Julia Watson : Indigenous Designs Can Guide Our Response to the Climate Crisis.

 

As an architect, activist and academic, Julia Watson has spent nearly twenty years studying Indigenous ways of living, knowing and building. In her bestselling book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, she explores what ancient, ecological innovations from around the world can teach us about our relationship with nature. From living root bridges that can withstand floods, to sunken garden beds that thrive in the desert, many of the examples in the book also offer valuable lessons about climate resilience. On 3 June 2022, Julia will speak on the main stage at What Design Can Do Live Amsterdam about how these technologies can guide us towards a ‘future that’s built upon symbiosis’.
 
In the lead-up to the event, Julia shared about her extraordinary work, and her life-long interest in Indigenous systems and philosophies. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia, she remembers encountering different cultures and landscapes at a young age. ‘I grew up in a place called West End, which had a really strong Indigenous presence. The area was originally called Kurilpa, meaning ‘place of the water rat’. And it was an area where—pre-colonialism—local Jagera and Turrbal tribes would come to meet in the beautiful floodplains by the river.’
 
After high school, she decided to pursue architecture at Queensland University, where she was able to develop her research into Aboriginal cultures and practices. For Julia, the experience would end up changing the way she thought about the history of her own country. ‘Even though I grew up in a multicultural area, you are taught a certain history about your country, and it’s a very colonial history. Doing architecture school, I was exposed to things that discredited these narratives and gave a different, decolonial perspective of Australia.’
 
From then on, Julia became fascinated with the ecological, cultural, and spiritual threads that bind humans to their environments. ‘I was learning all these Indigenous stories about this landscape that I had lived in for my whole life, but had no understanding of,’ she explains. ‘And I think that for anyone who's grown up in a place like that, to suddenly learn about a culture that had been there forty to fifty thousand years before you—that’s a really big moment that cuts through your understanding of place.’
 
Redefining technology
 
The next few years would see Julia continue her studies at Harvard University, and travel the world to research various communities and their sacred sites. During a visit to the rice terraces of Bali, she learned that traditional farmers on the island had developed a water management system called the Subak, which was maintained through a collaborative network of canals, tunnels, villages, and temples. Here was a thousand-year-old innovation that was not only sophisticated, but sustainable, too.
 
‘I realised then that these rice terraces were a technology—and that they’re a technology that maybe you could build other technology into,’ she recalls. ‘After Bali, I got introduced to the work of other communities like the Maʻdān in Southern Iraq. And I thought: these are all incredible technologies that no one is talking about!’ Although they were often complex, adaptive, biodiverse and deeply integrated with local communities, she found that broader design discourse would often ignore these feats of human ingenuity, deeming them primitive.
 
How many technologies are out there today that haven’t been considered as technologies yet? And what would happen if instead of dismissing these ideas, we learned to celebrate—and centre—them? These were the questions that ultimately led Julia to the concept of ‘Lo-TEK’. The term is a conjunction of Local and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and offers a new mythology of technology that is rooted in Indigenous methods, beliefs and practices. Eventually, it would become the core of Julia’s 2019 book with Taschen, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism.
 
From superiority to symbiosis
 
Informed by more than seven years of travel and research, the book offers a diverse blueprint for resilient, regenerative design. Through four sections spanning Mountains, Forests, Deserts, and Wetlands, it highlights nature-based technologies from 18 countries including Peru, Tanzania, Iran, India, and Indonesia. Many were borne out of necessity, cultivated by Indigenous tribes as a means to grow food, make shelter, and protect themselves from natural disasters. Most are also steeped in cultural significance, often connecting spirituality with caring for the land. Viewed together, they are a powerful reminder that humans can live in harmony with nature, and indeed have done so for many centuries.
 
Julia’s hope is that the book will provoke new conversations about the value of Indigenous knowledge, and the urgent need to rethink our response to climate change. ‘Often we talk about sustainability as a catch-all for solving problems with a lack of understanding about resource limits, or inputs and outputs, or ecological footprints,’ she says. ‘But it’s also about a lack of understanding of how the human being relates to their environment, and how the environment relates to the human being. It’s a very reciprocal relationship. I think ‘sustainability’ doesn’t capture that fundamental understanding, which is why in the book, I talk about symbiosis.’
 
If we could unlearn the idea that humans are separate from nature, Julia believes we’ll have a better chance at designing solutions that are truly active, adaptive and restorative. ‘Sustainability has come from our disassociation from nature,’ she observes, pointing Western society’s legacy of colonisation and exploitation. Indigenous people have an understanding of the Earth that is ‘far stronger, far more integrated and more place-based than that.’
 
‘Another prevalent understanding of local and Indigenous communities is that our role on this Earth is to protect other forms of life on Earth,’ Julia adds. The great irony here, of course, is that Indigenous communities are the ones who are suffering the most from the consequences of climate change. With so much at stake, it’s urgent that we pay more attention to the idea of custodianship in mainstream discussions about sustainability. ‘That responsibility needs to come to the foreground: that our role as human beings is to be the custodian of life. It’s more important than ever that we understand and support that role.’
 
Imagining future cities

 
When she’s not writing or teaching, Julia spends a lot of her time exploring ways to put these ideas into practice. Often she does this as the creative director of her eponymous landscape and urban design studio, which is oriented toward the practice of ‘rewilding’. She also regularly contributes to various exhibitions across the globe, and recently completed an installation for a new show at the Barbican, Our Time on Earth. ‘It’s an extension of the ideas expressed in my book,’ she tells us. For the project, she collaborated with three of the communities in the book to project how their technologies could be applied to urban environments in 2040.
 
So what might our cities look like if they were designed according to the principles of Lo-TEK? For Julia, the question is less about replacing one mode of innovation with the other, and more about marrying different ways of knowing. As she puts it: ‘How do we, not translate one to the other, but create a middle ground for both perspectives to exist and understand each other?’ It’s in this space—between skyscrapers and ancient wells, artificial intelligence and local wisdom, that we might find the answers we’re looking for.
 
How to live and build in symbiosis with nature.  BNO, May 18, 2022. 

In Iran, agricultural oases form amidst tirelessly harsh deserts. They are fed unseen by underground tunnels that channel water several kilometers from mountain to field. The burrowed streams, dug by hand, are called qanats. Qanats trace back to the Persian Empire in 500 BCE. They were carved throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Northern Africa, and into Europe via the Silk Road. Having supplied seventy-five percent of Iran’s water for household use and irrigation up until the 1970’s, they are an ancient technology that still bears lessons and relevance for life today. The qanat’s function and engineering marvel is akin to the Roman aqueducts, so why do they remain far less celebrated?
 
Around the world, indigenous innovation has integrated whole societies into nature. Lo-TEK . Design by Radical Indigenism collects these stories. The book is an introduction to eighteen indigenous infrastructures. From the qanats in Iran to the Zuni waffle gardens in New Mexico, each has been built and adapted over generations to mutually sustain communities and the environments that they live in. The presented cultures and technologies are diverse. Yet, they all echo reminders that humans can be an integral part of a robust and healthy nature.
 
The book’s context is captured in the idea that the modern world is “drowning in information while starving for wisdom”. Indigenous peoples are a vital source for discerning how to care for nature while sustaining our own needs. In a period where the Earth is changing at a rapid pace due to harmful human impact, renewed relationships with the natural world are gravely needed. The book’s intention is to challenge the notion that indigenous culture is primitive and instead, illuminate how indigenous peoples have cultivated ingenious solutions for inhabiting the world. While indigenous people’s hold invaluable knowledge for the future of the world, the book also frames some of the ways that they continue to be threatened and displaced by processes of colonialism – disproportionately effected by global patterns of capitalism, climate change, urban expansion, and resource extraction. Overall, Lo-TEK is not a forceful outcry for change that is urgent, but the book does introduce an important range of issues that have led to and perpetuate the erasure of indigenous voices and ways of life from predominant ideas of progress and technology.
 
The book coins and defines the term “Lo-TEK” as “a design movement to rebuild an understanding of indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture that generates sustainable, climate-resilient infrastructures.”  Author Julia Watson is a designer and academic. She teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In addition she heads Julia Watson Studio, a New York-based practice that focuses on urban, ecological, and spiritual design projects. It is no wonder then that the book feels written and illustrated for an audience of designers. However, the innovations and issues that are the core themes of the book are relevant to the everyday reader. They remain accessible through beautiful photographs, creatively drawn illustrations and diagrams, and writing that is information dense but clear; also including on-page definitions for any technical terms.
 
The book is divided into four landscapes – mountains, deserts, forests, and wetlands. Each section gives a written introduction to a region’s people, culture, histories, and the influence of a local ecology on infrastructural innovations. The infrastructures range from fantastical such as the Jingkieng Dieng Jri living root bridges in India and the Uros’ totora reed floating islands in Peru, to simple yet highly effective techniques such as the Waitiwina Dams of the Enawenê-nawê in Brazil or the Acadja Aquaculture of the Tofinu in Benin. The book shares how uniquely people have interpreted similar environments while also highlighting the remarkable similarities that can co-exist in innovations taking place on opposite sides of the world.
 
One of the key themes is the importance of relationships – relationships between generations of people within a community; relationships between people, plants, and animals; and relationships of respect, reverence, and sacredness in caring for a landscape’s long-term sustainability. The book’s focus on infrastructure is a way to shift preconceived notions about technology. But the deeper work that is asked of designers, and that is more broadly applicable, is how can we begin to connect with these forms of relationships in our lives today.
 
The second term of the book’s title – Radical Indigenism – is a concept from Cherokee Nation scholar Eva Marie Garroutte. Being radical stems from the need to rebuild from the root. The book is a strong advocate for the tangible value of indigenous knowledge and its ability to inform the future of humanity collectively. Where it could have gone one step further is to call more loudly for recognized indigenous leadership. In the end this feels like a critical missing dimension of the book’s proposal for newfound applications of indigenous knowledge. It is not just generations old bodies of knowledge that can guide change, it is also the people who have cultivated and stewarded them.
 
There are five interviews that discuss a specific infrastructure’s context in greater depth. However, only two of the five interviews are with people from the specific culture that is being focused on. The two interviews provide a more intimate perspective on an infrastructure’s role within social, cultural, spiritual, and political changes across the current generation. The voices enrich the presentation of a culture’s traditional knowledge and more instances of this throughout the book would have been welcomed.
 
Lo-TEK . Design by Radical Indigenism engages the opportunity to contribute to how traditional knowledge is valued, taught, shared, and ultimately utilized. As a thoughtful introduction to indigenous infrastructures and forms of knowledge, the book translates how invaluable they are to aiding a rapidly changing world. As the basis for a new design movement though, more growth is still required.
 
 
“Lo-TEK . Design by Radical Indigenism” introduces knowledge from around the world for how people can live integrated with nature. By Bennet Song. International Examiner, March 23, 2021. 

For generations, Indigenous people have used slow but sophisticated technology to build elaborate structures. Architect Julia Watson says their designs can guide our response to the climate crisis.
 
Julia Watson is an architect and the author of Lo-TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism, a book about using Indigenous technologies to design a sustainable future. She is a lecturer at Columbia University's School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and she has previously taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design as well as the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's School of Architecture.
 
Her design portfolio includes the Rockefeller Center Summer Gardens, Bali's first UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Gateway to the City of El Segundo at Los Angeles International Airport.
 
Watson received her master's in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, and her bachelor's in Architecture from The University of Queensland.
 
Julia Watson: What Can We Learn From Indigenous Design Developed Over Generations?  NPR, February 5, 2021. 

We’re beginning to understand a great irony of climate change: that the people most affected by it often did the least to cause it. What’s less discussed is that many of those people also have the technology, philosophy, and knowledge that could have prevented the rising temperatures, the uncontrollable wildfires, and the dying coral reefs in the first place.
 
They’re people like the Chagga in Tanzania, whose forest agriculture systems support Mount Kilimanjaro’s rich biodiversity and feed a rapidly-growing population. Or the Kayapó in the Amazon Basin, who use fire to cultivate their crops, replenish the soil, and protect their land from deforestation. In Iran, Persians have developed qanats, or underground aqueducts, which serve as natural foils to our energy-intensive pumps and wells. Then there’s the Khasi people of Meghalaya, India—known as the wettest place on earth—who have a solution for navigating heavy rains and monsoons: They’ve trained rubber fig trees to grow across rivers. Over the course of decades, the massive roots grow, tangle, and strengthen into the only bridges—natural or otherwise—that can withstand surging water levels and powerful storms.
 
These are people who were embracing regenerative agriculture, zero-waste living, and nature-based solutions long before they were 2020 buzzwords. Architect, landscape designer, and Harvard and Columbia professor Julia Watson traveled across 18 countries for six years to visit these communities and document their ways of life in her new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, published by Taschen earlier this year. Beyond shining a light on their cultures and innovations, Watson illustrates how indigenous methods actually benefit the planet—and how they might be adopted worldwide in the face of climate crisis.

 
It all starts with the meaning behind Lo-TEK, Watson’s subversion of “low-tech,” with TEK standing for Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The suggestion is that we need to unlearn our Western definition of “low-tech” as basic or outdated, and similarly problematize our embrace of all things “high-tech” and “disruptive.” Watson says Lo-TEK has come to represent a broader design movement: “In contrast to the homogeneity of the modern world,” she writes, “indigeneity is reframed as an evolutionary extension of life in symbiosis with nature.”
 
That’s what the Khasis, the Mayalali, the Chagga, and the other communities in Lo-TEK have in common: a deeply symbiotic relationship with their surroundings. They see themselves as part of the environment, not separate from it, and thus have no desire to harm it. (In most cases, nature is better because of them—something no Westerner can say about his or her environs.) There’s often a spiritual significance in their land, too: The rubber fig tree is sacred to the Khasis, for instance, and the Kayapó believe their ancestors learned from bees, so they have hives that produce honey, pollinate their crops, and maintain biodiversity in the Amazon. (As bee colonies disappear around the world, Watson calls their approach “an inspiration for designers on how to collaborate with nature.”)
 
On a recent Zoom call, Watson described these chapters as “parables” for what we need to do and how we need to change our thinking; Lo-TEK isn’t meant to be a “how-to guide” to fix the planet. Her vision for the future is more or less a hybrid of Lo-TEK and high-tech: While she isn’t suggesting we replace the Golden Gate Bridge with living roots, maybe an urban designer could find inspiration in the Khasis’ methods and “guide” trees on a Brooklyn street to grow into a canopy and provide constant shade. “How do we seed our public spaces to start to perform differently?” she explains. “If there was more intention, and we were more invested in our streets and our neighborhoods, what would that look like?”
 
It’s a mindset shift that promotes balance, resourcefulness, and a re-centering of indigenous voices after centuries of ignorance and exploitation. As far back as the Enlightenment, the Western attitude has focused on colonization, not collaboration, so the opportunities to learn from indigenous practices were wholly missed. Now, the destruction of the planet makes the gaps in our knowledge all too obvious. Another irony, of course, is that we’ve never had greater access to education, news, resources, and ideas. As Watson puts it: “We are drowning in this age of information, but we are starving for wisdom.”
 
Against the backdrop of the recent wildfires in California, Australia, the Amazon, the Pantanal wetlands, and even the Arctic—“natural disasters” exacerbated by global warming and extreme temperatures—it seems abundantly clear that wisdom is what’s missing. We know that human activity and industrialization are contributing to climate change, and despite subtle progress and rising awareness, we’re miles away from “reversing” its effects. Politicians and corporations are making pledges for 2050, yet scientists say we have less than 12 years to act. Clearly the “high-tech” solutions we’ve come up with aren’t enough. As Watson says: “We cannot find solutions to the problems we face with the same ideology from which those problems emerged.” The remaining option is to slow down, reconnect with nature, and listen to indigenous communities.

 
The fires offer a timely example. We’re now beginning to understand how indigenous practices can actually prevent wildfires from getting worse—or avoid them altogether. While the “modern” view of land management typically calls for quickly extinguishing fires, indigenous methods—from Aboriginal communities to Native American tribes—have long understood the benefits of “cultural burning,” which connects spirituality with caring for the land by using fire to clear away dead leaves and regenerate the soil. Watson points out that in Australia, the areas with a history of cultural burning were actually spared by the larger wildfires; the flames essentially went around them, because there wasn’t an excess of dead vegetation or “fuel” to burn. Here in the U.S., the California government is now beginning to collaborate with local tribes to better understand and adopt some of their fire methods, and in Australia, organizations like Firesticks Alliance work with local governments and communities to spread awareness around cultural burning and Aboriginal practices.
 
 “People are starting to recognize that we need nature-based technologies and indigenous cultures, but we have to allow these people to lead beside us or in front of us,” Watson adds. “It has to happen with the community, because we’re never going to understand everything [as outsiders]. We can look at their knowledge, and we can look at their technologies, and we can look at the system, but that’s just an observatory exercise. Climate change is completely dependent upon us recognizing that and really working towards decolonizing our understanding.”
 
Lo-TEK tells a few stories: of the significance and value of indigenous wisdom; of our need to live in harmony with nature; and of the fallacy of unbridled industrialization and growth. The most energizing story, though, is of the climate solutions laid out in these pages. In a moment of mounting climate anxiety and cascading disasters, these are real, tangible, positive things we can do right now—technologies that already exist and span generations. Lo-TEK is like a blueprint; we just need to figure out how to use it. “A big part of my work right now is just making people notice,” Watson adds. “Let’s make governments notice, and designers, and the United Nations… We need to be heard and understood by as many people as possible. That’s a huge first step.”
 
In addition to publishing Lo-TEK, Watson recently hosted a TED Talk and is working with brands like Cartier on their sustainability plans. Through her design studio, Watson Salembier, she’s also executing “rewilding” projects in public urban spaces; she recently filled Rockefeller Center’s plaza with grasses, flowers, and trees native to the northeast, an experiment in rebuilding the city’s biodiversity.
 
As Watson concludes in her book, we have a choice: “We can either continue a narrow view of technology informed by our distance from nature, or we can acknowledge that this is just one way, and not the only way, for humans to live.” If we can transform our relationship with the planet from “superior to symbiotic,” as she puts it, we might actually get somewhere—and Lo-TEK provides 400 pages of inspiration. “Climate change is happening, but these things are happening too,” she adds. “We have to use what we’ve got, and this is the very best we’ve got right now.”
 
How Indigenous Architecture Can Change the Way We Live on Earth. By Emily Farra. Vogue, October 27, 2020. 

At its core, design is an inherently futurist medium. In the 1960s, as the writer Maggie Gram has noted, key figures in the Modern design movement often used the word “design” indistinguishably from the word “planning.” This isn’t surprising: Design, like planning, was the profession most concerned with the future. Today is not so different, but what we mean by “the future,” a utopian ideal throughout much of the 20th century, is now undeniably much darker as we progress further into the 21st. To look ahead at what role design will play on an increasingly troubled planet takes us back to the fundamental polysemy behind the word itself. At various times it has encompassed drawing and architecture, products and graphics — in fact, everything short of the creation of the world itself (and, in the risible concept of “intelligent design,” sometimes that, too). Once industrial design became a profession in the early 20th century, the promiscuity of its aims and undefined nature of its objectives meant that designers felt they could do very nearly anything. In its most heroic phase, the mid-20th century, industrial designers gave themselves over to pronouncements that suggested they alone held the key to this savage parade. “What are the boundaries of design?” was the question posed in 1969 to Charles Eames, who, with his partner, Ray, designed chairs, toys, housing, films, exhibitions and, to a certain extent, the very nature of communication. Eames responded, “What are the boundaries of problems?”

 
In the months just before the novel coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the world, various museums were beginning to think about what the future might hold for design, namely in the face of a different existential crisis, equally characterized by uncertainty: that if we do not move decisively to mitigate the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, we will experience catastrophic degrees of warming. David Wallace-Wells’s 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth” laid out the scenarios: acres of the earth denuded; coastlines and islands swallowed; mass extinctions of flora and fauna; mass human deaths. In other words, design in recent years has been unavoidably faced with a question many of us never thought we would have to ask: How do you design for the future when the future you are designing for will not exist?
 
One of the institutional reckonings with this predicament is “Designs for Different Futures,” an exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where it is currently on view. The show’s assumptions about the future preceded the coronavirus, so its focus is predominantly on climate change, war, refugees and mass surveillance rather than disease. One of the works featured in the show in Philadelphia, “Resurrecting the Sublime” (2019), is a collaboration between the synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and the smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas, with the help of the biotechnology firm Ginkgo Bioworks and the sensory experiences company International Flavors & Fragrances. The piece recreates the scent of flowers that have gone extinct in the last 200 years. The particular specimen evoked in the installation — an unassuming room with two glass sides containing three large limestone rocks, in which an almost sickly floral scent is diffused in the midst of the otherwise anodyne museum environment — is Orbexilum stipulatum, or Falls-of-the-Ohio scurfpea, a flowering plant last found in 1881 on the now defunct Rock Island in the Ohio River near present-day Louisville, Ky. It is thought to have gone extinct because of the overhunting of buffalo, without whose grazing the plant couldn’t survive.

 
The work suggests the fundamental paradox of contemporary design — that in an attempt to make our environment more and more comfortable, we have destroyed that environment itself. With that irony in mind, it is unsurprising that the height of the Covid-19 outbreak this past spring gave birth to a booming speculative industry for designers — be they architects, urban planners or product developers — who began reimagining parks, homes and offices in a world whose rhythms would be controlled not by the stock market or the climate but by rising and falling infection levels. Writing for Dezeen in March, the Ukrainian architect and designer Sergey Makhno predicted a new zeal for bunkerlike houses instead of apartments, an end to the trend of mass industry and a rise in private farming and general self-sufficiency. In New York, a city that has been designed so that people exist shoulder to shoulder and on top of one another, previously banal facts of urban existence — the subway, the grassy knoll of a park — transformed overnight into dangerous propositions that had to be avoided; as the city began to emerge from quarantine, these same transformed banalities became symbols of how design often reflects the changes in the world around it: Some parks have instigated social-distancing circles, drawn in white chalk, so that visitors know to stay six feet apart from one another in an effort to curb transmission of the virus. If it was on some level a failure of design that helped spread the virus so vastly throughout New York, then the thinking seems to be that perhaps a better kind of design will guide us out of this moment.

 
Another exhibition — initially stalled by the pandemic when the city’s cultural institutions shuttered this past March — that imagines human design in a post-human world is “Countryside, the Future,” produced by the architect Rem Koolhaas’s think tank and research studio, AMO, and on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This show, which includes charts, objects, ephemera, images and data related to rural environments, as well as an indoor farm growing cherry tomatoes, all but ignores the apocalyptic side of the climate crisis to instead focus on a statistic: Though most of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, 98 percent of the earth is still nonurban. Impressed by this fact, Koolhaas and his partners use the exhibition to traverse the (mostly) uninhabited earth with unsystematic abandon. On view are suits that use a lightweight exoskeleton to amplify the physical strength of elderly Japanese farmers, as well as images of the refugee crisis in Germany and Italy and an area in Uganda where mountain gorillas have grown accustomed to the presence of tourists. Of course, looming disasters remain inescapable: One section of the exhibition, which includes a replica of a woolly mammoth skeleton, is devoted to the thawing permafrost in central Siberia, whose continued melting will, by 2030, have released untold levels of carbon into the atmosphere and shift the climate crisis into climate nightmare.
 
That various apocalyptic scenarios are now unavoidable even when trying to think hopefully about the future has made contemporary design into a backlash against itself. In the 2019 book “Lo-TEK” (a response to the old architectural and design movement called high-tech, whose most famous example is the 1977 Centre Pompidou in Paris, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, with its facade of exposed metal innards), the urban designer and activist Julia Watson seeks answers from Indigenous peoples around the world, because of their long practice in handling climatological disasters and other unforeseen events. She studies bridges made from living roots in Meghalaya, India, and advanced canal farming around Lake Titicaca in Peru by the Incan peoples. Where “Designs for Different Futures” feels high-tech in its imagination — envisioning, for example, that humans might perhaps one day be cloned from DNA extracted from gum left under park benches — Lo-TEK imagines that the knowledge of how to survive the future is already embedded in low-energy, often ancient practices. Both allude to ways that designers have begun to ask what a world characterized by increasing robotization, declining biodiversity and the disappearance of technologies that work in harmony with nature will look like. Climatological disasters exist in the degrees of warming we are prepared as a society to accept, to the extent that, at a certain point, we will still be able to call ourselves a society.
 
The biggest gap in the congruence between design and the future was the advent of the environmental movement. Suddenly there was a recognition that design could not take uncontaminated water, stable food supplies or clean air for granted. In 1969’s “Design With Nature,” one of the founding documents of late 20th-century environmental planning, the landscape architect Ian McHarg proposed vatically that “man is that uniquely conscious creature who can perceive and express. He must become the steward of the biosphere. To do this, he must design with nature.” Yet prophetic utterance was not the tenor of the book or what McHarg had in mind. In practice, he wanted landscape architects to embrace territory-level planning, rather than fiddle with parks and gardens. His most salient project was the 1974 Woodlands community, 30 miles north of Houston, which was organized around restoring and protecting the area’s water cycles, while also building what was originally a mixed-income neighborhood as opposed to an exclusive suburb.
 
Still, a sense of design’s overwhelming capacity to overcome any large-scale problem persisted into the 1970s. The aborted Minnesota Experimental City was one such instance. Conceived by the improbably named Athelstan Spilhaus, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained polymath in the vein of R. Buckminster Fuller — whom he recruited to design a geodesic dome for his project — Spilhaus proposed a city of 250,000 people in which everything would be recycled, and in which automobiles entering the city would be asked to turn off their engines and be placed on a guided-rail system. His project, which received federal funding and corporate backing, was to be realized on a mostly uninhabited swampland in north-central Minnesota. But it was ultimately defeated by an alliance of environmental activists and local property owners who didn’t like the idea of wilderness being sacrificed for a futuristic utopia.
 
The tension between technological change and environmental planning and conservation ran through the decade’s design philosophy. Was technology the solution or the enemy? Stewart Brand, the creator of the 1960s counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog and one of Fuller’s most influential acolytes, identified the tension in one of his more famous quotations, from 1968:
 
 “We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to those gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”
 
The first part of the paragraph, its most quoted line, suggests the immense power of human design and imagining. The second part relegates that power to individual activity and craftlike labor, rather than organized, collective action.
 
Ultimately, the tension between landscape design’s technocratic impulses and the individual, experimental ethos of sections of the environmental movement unraveled, even as the movement scored multiple public successes, such as the 1970 establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (under a Republican president) and the Clean Air Act of 1963, which eliminated so many of the pollution issues that the Minnesota Experimental City sought to solve. None of these anticipated the greenhouse gas emissions, which far outstrip our current regulatory authority. The wide use of catalytic converters, which cleaned up carbon monoxide in the air, did so by transmogrifying it into carbon dioxide.
 
A suspicion of and fascination with technological capability persists in predictive contemporary design. The most gleeful section of the “Designs for Different Futures” exhibition is a circular dining table showcasing various food items made by Andrew Pelling, Grace Knight and Orkan Telhan in 2019. One is “Ouroboros Steak”: reddish, amuse-bouche-size portions of meat, cast in resin, made from human cells. As with dinner-party art concepts from the past, it poses the idea that we have excluded something from our imagination — in this case, of what food could be. It may also suggest that with increasing pressure on our agricultural systems to deliver food across the world, we may need to resort to generating food from our own bodies: in effect, eating ourselves. Another, more generative idea is Ryan Mario Yasin’s line of children’s clothing that actually grows as the wearer ages, which launched last year. Like a Hoberman sphere for infants, with the look of repurposed black garbage bags, they unpack and expand as a child grows older.

“If you follow it even loosely, you’ll have noticed that current farming-systems research is heavily focused on two big challenges,” Lenora Ditzler, a “pixel farmer” who uses digital simulations to plan food production, argues in her catalog essay for “Countryside, the Future”: “how to feed everyone on this overloaded globe, and how to do it in a way that doesn’t render the earth uninhabitable.” Criticizing the monocultural, soil-sapping practices of modern agriculture, she points to biodiverse models of farming that don’t require massive tracts of land and vegetables planted in single rows, instead arranging plantings in higher-resolution bunches, a means of production that requires less fertilizer.

 
For those who think of design as fundamentally consisting of things like chairs and the arrangement of interior space, these topics and proposals might seem to exceed the usual scope of a designer’s world. But designers and architects have always concerned themselves with the technical frontiers of their disciplines, and the question now is whether the majority of them — or even the most influential of them — will ultimately participate in a global movement that imagines a society run on completely different energy sources than what we currently depend on, namely fossil fuels. In a widely circulated essay from last year, “Design and the Green New Deal,” Billy Fleming, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania (and, not incidentally, director of the school’s McHarg Center), criticized the status quo of a design world that professed “green” ambitions while failing to grapple with fundamental challenges of climate change: “We don’t need playful design proposals,” he wrote. “We need high-impact built projects — prototypes for the resilient futures we’ve been promised.”
 
As we imagine (prematurely) multiple ways to get out of the Covid-19 crisis — and the different world into which we will emerge — design has furnished examples of how the field can be both highly relevant and professionally incapable of long-term thinking. Covid-19 is, after all, a zoonotic disease, like SARS or Ebola, and it is the result of habitat destruction, of animals that humans shouldn’t be in contact with getting too close to our livestock as a result of overfarming and development — problems in which design has played no small part. That remains unsolved. But some of the temporary fixes for social distancing and quarantine have been the result of design innovations as well. There are piazzas in Italy parceled into squares for physical gathering without physical closeness; Plexiglas panes that help people keep apart; a social-distancing picnic blanket, with individual seating areas spaced about six feet apart and so on. The surface ingenuity of all of this, however, is less powerful in cities where tens of thousands have died — where contemporary design helped create housing markets that cram multiple people into increasingly dwindling numbers of units for exorbitant prices, at rents people are increasingly unable to pay. If design has always been about looking forward — and doing so with the hope that what was to come would be better than what happened before — it now must also be about looking back in regret that our lives, in the end, have not been improved by all our expansion and growth. Can design make our lives better while also fundamentally changing its own raison d’être? We need a future characterized not just by small interventions but large-scale initiatives that take into account the dystopia design has, in part, created for us. (And that “us” is fractured, unequal, riven by race, geography, language and class.) If design is to be about how we live better, it also has to be about how we survive.
 
 
Design for the Future When the Future Is Bleak. By Nikil Saval . The New York Times, September 28, 2020.

Biodiversity and effects of climate change can be significantly affected by small-scale rewilding projects argues designer and environmentalist Julia Watson, who has temporarily covered New York's Rockefeller Center plaza and ice rinks with native plants with planting designer, Marie Salembier.
 
Named Rewilding the American Meadow, the project covers the North Plaza and Ice Rink of the Midtown Manhattan complex with wooden pots containing plants from the northeast of the United States.
 
The designer's landscape and urban design studio Watson Salembier chose plants with a wild American meadow in mind like native grasses, perennials and trees indigenous to the north-east region.
 
The designers call the scheme a rewilding, which aims to allow natural habitats to recover with minimal human intervention, as a nod to the fact that the area where the Rockefeller Center stands was formerly home to the Elgin Botanic Garden. Watson said at the time it contained 2,000 native and rare exotic species.
 
She believes that urban rewilding is an example of how to improve biodiversity in cities, bolster pollinators and help provide clean air.
 
"Rewilding the American Meadow at Rockefeller Center's North Plaza and Summer at The Rink are part of an idea we have that envisions entities with significant global property portfolios becoming catalysts for mitigating climate change in our urban environments," Watson told Dezeen.
 
"By matching indigenous, rare, and threatened plant species to local property portfolios around the globe, these urban rewilding projects could replace the homogenous and predominantly ornamental urban landscapes that form the backdrops of our cities today," she continued.
 
"By thinking of this as a multi-scalar global project, we can conceive how these ideas become mainstream and could have that explosive, emergent impact towards increasing global biodiversity that we need, while also celebrating local ecosystems, cultures, colours and identities."
 
Watson Salembier chose a range of plants that would bloom at different times over the duration of the installation from July until November.
 
"I was onsite for both of the installation days and before the gardening team had finished transferring the plants from pots to the planters, we had pollinators like bees and butterflies already feeding on the blooms," she said.
 
"That's honestly the highest form of appreciation."
 
While the temporary project is relatively small scale, Watson argues the plants will have many knock-on effects. For example, they will attract animal and insect species like birds, bees and butterflies that will help with pollination of surrounding environments in the city over the next year.
 
"If you think of these temporary planters as seeding the growth of next year's indigenous plants within the local radius that the pollinators move throughout, that means the summer gardens will have that unknown and cascading effect on the local ecosystem of Central Park and other larger landscape patches throughout the city," she explained.
 
"These blooms provide the energy for the pollinators needed at this time of the year and another stopping point for the pollinators as they make their way through the city landscape," she continued.
 
"We will then indirectly effect next year's populations by providing for this year's colonies so that when we design these gardens again next year, we'll provide the same support systems for new colonies."
 
Watson added that it is these effects of rewilding that make it far more beneficial in comparison to conservation projects.
 
"Rewilding is so important because it takes an active, rather than passive approach to ecosystem conservation and regeneration," she said. "It works to introduce systemic change that leads to cascading effects that are emergent and open-ended. This is a really fascinating design approach, and one that I bring to my work."
 
Watson teaches urban design at Harvard GSD and Columbia GSAPP, and is author of LO–TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, in which she argues that tribal communities, seen by many as primitive, are highly advanced when it comes to creating systems in symbiosis with the natural world.
 
She said the Rewilding the American Meadow shows how these philosophies can be used to change how we design cities.
 
"This project really speaks to a core concept of LO—TEK, which is, as a species, the vast majority of humans on this earth need to foster a more nature-based culture," she said.
 
"In my book LO—TEK, I discuss designing with biodiversity and document indigenous technologies from the scale of the module, to the structure, system and infrastructure," Watson added.
 
"This really means that biodiversity literally becomes the building block for these technologies, just as it becomes the building block for the design at Rockefeller Center and in the processes of rewilding."
 
Read on for our full interview with Watson:
 
Marcus Fairs: How did the project come about?
 
Julia Watson: Rewilding the American Meadow at Rockefeller Center's North Plaza and Summer at The Rink are part of an idea we have that envisions entities with significant global property portfolios becoming catalysts for mitigating climate change in our urban environments.
 
By matching indigenous, rare, and threatened plant species to local property portfolios around the globe, these urban rewilding projects could replace the homogenous and predominantly ornamental urban landscapes that form the backdrops of our cities today.
 
In Rewilding the American Meadow, we used tree species like Cercis canadensis or Eastern Redbud, which offer colourful fall flowers that attract honeybees; Oxydendron arboreum or Sourwood, which has a honey that is considered a delicacy; and fruit that persists throughout winter, which is attractive to birds and helps them survive through the winter.
 
These native trees were underplanted with Asclepias incarnata or Swamp Milkweed, Echinaceae purpurea or Purple Coneflower, and Achillea millefolium or Yarrow, which is a classic but great for a long blooming season and for pollinators.
 
We hope the design of rewilding gardens as forming part of a larger ecosystem encouraging on-site programmes that would include local seed banking, on-site propagation, farmers markets with educational programs, and seed exchanges.
 
By thinking of this as a multi-scalar global project, we can conceive of how these ideas become mainstream and could have that explosive, emergent impact towards increasing global biodiversity that we need, while also celebrating local ecosystems, cultures, colors and identities.
 
Marcus Fairs: How does it relate to your other projects and your book?
 
Julia Watson: This project really speaks to a core concept of LO–TEK, which is, as a species the vast majority of humans on this earth need to foster a more nature-based culture. The tenets of that culture could be universal, but the manifestation should be inspired by the diversity of local cultures.
 
In my book LO–TEK, I discuss designing with biodiversity and document indigenous technologies from the scale of the module, to the structure, system and infrastructure. This really means that biodiversity literally becomes the building block for these technologies, just as it becomes the building block for the design at Rockefeller Center and in the processes of rewilding.
 
In LA I'm working on a project for the City of El Segundo to redesign the Gateway to the City, where we're taking that idea of the spectacle of LAX airport and enhancing that sensory experience by introducing an ecological runway, for butterflies and other photoreceptive insects, to the Pacific Ocean.
 
The ecological runway will manifest as a diurnal photoreceptive pollinator corridor designed to regenerate the indigenous habitat of the threatened, native El Segundo Blue Butterfly. While in the Cotswalds, we're working on a rewilding master plan of a sheep farm that's be regenerated and will house an artist's residency program in Warwickshire.

 
Marcus Fairs: Why is it important to use native plants in projects like this?
 
Julia Watson: With my design partner Marie Salembier, a horticulturist and planting designer, we've been envisioning ways to bring the language of botany and biodiversity back to the city as an educational experience.
 
This is all part of a grander scheme to champion the regeneration of threatened plant species, which are connected to habitat loss and the mass extinction of our pollinator populations, which form the basis of our food webs.
 
Marcus Fairs: How has the project been received by both people and local wildlife?!
 
Julia Watson: Tishman Speyer has been a great Client and everyone has commented on how fantastic the greenification looks. The Rockefeller Center gardening team is incredible and they're been very gracious through-out this collaboration and receptive to new ideas. The local tenants of the restaurants around North Plaza have been featuring the rewilding in their social media and people seem to really appreciate the beauty and biodiversity, which isn't always the case when using natives.
 
I was onsite for both of the installation days and before the gardening team had finished transferring the plants from pots to the planters, we had pollinators like bees and butterflies already feeding on the blooms. That's honestly the highest form of appreciation.
 
Marcus Fairs: Rewilding is becoming a hot topic – in your view why is it important?
 
Julia Watson: I've been outspoken in my criticism of Conservation in LO–TEK. Rewilding is so important because it takes an active, rather than passive approach to ecosystem conservation and regeneration.
 
It works to introduce systemic change that leads to cascading effects that are emergent and open-ended. This is a really fascinating design approach, and one that I bring to my work.
 
Landscape architecture is a unique design profession in that it offers the ability to interact with ecosystems by opportunistically amplifying specific conditions, creating symbiosis, or catalyzing interactions that set up an evolving scenario. As a designer, I can envision parts of that evolving scenario and the alternative future, but not all of it.
 
In working with dynamic and living ecosystem interactions, there is a wildness and a beauty in the unknown of a future that's still to evolve that you've helped to create. It's that richness and potential that is nature, which we as designers are still trying to understand and grasp in our work.
 
Elizabeth Meyer wrote a fantastic essay a couple of years ago about finding that beauty in the design of sustainable landscapes. I feel we're having a revival at this moment, in which we're re-exploring traditional, technical and ecological aspects within design that are redefining our conceptions of beauty along the way.
 
Marcus Fairs: Can this kind of project really be considered as "rewilding"? Can the term really be applied to temporary projects with plants in containers?
 
Julia Watson: Typically defined as restoring an ecosystem, in our studio we redefine rewilding as a radical revision of urbanism's taming of nature, towards a new wildness in localism. We envision biodiversity as becoming the building blocks of diverse, local symbioses between species, peoples and place.
 
As for temporality, that's a cyclical phenomena that's characteristic to nature.
 
The planting palette for the summer gardens at Rockefeller Center is designed with a staggered flowering cycle, so different blooms will be continuously present from July to October.
 
Pollinators have their own life cycles geared towards the spring summer and autumn seasons. These blooms provide the energy for the pollinators needed at this time of the year and another stopping point for the pollinators as they make their way through the city landscape.
 
We will then indirectly effect next year's populations by providing for this year's colonies, so that when we design these gardens again next year, we'll provide the same support systems for new colonies.
 
We're also indirectly increasing the life supporting systems for ourselves. This happens as native flora attracts the native fauna essential for pollination. In turn, these species assist in the reproduction cycle of the plants.
 
If you think of these temporary planters as seeding the growth of next year's indigenous plants within the local radius that the pollinators move throughout, that means the summer gardens will have that unknown and cascading effect on the local ecosystem of Central Park and other larger landscape patches throughout the city.
 
The plants we are bringing to the summer gardens are also assisting mature in cleaning the air we breathe and the pollinators they attract are helping to grow the food we eat.
 
Marcus Fairs: How can architects and designers help increase biodiversity and tackle climate change through their work (particularly in urban areas)?
 
Julia Watson: When we ask these type of questions we're really directing our responses to a few urban environments that we're very familiar with, have probably lived in or travelled to. For those, we have a modest set ideas for how we can tackle climate change. But our profession is informed by a legacy of industrialization and modernism.
 
This legacy limits our understanding of what technology is, what innovation is, and what our cities could become. For so long we have all believed that high-tech and fast growth is the future. I don't think many of us have really, deeply negotiated a radically different alternative future.
 
Seriously and strategically tackling biodiversity and climate change at a global scale is not going to happen by applying a one size fits all approach designed by affluent cities to be applied to the diversity of ecosystems across the globe. This approach is inconsiderate of the resource availability and economic feasibility of individual cities and their communities. In looking for solutions for the whole planet, we cannot follow the current mythology of technology that calls for a scaling of costly, high-tech, and hard infrastructural strategies.
 
Designers need to look elsewhere – at effective responses that are symbiotic with specific environments and the availability of resources. Communities in developing countries can still leap-frog the typical model of progress that ends in the displacement of indigenous diversity for the sake of homogenous high-tech.
 
In LO–TEK, we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. These nature-based systems act multidimensionally, for example not only for the purpose of food production but also as resilient infrastructures that may survive industrial agriculture, as seas rise and climates change.
 
They are ecologically-intensive, rather than energy-, chemical-, or capital-intensive. They are technologies that already embody the construction techniques, climate, soil quality, precipitation levels, and seasonal understandings of the local culture and the ecosystem that evolved them. They amplify ecosystem services rather than erase them.
 
Designers will have the most impact on climate change by collaborating with local communities and taking the time to understand the intelligence of local knowledge, practices and technologies. They can assist in the scaling and systematic expansion along with development of these LO–TEK systems.
 
In return, the profession will also be expanding the toolkit of available resilient technologies that could be adapted, hybridised, innovated in consultation with these communities. As we look for ways to design resilient technologies in the face of climate change, we must look at systems that are proven to work, as Dr Eugene Hunn puts it, "tested in the rigorous laboratory of survival".

 
Marcus Fairs: How can cities help encourage biodiversity and mitigate climate change?
 
Julia Watson: Cities can explore nature-based infrastructures that are active, adaptive, and productive, involving co-existences of many species, and using biodiversity as a building block - thereby harnessing the energy and intelligence of complex ecosystems. This is how humans have been dealing with the extremes we now face for millennia.
 
Nature-based technologies align with today's sustainable values of low-energy, low-impact, and low-cost. Climate change is showing that our survival is not dependent upon superiority, but upon symbiosis - and cities must shift how they develop in their second and third growth rings towards integrating these symbiotic technologies.
 
Marcus Fairs: What do you think will be the long-term impacts of Covid-19 on the design of cities?
 
Julia Watson: Historically pandemic has transformed cities. The bubonic plague led to the Italian Renaissance, one of the greatest epochs of art, architecture and literature in human history. The Spanish flu championed the City Beautiful Movement, introducing parks, wide streets, and clean water, remaining at the forefront of urban design for many years. But the current pandemic in the context of climate change is different.
 
Hopefully today's response will not be limited to sanitation and beautification because there are ecological explanations that connect reduced resilience to pandemic. These include habitat encroachment causing zoonotic transfer, reduced biodiversity causing single species dominance leading to increased incidence of human contact, and reduced environmental resilience in the face of climate extremes, leading to poverty, risky behavior, migration which all increase the incidence of viral transmission.
 
So the response to Covid-19 must displace the homogeneity and monoculture of globalism and urbanism that is crippling our cities and agricultural landscapes and making our systems vulnerable. Design must lead us toward the rediscovery of resilient localisms.
 
The pioneers of nature-based design and technology are indigenous communities, whom are often seen as primitive, but in reality are highly advanced when it comes to creating systems in symbiosis with the natural world. Having studied indigenous communities across the globe for twenty years while training as an architect, landscape architect and urban designer, the evolution of design towards integrating these nature-based technologies and the eventual change this integration could have on the way we design cities, is now within our reach.
 
Rewilding the American Meadow by Julia Watson. By  Eleanor Gibson. Dezeen , August 28, 2020. 

Indigenous communities are pioneers of technologies that offer solutions to climate change, according to designer and environmentalist Julia Watson.

 
In her new book, LO–TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, Watson argues that tribal communities, seen by many as primitive, are highly advanced when it comes to creating systems in symbiosis with the natural world.
 
"There are so many examples," she told Dezeen. "They have increased biodiversity, they're producing food, they're flood mitigating, they're resilient in terms of foreshore conditions, they're cleaning water, they're carbon sequestering."
 
"They have all of the natural qualities that we're really interested in, in terms of ecosystem services, but they're completely constructed by man," she added.
 
Progress requires a new toolkit
 
Watson believes that the tech industry is more limited in scope than people realise, based solely on a concept of high-tech that developed after the industrial revolution.
 
She calls for this industry to adopt some of the principles of indigenous design, many of which are thousands of years old, to help cities around the world to not only mitigate the impact of climate change, but to be resilient for the future.
 
"I have a really clear vision for what the middle ground could be, how we could start to explore these technologies and think about how they could change the way we design cities," she said.
 
"We can't really move forward using the same toolkit that got us to the place we are now," she continued. "We can't just keep reusing the high-tech and that type of thinking to solve the problems that created the problems."
 
LO–TEK design philosophy
 
Watson, who teaches urban design at Harvard GSD and Columbia GSAPP, has spent six years developing her concept for LO–TEK. Not to be confused with low-tech, it incorporates the acronym TEK, which stands for traditional ecological knowledge.
 
The book highlights a series of case studies, in mountain landscapes, forests, deserts and wetlands.
 
Examples include the Jingkieng Dieng Jri Living Root Bridges, a system of living ladders and walkways created by the Khasi tribe of North India, and the Totora Reed Floating Islands, a series of manmade islands created from reeds in Peru.
 
Some are directly comparable with western-developed alternatives, as is the case with the Bheri Wastewater Aquaculture in Kolkata, a natural wastewater treatment system that cleans half of the sewage for a city of 12 million people.
 
Symbiotic relationships with nature
 
"LO–TEK reframes our view of what technology is, what it means to build it in our environment, and how we can do it differently, to synthesise the millennia of knowledge that still exists," said Watson.
 
"This is about symbiotic relationships, which are the fundamental building blocks of nature. These LO–TEK technologies are born of symbiotic relationships with our environment, humans living in symbiosis with natural systems."
 
Watson believes that, with global awareness of the climate crisis growing, and a groundswell of young people up in arms, the time has come to reassess our approach to sustainability and innovation.
 
"I can see change happening because I see it every day," she added. "This is a huge step in the right direction towards shifting, elevating and reframing how we build and how we urbanise."
 
LO–TEK Design by Radical Indigenism is published by Taschen.
 
Watson presented some of her research from the book at The World Around architecture forum last month, which Dezeen livestreamed from The Times Center in New York. The conference, which also featured speakers such as Junya Ishigami, Elizabeth Diller and Shohei Shigematsu, is still available to watch on Dezeen.
 
Read on for the interview with Watson in full:
 
Amy Frearson: Can you start by explaining what LO–TEK is?
 
Julia Watson: LO–TEK is a term that I developed. Obviously low-tech is a term that we use in architecture and innovation, which means rudimentary or primitive technologies. It's seen as utilitarian, a lower type of technology, and often has a relationship to social innovation. I think that there's a confusion that perhaps nature-based technologies might be of that same category, or that they're not a technology at all because they're so synthesised with our natural environments.
 
It's working in contrast to the concept of high-tech, which is the fascination and evolution of industrialism. We're in an era where our world is pretty high-tech and so is our industry. We got here because, at a certain time, we said this is what technology is. Of all the thousands of technologies across the globe, including indigenous local technologies, we took a small sliver that was in the view of the people who began our globalised, modernised path forward. That got us to where we are now, which is a fantastic development as a global civilisation, but we're also in this paradox of being in a world that is threatened by climate change and environmental crises, and that has social and economic off-spins.
 
So we're at a point in time where we have this frame of a global view of the world. We still have these nature-based technologies out there, although most are threatened and we've lost a lot of them. And it's a time where we're looking for something different in the urban environment, and in the way that we build and relate to nature. It is a moment for us to take stock, to recontextualise that framework of industrialised, digital high-tech or high-tech living, which removes us from nature, and reframe the potential of the toolkit in our urban environments. What's the toolkit that we have to relate to nature? And how do we do it differently moving forward?
 
And so the LO–TEK also incorporates TEK, which means traditional ecological knowledge. It's a term that's used in human ecology, which is where a lot of this work grounds itself, in the realm of the sciences. It's saying, if these are technologies that are simply constructed, made from local materials, they are not within the frame of high-tech. But it's not low-tech because these are really complex ecological relationships, it's nature-based technology. It's not primitive, it's incredibly innovative in trying to find solutions for the urban or peri-urban networks that feed our cities, trying to find solutions for climate change and resilience. We're looking to these types of solutions but we just don't have a huge toolkit at this point in time.
 
LO–TEK reframes our view of what technology is, what it means to build it in our environment, and how we can do it differently, to synthesise the millennia of knowledge that still exists. Technology has been born of that and is symbiotic with ecological processes, from the micro to the macro.
 
Amy Frearson: Can you tell me a bit about your background and what led you into this field?
 
Julia Watson: I began as an architect, 22 years ago in Australia, studying in Queensland at UQ, where I took a course called Aboriginal Environments. Obviously the colonial and Aboriginal world in Australia is a really charged topic.
 
My family is English and Greek, and my mother was a first-generation immigrant from Egypt, so as a kid growing up I had a very colonial worldview frame without even knowing about it. When I started learning about the Aboriginal environment, it was such a different way of looking at the world and I was fascinated. About a year later, I graduated and was going to live in London but I stopped in Borneo on the way. I had been reading about what was happening in Borneo, with the loss of orangutangs and primal plantations, and I was looking for this tribe called the Penan people. I'd been reading about a Swiss environmentalist who had been championing this group of forest dwellers to stand up against the Malaysian government because they were taking away their forest to develop into palm-oil plantations. He had gone missing, but he had documented this tribe that no one had really seen before. I was fascinated with going to the jungle and looking for this tribe. I went to Borneo for a month and I found the tribe eventually. They were living in this encampment on the side of a river that was obviously not the way they'd ever lived. It was so sad.
 
I went to London, then came back, but kept on studying this idea of what it means to be an indigenous person and how you see the landscape that you live in. I wanted to know why is it so different to the way that I was brought up, to the way that so much of the world relates to the natural world, and what is still there in that relationship. What have we lost with the pathway of colonialism? Can we ever find a middle ground?
 
That led me to Harvard, where I went to study sacred landscapes, looking at why they are sacred and how you conserve them. I discovered that most of these sacred landscapes are about protecting resources that makes human survival possible, like freshwater or farms. They're basically about protecting the earth, because human survival is dependent upon that. I won an award when I graduated, so I was able to go on pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world to study them. I did trips to Mount Kailash in Tibet for a Saga Dawa Festival and to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Bali.
 
Out of that, I started teaching contemporary landscape technology at Columbia, where I started to realise that a lot of these technologies, like green roofs, have been around forever. We're making artificial wetlands that clean water, but there's already natural wetlands that do that. We package these things as very new, contemporary, modern and urban technologies but they have these long lineages of millennia-old knowledge. It got me thinking, how many others are out there that we're not looking at yet? How closed-down is our frame of what we package as technology?
 
That's where the book came from. I asked, could there be 50 more technologies like this? Could there by 100? In the book there are 120, and that's just a flashlight in the dark, of one person doing this with no funding, just driven by curiosity and some wonderful students that took on the cause and wanted to work alongside me.
 
Amy Frearson: Can you pick out some of the most radical examples of LO–TEK from the book?
 
Julia Watson: The case study that I think people understand the most succinctly is the East Kolkata wetlands, which is a sewage wastewater treatment system in Kolkata. It was born a few hundred years, so it's not like it's a 6,000-year-old technology, but it was born from a group of Bengalese farmers who were living on the outskirts of Kolkata, which is now a city of 12 million. There's a collective of farmers that treats sewage water coming out of the Hooghly River. A lot of the sewage from Kolkata goes into a system that leads to this wetland, and they put it through a series of processes. They have settling ponds and they have ponds where they introduce fish. It's a really large system of wetlands that is completely manmade and run by village cooperatives. They're cleaning wastewater and producing vegetables for the city, while saving millions of dollars a year compared to the operating costs of an actual sewage treatment plant. It's actually cleaning half of the sewage coming out of a city of 12 million people, every single day. You can see that that application on the periphery of a city like New York or London, if there was municipal will and a real mind-shift towards nature-based technologies.
 
Another technology that I think you can recontextualise is in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. There is a tribe called the Kayapó that introduces hundreds of different species of plants in an agroforestry system within the rainforest. It doesn't destroy the rainforest but is incredibly productive for food. So you have the Amazon on fire because of clearcutting for cattle ranching, but in that same rainforest you have a community who live in the rainforest, obviously at the same scale, but doing a different type of farming that integrates into the canopy of the rainforest and still produces food. There are these two completely different types of systems, coming up against one another, but no one's learning from one another. There's no adoption of a symbiotic agroforestry productive food system or allowance of the co-benefits of keeping the Amazon rainforest but also producing food, even though you see those types of systems across the globe.
 
Another very similar system is at the base of the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The Chagga is one of the richest, most-educated communities in Tanzania, in that part of Africa. They have what they call the kihamba, which is a banana plantation that takes you can two and a half hours to drive through. It's the size of Los Angeles, this area of land. They've got an estimated 500 species in that forest that retains the original forest canopy, but they've introduced about 250 new species of productive bananas, coffee and different plant species. They've managed to figure out a way to retain the complexity of the natural rainforest but also integrate a really complex agroforestry system that is incredibly productive, which has made them one of the most economically advanced communities in that region.

 
Amy Frearson: How would you sum up the case studies you're found so far?
 
Julia Watson: It's a reframing of understanding technology, how we relate to our natural environment and what that means. And if we keep on looking, there are so many examples. They have increased biodiversity, they're producing food, they're flood mitigating, they're resilient in terms of foreshore conditions, they're cleaning water, they're carbon sequestering. They have all of the natural qualities that we're really interested in, in terms of ecosystem services, but they're completely constructed by man. They use complex ecological relationships to drive them, but they are low on embodied energy. They produce a certain type of community and cultural activity, and they allow for that community to live really closely and harmoniously with their environments.
 
Amy Frearson: Earlier you said you were looking for a middle ground between indigenous technologies and the world of high-tech. Having done this study, do you think it is possible to find one?
 
Julia Watson: That's part of why I'm putting this book out to the world. I have a really clear vision for what the middle ground could be, how we could start to explore these technologies and think about how they could change the way we design cities.
 
As cities keep on expanding and growing bigger, what's the new way that cities will grow? We all have these utopian visions for cities but what if those utopian visions were really set within this type of thinking, drawing upon these types of nature-based technologies? What if cities really did sit within ecosystems, rather than the small applications of small ecosystems applied to facades in cities?
 
The book and this work is to put out examples and case studies, and seed contemporary designers who can take them and champion them. There are way better designers out there than me and I want them to take this, use it and apply it.
 
In the world of academia, we're looking at the most cutting-edge, forward-thinking research transitioning to design. A lot of the time, academia and research is on the cusp of rethinking how the next wave of development will happen in practice. Given the number of issues that we're having to confront today in our urban environment, in the world that we now live in, if we can just expand that horizon, there is so much potential.
 
Amy Frearson: What kind of response do you think you'll get to the idea?
 
Julia Watson: It's really funny that, across the board, there are three responses. The first is: 'I can totally see this happening'. Then there's some people who say: 'Okay, but can it really apply to cities?' Then there are people who just say no.
 
I love contemporary politics, so I'm really into understanding the way that frames our world and the way we see the world, and I think that it almost comes back to a political understanding about being visionary and forward-thinking. It's like climate change at this point in time, it's just a political argument, because the science can't be refuted. Where there's an adoption of the science, that's going to reframe our world.
 
One project that I think is really interesting to talk about here is the UN-Habitat, the United Nations project looking at floating cities. People are really interested in this idea of floating cities. Yet in the book, there are two case studies of communities that have lived on islands. One of them is the Ma'dan that lived in the southern wetlands of Iraq for 6,500 years on floating islands. The other is the Uros that live on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, on islands they construct from reeds, which last for 20 years. All around the world are people that live in aquatic environments.
 
We can't really move forward using the same toolkit that got us to the place we are now. We can't just keep reusing the high-tech and that type of thinking to solve the problems that created the problems. Looking at other communities might just give us the opportunity to say, what if we use high-tech and LO–TEK technology to think of this idea of floating cities? What do we think of these systems working with our natural environments? There's so much opportunity with design and resilience, if we can leapfrog just being responsive. We're really fascinated with sea-level rise right now because that's what we see is the most imminent condition that we're going to deal with. But following very closely on the coattails of sea-level rise is a huge die-off of trees in desert environments. It's just the one thing that's impacting the most people at a point in time.
 
There's a new crisis coming to you, which is the wildfires in Australia and in California. People have been doing managed burn-off and using pyrotechnology as a technology. Communities all over the Americas and Australia have been doing that for millennia. They knew that they had to do that in those environments to create productivity but also to reduce threat. They've been using these things as resilient strategies for a very long time.
 
I think we have to really expand our view of technology but really also be more predictive and be more prepared, not just in coastal ecosystems and coastal cities, but across the board. That's why the book is divided into mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands. We've got to be looking at all these different environments and being resilient in all of them.
 
Amy Frearson: With climate change and the anthropocene already here, are you sure we haven't run out of time to be resilient?
 
Julia Watson: No. I want to reframe the concept of the anthropocene, in a way. Because we came to industrialisation, we came to this period of time, we came to having a dissociation from nature through the Age of Enlightenment. It's removed us from nature so that we either see nature as a threat or we see ourselves as the saviour of nature. I think that's still like a fundamental thinking within this concept of the anthropocene and I want the book to dissolve that lens.
 
This is about symbiotic relationships, which are the fundamental building blocks of nature. These LO–TEK technologies are born of symbiotic relationships with our environment, humans living in symbiosis with natural systems. That's what I think needs to change. We're not superior, we're not working against or threatened by nature, we need to be symbiotic with it. We need to shift this idea of superiority, to an understanding of symbiosis.
 
I think we need a new mythology, I keep on talking about this mythology of the contemporary world and the mythology of technology, but that mythology is really fundamentally underpinned by understanding that we're not superior. It's the only way that we're going to move forward. I really do think there is a huge political will that's just growing and growing. We're seeing it like I've never seen anything like before. I think that it's truly inspiring and unprecedented. To see a government completely disqualifying and disregarding that climate change is happening and then to have a groundswell of youth, of children, who are just politically up in arms, saying that you can ignore this anymore.
 
I can see change happening because I see it every day. There is a huge concern and architects are championing it, asking how they respond. This is a huge step in the right direction towards shifting, elevating and reframing how we build and how we urbanise.
 
Indigenous technologies "could change the way we design cities" says environmentalist Julia Watson. By Amy Frearson. Dezeen, February 11, 2020. 

In her new book, designer and academic Julia Watson explores how designers can look to the sustainable practices of indigenous peoples and apply them at scale in cities.
 
For months, Australia’s wildfires have served as a looming reminder of the immediate threat posed by climate change. An estimated one billion animals have been killed; 24 people have lost their lives; and 25 million acres of land have been lost.
 
It is not the first time Australia has burned. As a country with routinely hot and dry seasons, bushfires have always been a part of its history, with some native plant species even evolving to depend on bushfire for reproduction.
 
And just as plants adapted, so too did Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal communities. To minimise the impact of bushfires on wildlife and ecosystems, the technique of cultural burning – put simply, controlled fires – was developed as a preventative measure. With the arrival of European colonisers in the 19th century, this practice became largely ignored, and the number and severity of bushfires increased.
 
 “Working within frameworks that already exist”
 
In her new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, designer and academic Julia Watson calls on practices like Aboriginal cultural burning as examples of nature-based technology systems.
 
Through extensive research of systems used across the world’s mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands, Watson argues that in designers’ quest toward sustainability, indigenous practices can be invaluable resources.
 
Where “low-tech” refers to something that is unsophisticated or primitive, “Lo-TEK” (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) represents a “design movement to rebuild an understanding of indigenous philosophy… that generates sustainable, climate resilient infrastructures.”
 
“There’s a huge hole in theory and research of low-energy, low-impact and low-cost technology systems that are highly sustainable,” Watson tells Design Week, when speaking about western approaches to design. “These indigenous systems have been written about in science and literature, both of which aren’t always accessible, or maybe reported on in National Geographic, but have never been seriously considered for our own built environments.”
 
Rather than viewing systems like aquaculture, forest gardens and rice terraces as only relevant in their own environments and cultures, she says designers should consider how these principles could be transferred to other contexts. “In the west, we would never be working in the same cultural, material or economic framework as any given indigenous cultures.
 
“We have to work within frameworks that already exist, so where the governing force for indigenous design might be spirituality, in the context of Los Angeles, for example, the governing force would be the municipality.”
 
“Drowning in information while starving for wisdom”
 
Among the many case studies in the book is the example of wastewater aquaculture technology developed by the residents of Kolkata, India. The system, made up largely of river channels and flat-bottomed fish ponds known as bheris, operates at once as a sewage treatment facility for half of the city’s some 15 million people, a fishery, agricultural field, rice paddy network and community hub. It works by directing the city’s waste water through the bheris and several steps of filtration before eventually redistributing it to farms, fields and rice paddies.
 
“Kolkata is a city of 15 million people and around half of their sewage is treated this way every day,” says Watson. “We have cities of comparable sizes in the west, and if they were to design a similarly nature-based aquaculture system instead of building a wastewater treatment plant, it would be far more sustainable for the environment.”
 
Moreover, designers would have the chance to “hybridise” nature-based technology with high-level technology, Watson argues. “It’s not removing technology as we know it, it’s about recognising the value of the systems that have worked for millennia,” she says, underlining one of the book’s starkest claims: that we are “drowning in information while starving for wisdom”.
 
“Cohesive, clear and timeless”
 
Watson’s sustainable mission is further carried out in the design of the book itself. The 420-page volume has been designed by W–E studio to reflect the value of simple construction. Split into four sections – mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands – the brief for its design was to create a “tactile journey” for readers.
 
Text and images are printed on two differing paper stocks, one raw and uncoated and the other glossy. This is done to signpost different sections of text, while the copper accent colours are used to  indicate “valuable knowledge of precious ancient wisdom,” according to W–E’s Piera Wolf and Claudine Eriksson.
 
To create a “cohesive, clear and timeless” effect throughout the book, text is interspersed with architectural drawings and illustrations. These have been created by illustrator Berke Yazicioglu.
 
“We wanted to break up the text and convey the content through ‘hero illustrations’ for each chapter,” Wolf and Eriksson add. “[By] capturing a snapshot of the innovation within its environment, while conveying a feeling of the location; it’s vegetation, tribe- and animal- life.”
 
“We also wanted to unify the detailed ‘Architectural Drawings’ for the innovations, by using a limited colour palette and streamlined stroke weights of the technical line drawings.” Working closely with Watson and Yazicioglu, more than 70 illustrations in the two distinct styles were created.
 
All of this has then been bound in a Swiss brochure style with an open spine. “The content of the book reveals the construction of ancient innovations,” Wolf and Eriksson say. “[And] this binding technique reveals the construction of the book.”
 
Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson is published by Taschen. Price: £40.00.
 
Ushering in the lo-TEK age: designers can learn from indigenous practice. By Molly Long. Design Week, January 16, 2020.

The rice terraces in Bali look almost otherworldly. For over a thousand years, local communities have cut into the sloping volcanic mountainsides in order to farm. What appear at first to be emerald-green steps in the landscape reveal a sophisticated irrigation system called subak that takes advantage of the natural watershed: Rains leach minerals from the volcanic soil and an underground canal system brings water and natural fertilizer to the rice. The result, says Julia Watson, a landscape designer and Columbia professor, is some of the most biodiverse and productive rice-growing land in the world.

 
Watson first visited the subak seven years ago when she began researching her new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, which dives into the history, philosophy, and engineering behind climate-resilient infrastructure developed by indigenous people: “those who have evolved a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs of the environment in which they live,” she tells Curbed.
 
As Watson argues in her book, such “traditional ecological knowledge”—the “TEK” in Lo-TEK—could unlock more sustainable solutions to solve crises of housing, resource management, farming, water treatment, and more. She says her book isn’t about prescribing solutions; rather, it analyzes the building techniques and philosophical underpinnings of indigenous communities through the lens of architecture, providing a more accessible read than the anthropological approach usually found in academic journals. She hopes it inspires ways of designing infrastructure that are less environmentally destructive and more attuned to natural ecology.
 
“There are so many stories and narratives that talk about ecosystem relationships, and we need to reengage with them,” Watson tells Curbed.
 
Lo-TEK explores 18 indigenous communities, organizing them by the type of landscape each inhabits: mountains, forests, deserts, or wetlands. Case studies include the living root bridges created by the Khasi in Northern India; the waffle gardens of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico; aquaculture around the floating villages of the Tofinu people of Benin; the qanat underground aquifers in Iran; and the mudhif reed architecture of Iraq. Watson approaches each of these case studies like a cultural anthropologist and an architect, laying out the different spiritual relationships each community has with its environment, the history of how they created their engineering techniques, and detailed diagrams that explain how the techniques work.
 
Watson sees her book as today’s version of the Museum of Modern Art’s influential Architecture without Architects exhibition of 1964, which discussed the merits and sophistication of vernacular design from the past—design that architects at the time had dismissed in favor of modernism.
 
“There are so many nature-based technologies that aren’t documented, recognized, and pushed in the engineering and design fields as solutions,” Watson says. “And these are culturally, ecologically, and economically resilient solutions.”
 
When Watson arrived in Bali, it wasn’t the sublime emerald-green landscape that struck her the most. It was the spiritual relationship between the terraces and the community of farmers who manage them: They are inseparable.
 
“It’s all a sacred landscape,” Watson tells Curbed.
 
Temples dedicated to water deities, overseen by priests, are situated throughout the rice terraces at important points for water distribution. In meetings about how to manage the nearly 50,000 acres of terraces, the voices of everyone—from the highest level of society to the lowest—are heard.
In the 1970s, Indonesia’s participation in the “Green Revolution” threatened the subak farmers’ way of life. The government imposed new laws requiring all rice farmers to use high-yield varieties of rice and artificial pesticides and fertilizers to increase production. They also instituted a “plant as often as possible” mandate, ignoring the subak’s synchronized planting strategy.
 
The change had catastrophic effects: failed growing seasons, diminished biodiversity, and degraded soil structure. Fertilizers in runoff damaged nearby coral reefs. Ecological collapse of the subak terraces seemed imminent. In the 1980s, the Balinese government recognized the problem after research by the anthropologist Stephen Lansing (who Watson interviews in her book) and restored some of the subak’s traditional water practices. In 2012, UNESCO designated the subak as a World Heritage Site. The hope is that global recognition of the cultural significance of this landscape will help preserve the farmers’ way of life and repair the damaged landscape.
 
“Nature-based communities don’t have a voice because [modern] governance structures do not have a place for their voices,” Watson says. “These ways of living with the land can disappear so quickly when they’re seen as primitive, not innovative.”
 
A similar situation occurred beginning in the 1970s in southern Iraq, where for 6,000 years the Ma’dan, or “Marsh Arabs,” have built soaring vaulted structures and temporary floating islands using nothing but reeds and mud dredged from wetlands along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Their cathedral-like buildings, called mudhifs, represent indigenous engineering passed down from 4,000 B.C. on how to co-exist with a landscape defined by water. Five hundred thousand people once lived in the marshes, but because of ethnic cleansing under Saddam Hussein and upstream water diversions, the marshes have been largely drained and only a few thousand people remain, nearly erasing 6,000 years’ worth of proven knowledge about how humans can live symbiotically with the land.

 
Today, humans have an adversarial relationship with our environment, as the impacts of anthropogenic climate change—extreme heat, catastrophic flooding, sea level rise, and mass extinctions—show. Naturally, there are competing philosophies on how best to address the problems.
 
Take fire management. Today, bushfires in Australia, ignited by dry lightning, blaze out of control, leading to 24 million acres scorched and and the death of an estimated 1 billion animals. Australia’s Aboriginal people once set “cool burns” to selectively eliminate plants and trees and maintain balance in the landscape so that when a natural fire occurred, the destruction would be minimized. Colonization changed the fire management practices in Australia. A Queensland-based fire ecologist studied bushfires between 1881 and 1981 and found that after 1919—when the government markedly moved away from indigenous fire management practices—there was an increase in the size and frequency of fires.
 
In California, some fire ecology experts say a century of fire suppression contributed to the deadly wildfires of the past few years. While Native Americans once regularly burned forests and grassland, the Forest Service tried to extinguish flames as quickly as possible. While the Forest Service does ignite controlled burns, experts say the agency doesn’t do it enough. Meanwhile, 32 percent of all homes in the state are built in the “Wildland-Urban Interface,” an area that is the most vulnerable to wildfire.
 
There’s a pervasive belief that new high-tech interventions will come to the rescue, but that formula isn’t working. For example, the $14 billion worth of levees constructed after Hurricane Katrina are already sinking. We can’t keep building the same way. Of course, New Orleans can’t be reconstructed out of reeds, but perhaps there’s a way to rethink future development that takes a longer view.
 
“We respond to disaster; we don’t think of preventative measures,” Watson says. “And understanding ecosystems is about prevention and having a deep relationship with the land that you’re working with. It’s survival through symbiosis, not survival of the fittest.”
 
For example, the Bheri Wastewater Aquaculture system developed over the last century by the Bengalese residents of Kolkata, India, cleanses 700 million liters of raw sewage every day. Wastewater flows through a series of ponds that contain anaerobic bacteria and fish. Wastewater from the ponds is used to irrigate vegetables grown on the banks of the ponds. According to Watson, the system saves about $22 million per year on the operating expenses of a conventional wastewater plant. Plus, the resulting aquaculture—which is safe to eat—goes to local markets and saves on transportation costs.
 
“There are so many different technologies around the world and we have a small, limited understanding of what technologies can be applied in the environment, and it comes from a particular view that’s high-tech and industrialized,” Watson says. “You can’t fix a problem with the same tool kit that caused the problem. We need something else.”
 
The world’s oldest design techniques might be the most radical. By Diana Budds. Curbed, January 15, 2020

Website Julia Watson