“These LO-TEK technologies are born from symbiotic relationships with our environment, where humans live in symbiosis with natural systems. That’s where we need to move today. We are not superior, we are not working against nature or threatening it, we need to be in symbiosis with it. We need to change this idea of superiority to an understanding of symbiosis.”
Julie Watson
Julia Watson (born 1977) is an Australian landscape architect and environmentalist, researcher, educator and writer who is an expert on indigenous, nature-based technologies, for which she coined the term Lo-TEK. In her groundbreaking book LO-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism (Taschen America Llc, 2020) has collected and brilliantly presented this traditional technological knowledge from various indigenous communities around the world. She argues that tribal communities, considered by many to be primitive, are highly advanced in creating infrastructure systems that are in symbiosis with nature and that increase biodiversity, produce food, mitigate floods, are highly resilient, purify water, and offer solutions to climate change. She sees these traditional technologies as the seed from which a new symbiotic vision of design can be born, which she describes as radical indigenism. From a radical indigenist perspective, human practice is, according to Julia Watson, “an evolutionary extension of life in symbiosis with nature.” Watson believes that the technology industry today is limited in scope, based solely on the concept of high-tech that developed after the Industrial Revolution. She therefore calls for the industry to adopt some of the principles of indigenous design, which would help cities around the world not only mitigate the impacts of climate change, but also make them resilient in the future.
Julie Watson studied at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology (Diploma in Landscape Architecture) from 1998-2001 and graduated as a Landscape Architect from Harvard University in 2008. She taught in the architecture programs at Columbia University and currently teaches at Harvard University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the founder of REDE, a research and design studio based in New York, where Julie Watson lives. The studio works at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, innovation and conservation on large-scale projects involving scientists, digital agencies, governments, foundations and local communities. This interview with Julia Watson, conducted by Amy Frearson, was published in the US magazine Dezeen on 11 February 2020 under the title “Indigenous technologies "could change the way we design cities" says environmentalist Julia Watson". Translation: Jiří Zemánek
Amy Frearson: Could you first explain what LO-TEK is?
Julia Watson: LO-TEK is a term that I created. Of course, low-tech is a term that we use in architecture and innovation to mean rudimentary or primitive technology. This technology is seen as a utilitarian, lower type of technology and is often related to social innovation. I think there is a confusion that perhaps nature-based technologies could be in the same category as low-tech, or that they are not technologies at all because they are so synthetically connected to our natural environment.
LO-TEK works in contrast to the notion of high-tech, which represents the fascination with industrialism from which it evolved. We are at a time when our world is quite high-tech and so is our industry. We got here because at some point we said to ourselves that this is technology. Of all the thousands of technologies from around the world, including indigenous local technologies, we took just a small sliver that was in the sights of the people who started our globalized, modernized journey forward. Thanks to this, we got to where we are now, which is a fantastic development of our global civilization, but at the same time we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation, because we live in a world that is threatened by climate change and environmental crises, which have social and economic repercussions.
So we are at a point where we have this global view of the world and we still have these nature-based technologies at our disposal, even though most of them are threatened and we have lost a lot of them. And it is a time when we are looking for something new in the urban environment and in the way we build and how we relate to nature. It is a time when we should reflect and recontextualize this framework of industrialized digital high-tech technology, or rather this high-tech way of life that is distancing us from nature, and reevaluate the potential of the tools that we use in our urban environment. What is the toolbox that we have at our disposal for our relationship with nature? And how can we do it differently so that we can move forward in this sense?
And so LO-TEK also includes TEK, which means traditional ecological knowledge. It's a term that's used in human ecology, which is the area that a lot of this work is based on, the area of natural sciences. It says that technologies like that that are simply engineered and made from local materials don't fall into the high-tech category. But it's not low-tech either, because these are really complex ecological relationships, these are nature-based technologies. They're not primitive, they're incredibly innovative in trying to find solutions for urban or suburban grids that power our cities, in trying to find solutions for climate change and resilience. We're looking for those types of solutions, but we just don't have a big toolbox at the moment.
LO-TEK re-evaluates our view of what technology is, what it means to build it into our environment, and how we can do it differently to incorporate the millennia-old knowledge that still exists. This technology was born from this knowledge and is in symbiosis with ecological processes, from micro to macro.
Amy Frearson: Can you tell me something about your background and what brought you to this field?
Julia Watson: I started as an architect twenty-two years ago in Australia, where I studied at a university in Queensland; there I completed a course called Aboriginal Environments. Of course The colonial and indigenous world in Australia is a really loaded topic.
My family is English and Greek, and my mother was a first-generation immigrant from Egypt, so as a child I grew up in a very colonial worldview without even knowing it. When I started learning about the environment of the indigenous people, it was such a different worldview that I was fascinated by it. About a year later I graduated and was going to live in London, but on the way I stopped in Borneo. I read about what was happening in Borneo, the decline of orangutans and the native rainforests, and I was looking for a tribe called the Penan. I read about a Swiss ecologist who was trying to help a group of indigenous forest dwellers to stand up to the Malaysian government because they were taking their forests so they could turn them into palm oil plantations. The ecologist disappeared, but he documented this tribe that no one had really seen before. I was fascinated to go into the jungle and look for this tribe. I went to Borneo for a month and finally found the tribe. They were living in a camp on the riverbank, which was clearly not the way they had lived before. It was very sad.
I went to London, but then I came back and continued to explore this idea of what it means to be indigenous and how as an indigenous person you perceive the landscape you live in. I wanted to know why that was so different from the way I was raised, from the way much of the world relates to nature, and what is still there in that original relationship to nature. What have we lost through colonialism? And can we ever find a middle ground?
That led me to Harvard, where I went to study sacred lands, and I looked at why they were sacred and how to protect them. I found that most of these sacred lands were about protecting resources that allow human survival, like fresh water or farms. It was basically about protecting the land because human survival depends on it. When I finished my studies, I won an award that allowed me to travel on pilgrimages to sacred sites around the world and study them. I went to Mount Kailash in Tibet, to the Saga Dawa festival, and to UNESCO World Heritage sites in Bali.
So I started teaching contemporary landscape technologies at Columbia University, where I started to realize that a lot of these technologies, like green roofs, have been around forever. We're creating artificial wetlands that purify water, but there are already natural wetlands that do this. We present these things as very new, contemporary, modern, urban technologies, but they're actually a long line of knowledge that goes back thousands of years. And that made me think about how many more technologies there are that we don't know about yet, and how narrow our definition of what we call technology is.
This book came out of such reflections. I asked myself, could there be another fifty such technologies? Could there be a hundred? There are a hundred and twenty in the book, and that's just the result of one person's research, doing it without funding, driven only by curiosity and a few great students who joined me and wanted to collaborate with me.
Amy Frearson: Could 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 best is the East Kolkata Wetlands, which is the Kolkata Sewage Treatment System. It was created a few hundred years ago, so it's not a 6,000-year-old technology; it was born out of a group of Bengali farmers who lived on the outskirts of Kolkata, which is now a city of 12 million people. There's a collective of farmers there that cleans the sewage that comes out of the Hooghly River. A lot of the sewage from Kolkata goes into the system that goes into this wetland, and the farmers put it through a series of processes. They have sedimentation ponds and then ponds where they put fish. It's a really large wetland system that's completely man-made and run by village cooperatives; the farmers clean the sewage and produce vegetables for the city, saving millions of dollars a year compared to the operating costs of an actual sewage treatment plant. They actually clean half of the sewage that comes out of a city of 12 million people every day. If there was a will from the communities and a real shift in thinking towards nature-based technologies, you could imagine, for example, applying this technology to the outskirts of a city like New York or London. Another technology that I think we can apply and recontextualize today is found in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. There's the Kayapó tribe who are introducing hundreds of different species of plants into the rainforest as part of an agroforestry system. It's not destroying the rainforest, but it's incredibly productive for growing food. So you have the Amazon burning because of deforestation for cattle ranching, but in that same rainforest you have a community that lives there on the same scale but does a different type of agriculture that integrates into the canopy of the rainforest and is constantly producing food. So you have these two completely different types of agricultural systems that are clashing, but neither one is learning from the other. There is no acceptance of a symbiotic agroforestry system with food production or the co-benefits of preserving the Amazon rainforest associated with food production, even though we can see these types of systems all over the world.
Another very similar system is located at the foot of the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The Chagga are one of the wealthiest and most educated communities in Tanzania, in this part of Africa. They have something they call a kihamba, which is a banana plantation that you can drive through in two and a half hours. It's an area of land the size of Los Angeles. It's estimated that they have 500 species of plants in this forest, which retains the original forest cover, but they have introduced about 250 new species of productive banana trees, coffee trees, and various other plants. They have managed to figure out a way to preserve the complexity of the natural rainforest while integrating a really complex agroforestry system into it that is incredibly productive, which has made the Chagga one of the most economically advanced communities in the region.
Amy Frearson: How would you summarize the case studies you have discovered so far?
Julia Watson: It's about rethinking our understanding of technology and how we relate to our natural environment and what that means. And if we look further, we'll find many more examples. These technologies increase biodiversity, produce food, mitigate floods, are resilient to coastal conditions, purify water, sequester carbon. They have all the natural properties that we're really interested in in terms of ecosystem services, but they're completely human-made. They use complex ecological relationships to drive and control them, and they're low-energy. They create a type of community and cultural activity, and they allow that community to live in really close and harmonious relationships with their environment.
Amy Frearson: You said before that you were looking for a middle ground between indigenous technologies and the high-tech world. After completing this study, do you think it's possible to find such a middle ground?
Julia Watson: That's one of the reasons I'm giving this book to the world. I have a really clear vision of what the middle ground might be, how we could start to explore these technologies and think about how they could change the way we design cities.
As cities continue to expand and grow, what will be the new way that these cities will grow? We all have utopian visions of cities, but what if these utopian visions were actually embedded in this new way of thinking and drawing on these types of nature-based technologies? What if cities were actually embedded within ecosystems, rather than just small applications of small ecosystems being applied to the facades of buildings in cities?
The goal of this book and this work is to present examples and case studies and educate contemporary designers who can take them and start pushing them. There are much better designers than me and I want them to take this inspiration, use it and apply it in reality.
In academia today, we see the most cutting-edge and progressive research flowing into design. Academia and research are often on the verge of rethinking how the next wave of development will play out in practice. Given the many challenges we face today in our urban environments, in the world we live in now, if we can broaden that horizon, there is enormous potential.
Amy Frearson: What kind of response do you think you will get to this idea?
Julia Watson: It's really funny that across all disciplines there are three reactions. The first one is, 'I can definitely see this happening.' Then there are some people who say, 'OK, but can this really be applied to cities?' Then there are people who just say no.
I love contemporary politics, so I'm really interested in how it articulates our world and how we see it, and I think it's almost coming back to a political understanding today that's based on visionary thinking and thinking about the future. It's like climate change right now, it's just a political argument because science can't be refuted. Where there's acceptance of science, it's going to change our world.
One of the projects that I think is really worth talking about is UN-Habitat, the UN project on floating cities. People are really interested in the idea of floating cities. There are two case studies in the book of communities that have lived on islands. One of them is the Ma'dan community, who have lived for 6,500 years in the southern wetlands of Iraq on floating islands. The other community is the Ur, who live on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, on islands that they build out of reeds, and which have a lifespan of twenty years. There are people all over the world who live in aquatic environments.
We really can't move forward with the same set of tools that got us to where we are now. We can't just keep using high-tech technology and this type of thinking to solve the problems that created those problems. Looking at other communities might give us an opportunity to say, what if we used high-tech technology along with LO-TEK technology to create floating cities. What do we think about these systems that work with our natural environment? There are so many opportunities in design and resilience if we can get away from just reacting to situations and problems. We're really fascinated right now with sea level rise because we think of it as the closest thing we're going to have to deal with. But right behind sea level rise is the massive dieback of trees in desert environments. It's just the thing that's going to impact the most people at any given time.
There's a new crisis coming, which is the wildfires in Australia and California. People are doing controlled burning and using pyrotechnics as a technology. Communities across the Americas and Australia have been doing this for millennia. They knew that they had to do this in these environments to generate more fertility but also to reduce the threat. They've been using these things as resilience strategies for a very long time.
I think we really need to broaden our perspective on technology, but also be more proactive and prepared, not just in coastal ecosystems and coastal cities, but in all areas. That's why the book is divided into mountains, forests, deserts, and wetlands. We need to address all of these different environments and be resilient in each of them.
Amy Frearson: With climate change and the Anthropocene already here, are you sure we haven't run out of time to become resilient?
Julia Watson: No. I want to kind of reframe the concept of the Anthropocene. Because we got to industrialization, we got to this period—the Age of Enlightenment—that led us to a disconnection from nature. It separated us from nature, so we either see it as a threat or we see ourselves as its savior. I think that's still the basic way of thinking within the concept of the Anthropocene, and I want the book to dissolve that lens.
These are symbiotic relationships that are the basic building blocks of nature. These LO-TEK technologies are born from symbiotic relationships with our environment, humans live in symbiosis with natural systems. This is where we need to move today. We are not superior, we do not work against nature or threaten it, we need to be in symbiosis with it. We need to change this idea of superiority to an understanding of symbiosis.
I think we need a new mythology, I keep talking about this mythology of the contemporary world, the mythology of technology, but this new mythology is actually fundamentally based on the understanding that we are not superior. It's the only way we can move forward. I really think there is a tremendous political will that is growing. We are witnessing something that I have never seen before. I think it is really inspiring and unprecedented. To see a government that is completely disqualifying and ignoring the fact that climate change is happening, and then to have a wave of young people, children, who are just rising up politically and saying we can't ignore it anymore.
I see change happening because I see it around me every day. There is a huge interest in moving in this direction, and architects are advocating for it and asking how to respond to this challenge. It is a huge step in the right direction, to elevate and reframe how we build and how we urbanize.
