Back yard chicken coops are illegal in Montreal and all boroughs, but here is an example of bringing sustainable thinking to an old structure:

Sourse: Transition Times

Chicken Coop

The black chicken coop on display inside the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is sleek, like a chicken-house-of-the-future. The air slats that ring the wooden coop are perfectly parallel, and the square nest boxes that line the back are uniform.

Even the tiny ladder that allows the chickens to climb up to the ledge where they’d sleep looks like it was made with precision — which it was.

But the idea behind University of Colorado senior Jeff Troutman’s coop is decidedly down-to-earth. The architecture student set out to build a chicken-house that could be manufactured easily and inexpensively — and sold at an affordable price to Boulder’s burgeoning set of urban hen-keepers.

“I would love to see it become a functional coop in people’s backyards,” he said.

Keeping a flock of chickens next to the lawnmower shed is a practice that’s taking off across the country and across Colorado, as more and more cities make allowances for backyard birds. Boulder allows them, as do Superior and Longmont.

For proponents like Troutman, who, as a renter, has never had a flock of his own, backyard chicken-keeping is partly about knowing where your food comes from — and where your waste goes.

“That’s the idea behind this — to create a cycle, instead of this throw-out culture,” he said…

“It’s part of our local culture,” Pyatt said of Boulder. “People want to have backyard hens or gardens, but they don’t know how.”