The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City is a comprehensive guide to achieving a completely sustainable urban lifestyle by creating a mini-ecosystem where residents grow their own fruits and vegetables, raise chickens, rabbits, and fish, recycle 90% of their waste, solar heat their hot water, and use a variety of other alternative technologies-all on a 1/8-acre city lot. Long considered the bible of urban homesteading, this book is the result of four years of living with and refining the systems of the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, California-a collaborative project which combined the collective skills of the members of the Farallones Institute to develop a center for creating and testing experimental, ecologically stable and resource-conserving living systems. With its vision of an intimate connection between the urban habitat and ecological principles The Integral Urban House will inspire and empower people to act within their own communities to create places where they can live more sustainably. The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City is a magnificent, inspiring record of eco-technically effective intelligent human cooperation... This is magnificent news for humanity. We are on our way. -- R. Buckminster Fuller Civilized cities, nourishing food, renewable energy, closed nutrient cycles, -- these form the vision of this pioneering guidebook. With it we can start to build a new urban culture that is practical, sustainable, inviting and exciting. -- Amory Lovins

Juxtaposes black-and-white photographs of houses in Hatfield, Massachusetts taken between 1882 and 1907 with color photographs of the same houses taken in the late 1990s, and features text that offers comparisons of life in the different eras.