, the local park & my neighbours houses.

From both and ecological and urban design perspective - it makes sense to think this way. Because cities and ecologies are both systems, and when you're dealing with systems it doesn't help you much to focus solely on one element within the system, what is important in the relationships between the elements.

So thinking about it that way - my house is literally connected to a series of systems; the road network, power, gas and electricity systems, stormwater and drainage systems. My neighbours and I share the problems of pollutants from the two major roadways nearby, our cars spend most of the day and night beside each other on the street, our oranges and teabags probably travel half way around the world on the same shipping container, get loaded onto the same truck and delivered in the same box to our local supermarket.

We are also connected in less physical ways; by council and community infrastructure, by cultural events and attitudes, and by personal relationships (my family have only been living here for a few months, but Jo and Joanne; the couple that own this house have lived here for 16 years, and they have strong relationships with dozens of households in this neighbourhood).

It makes sense then to expand my thinking past the boundaries of my own house in order to think effectively about achieving a higher level of sustainability. At the same time it seems to me that the best way to achieve change is not to worry about what everyone else is doing and "heal thyself" - because, lets face it, that is hard enough. And in fact, it's only ever by changing yourself, that you can ever change or affect anything else.

Ok, so that leaves me stuck between a rock and a hard place really...

Perhaps the solution is to try and find a middle ground between trying to deal with a whole system or large scale series of interrelated systems and thinking about only me and my house. The secret is to identify a mini-system which is manageable in some sense - that I can get my head around, and maybe hope to affect in some way.

I'm going to define 'a block', which I'll think of as my neighbourhood. Of course I'm not trying to over simplify, I know that these systems and relationships can't be diced up into neat units like that, but I think even Christopher Alexander would approve of finding a focus area, or a defining a 'problem'.

I'll define two areas on two separate scales - a 400m five minute walk radius (so loved by New Urbanists) and a 100m radius centred around my house. I'll draw the boundaries in the middle of the housing blocks rather than in the middle of the road - because I want to cater for the fact that over the parked car relationships are more common in my neighbourhood that over the back fence (or back lane) relationships.

Ok, so here below is my subject area - my neighbourhood, my little part of Collingwood - including Hotham, Gold, Charlotte and Wellington Streets. And my project is to try and design a series of interventions which can be taken up by residents or retrofitted to make this one block ecologically sustainable.

In the next post I'll define some clearer & more detailed objectives. And also take a closer look at my neighbourhood - and maybe do a kind of site or context analysis.