Living root bridges of Nongriat village in East Khasi Hills district, Meghalaya. Photo by PJeganathan, licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has outlined a plan for humanity to live in harmony with nature by 2050. Our cities aren’t going away, so how can we use biodiversity as a building block and work with indigenous technologies to take action? Pauline Herbst talks with international landscape designer and keynote speaker at the World Green Infrastructure Congress 2024, Julia Watson, to answer these questions.
Introduction (00:00:00)
Pauline Herbst: Hello and welcome to Sustain!, a project of Ngā Ara Whetū: the Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society. I’m Pauline Herbst, and today we’ll be speaking with landscape architect, academic and activist Julia Watson about designing for climate change, how biodiversity can be a building block for urban environments, and how the concept of Lo-TEK can be translated into our cities. Julia, welcome. It’s so wonderful to have you with us today
Julia Watson: Thank you so much for inviting me.
PH: Julia is currently based in New York, and in a few weeks she will be flying to Aotearoa New Zealand. So that’s in September, as she’s one of the keynote speakers for the World Green Infrastructure Congress, being held here at the University of Auckland. So to kick off Julia, one of the first things I wanted to talk about was the link between landscape architecture and urban design. What drew you into this field?
JW: So originally I started out as an architect and was studying and was, on the side, introduced to landscape architecture and immediately felt a really strong affinity to that and was working with a lot of designers who were working with communities in participatory design. So already working in urban environments and working in spaces where participants were in the city, and users of the city and neighbourhoods were becoming a really important part of the process of design and the methodology of the practices. And I think that just, as a landscape architect, interested in work that was participatory, it just leads you to be working in the field of urban design, because I see them as really synonymous. In my career of 25 years, where you might have thought of landscape architecture as a smaller site scale, or more planting specific, but in my lifetime, I’ve really seen this explosion of landscape architecture as a field really start to dominate in areas of larger scale.
JW: So, really starting to think about cities and through the lens of ecological design and ecological urbanism, especially while I was teaching over the last ten years, it came to be the dominator of how we really start to think of cities and foregrounding the design of cities and neighbourhoods and public spaces to have much more of a consideration, not just for landscape, but for the flows in and out of the site. There could be hydrological or wind or soil composition, especially in the era of really post-industrial landscapes as well, where you’re really forced to deal with landscapes that are emergent from extraction, that were feeding the cities and on the peripheries of the cities and mostly on the waterfront edges of our cities, which then became really valuable spaces. In my period of time as a landscape architect, I’ve really seen that sort of switch where the industry, I think, has become the dominant leader in the field of urbanism.
Design for Climate Change (03:08:19)
PH: That leads me to something that you said in one of your podcasts, and that is design for climate change. Do you want to talk to us about design for climate change?
JW: I was teaching at Columbia for the last 12 years, and within that time of teaching, there was also, in the last 7 or 8 years, this transition. And it was very focused around the leadership in the urban design department at Columbia around thinking how cities are confronting climate risk and how they’re appropriately planning pre-emptively and also responding to the shocks and stresses of climate change. One of the courses I was teaching in was with Kate Orff for 12 years. We were sort of the climate resilience studio working with the 100 Resilient Cities program, which is a program that involved 100 mayors around the globe who are really foregrounding considerations about how to plan for climate risks within their cities and that was really how I came about to be exploring the relationship with climate risk and climate adaptation. I think landscape architecture has poised itself to be one alternative, where green infrastructures start to allow cities to adapt and accommodate and mitigate those impacts of climate change.
PH: You want to talk us through a few of those. The things that come top of mind to me is we see these roofs with plants growing on them. But then obviously people go, oh, but won’t that be heavy and break the roof? And I’ve read some very interesting journal articles around cooling within cities and how just planting trees, etcetera, can bring down a lot of that heat. But that’s obviously only skimming the surface. What can you tell us?
JW: For me, when we were hit by Sandy in New York, I was living here in the city. And really the impact that that particular hurricane had on the city was, we took a long time to recover. It brought a city of, on a work day, 25 million people to a grinding halt and flooded all of lower Manhattan. So I think personally, what I’ve experienced and in the studios that I’ve actually taught, cities that are really impacted by storm surge, cities that are impacted by inundation, housing being decimated by really large catastrophic storm events. That’s where I really see the complex design thinking of landscape architecture playing a really big role when you’re trying to decide how to be preemptive of those types of huge events and also how to, when you’re cleaning up post one of these events, how to make sure that that city won’t be affected in the same way. How to build the resilience level of those cities post-impacts, that you’re not just focusing on rebuilding housing in places that are extraordinarily vulnerable.
JW: Obviously, housing is one of the top priorities in a recovery effort from a city, but you’re also thinking about the green infrastructures that are going to allow a city to adapt to that. I think the industry itself has for a really long time focused on the things that you were talking about, like green facades, green roofs, how we can bring down the ambient air temperatures by creating canopies in cities which sometimes can lower up to eight degrees the outdoor air temperatures. I think that they’re all really important. But I myself was teaching a lot of these technology courses in seminars where the number of ideas and the number of solutions that were available in the toolkit of landscape architects seemed to me to be a little bit scant.
JW: The impetus for me to do a lot of the research that Lo-TEK was based on was, one, because I’d been travelling and working with a lot of communities on UNESCO World Heritage Sites and conservation projects, where I saw these incredible infrastructural technologies in the landscape that were doing the things that we were identifying in some of our high-tech, or in that toolkit they already have, but in really diverse ways. And to really just expand and to try and explore what other technologies are out there and available to us, the deep technologies that have been around for thousands of years that, in the progress of city building and mass expansion and population density, had we perhaps failed to focus on, had we erased, had we completely ignored, and how were they applicable in today’s context and in the face of the climate changes that we are experiencing? It was like an experimental research project that I think is still occurring.
Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (08:01:13)
PH: That’s right. This is a good time to introduce our listeners to the book that Julia Watson wrote called Lo-TEK. Do you want to talk us through what Lo-TEK means? From what I understand, Lo stands for local and TEK is the traditional ecological knowledge. Do you want to talk us through that in a little more detail?
JW: Lo-TEK is kind of shortened, as you said, for local and Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK. I came up with that, based on the last conversation, because I was teaching and researching all these nature-based technologies that were derived from traditional knowledge systems. In all the research that I was reading, they were lumped into this classification in architecture and landscape architecture, which was low-tech, same sort of phrasing, but a really, really different definition because low-tech, the other form, its definition is primitive, simple, usually made of industrialised processes, but with a rudimentary type of high-tech. It’s in direct contrast to high-tech as well. In all my work that I had done with communities and coming to understand a lot of these different systems, it was really obvious to me that the industry was doing an incredible disservice to itself by classifying these types of technologies in these ways.
JW: I really wanted to identify what technologies were already out there that could be seen as having a very direct relationship to climate change. Climate resilient technologies, which had already been identified by so many different local, indigenous, traditional communities who were using these technologies. It’s not like I was identifying anything new, I was just really trying to capture a definition that really explained and fully identified the breadth and sophistication, and the incredible divergent thinking and knowledge systems that surrounded these types of technologies, and to put them into focus in a way that would relate them to sustainability and climate technology, and to just try and give them a platform so that they could be researched and discussed and used and thought about in a really different way that was very pertinent to the needs of contemporary society.
JW: That’s exactly what radical indigenism means, and I just wanted to skip quickly to that, designed by radical indigenists, because it’s really important in that radical indigenism is a theory, a philosophy by Cherokee professor Eva Marie Garoutte, and she says that this is for indigenous communities to look at their mythologies, their oral histories, their practices and their beliefs in a new way, in a contemporary context, to shed new light about today’s events, today’s scenarios, or to create new knowledge for today. I thought that was so fascinating and interesting, and really relevant in how we were thinking and talking about climate change and sustainability. I brought it into the design context and said, well, what if we could do that in design and really look at traditional knowledge systems and the technologies and the beliefs and the mythologies, and try to understand how they could inform about the context of design and design in relation to resilience, for the discipline.
Defining Technology (11:53:18)
PH: I wanted to, first of all, ask you to give us some sort of definition of technology. Here I’m thinking around something that you said in an interview around how architecture traditionally tends to put up glass and concrete and these things that keep nature out. If you could perhaps speak around technology as it’s traditionally articulated through this architectural lens, and then how Lo-TEK has transformed this through some of the work that you’re doing as a landscape architect.
JW: For a really long time, we have had this divergence between humans and nature, and the idea that nature was to be controlled and made as efficient as possible and optimised. All of our industry is about that in some way, and it’s reflected in our codes and our specifications that everything must at all times be constant. If you go into looking at different types of materials and material technologies, which I taught, things such as fire retardants, continuous colour, the way that we really start to make sure that everything is optimised and controlled is one of the most important ways that we create this control around our environment. What’s been really interesting for me is to look at lots of the different technologies and materials and realise that some of the indigenous and traditional materials and technologies, they had all of these different types of performances and features, though the consistency and the constancy of a fire retardant rating wasn’t specifically applicable.
JW: Say, for example, if you’re making a seagrass thatched house or roofing system, that depends on the moisture content, on the drying, probably the area that this particular seagrass came from, the season, what’s happening around it. It’s much more living and static and constantly changing and evolving, though it has these fire retardant qualities that are naturally harder, the performance of this particular material. I think that we, in the industry, have tried so specifically to control everything rather than to work with the flow of things. The big lesson learned about climate change is that once you fortify and once you control, that sort of arrests a moment in time and a specific set of forces and principles and players and specific features of seasonality. In the era of climate change, that’s constantly changing for us. We’re in unknown territory. We see that with all the charts of outdoor air temperatures, sea level temperatures. At a moment, you have to start to wonder, if we have all of these conditions that are so controlled and so geared towards specific types and specifications that are about a moment in time, and we’re exceeding all of those limits, then how are these different types of materials, and how are the forms, and how is everything going to adapt?
JW: I think one of the principles, or the parables, of Lo-TEK is that we’re looking at living materials that do adapt, and construction systems that are incredibly adaptable, and living systems that are constantly becoming more complex and responsive from the day they’re built in time. That goes towards circularity. A lot of these systems are even more than circular. They’re continuously evolving and that’s the beauty, the sophistication and the complexity of dealing with living materials and living complex systems, which these technologies are. There’s so many differences, I would say, between modern and postmodern architecture, and material technology, and what we’re looking at with Lo-Tek. I would think with a lot of different other names for the types of living dynamic architectures and material technologies that are really starting to emerge within this circular economy or regenerative material economy, however we want to call it. I think there has to be a much larger space given to consider, how do we then accommodate that with within all the structures and codes and specifications, so that we can start to really push this industry forward and really start to change and respond to all the things that we see around us, that are changing so quickly so that we can actually catch up and keep pace with what’s happening in our environment around us?
Circular Design Basics (16:55:14)
PH: Do you want to talk us through the basics of circular design in your field, and perhaps how that can be translated when you’re scaling up? Because I understand you’re quite proficient in scaling up and large-scale projects, but trying to do that in quite a sensitive manner.
JW: Circular design is really thinking about the whole material life cycle, from beginning to end, and really starting to eradicate that even concept that there’s a waste, and really transition into thinking about things as a resource and a residue. That’s the life cycle. But there’s a continuous life cycle. After something becomes a residue, it can actually become a resource for another industry or for another type of material form. You’re starting to create these continuous or these circular systems or economies or material life cycles where everything becomes like we see in nature. There’s no waste. Things really start to reflect, I would say, the natural physical properties of our environment and the natural physical performances of our environment where everything becomes used by something else in its lifecycle and is transitioned into a different form of life.
JW: Talking about circular economy, it’s really something to consider on a very large scale, not even in just material, but even in data, how we use software to assist us in creating these much larger circular systems, how a building can be dismantled or taken down, and the waste from that building can be reconstructed, even through AI, to all be used in the reconstruction of different types of projects. It’s an emerging field that is incredibly interesting and valuable. I think the possibilities are really endless in how it could emerge as something that is so vastly game-changing in some of the really big issues that we’re dealing with in industry like waste, like carbon. From that local material technological scale, right up to that atmospheric, circular, system scale as well.
Barriers to urban rewilding (19:20:12)
PH: What are some of the barriers that you’ve seen in what you’ve called a rewilding of urbanisms that prevents us from really bringing circular design into our cities? Or perhaps it’s happening and I haven’t quite caught up yet.
JW: One of the biggest barriers in the industry is really that we’re in a transition phase where I don’t think everyone really sees the value in pushing forward this agenda. I think that that’s something we see across the board in the political realm. But not everybody really thinks that rewilding of our cities and making biodiversity a primary building block for our cities is actually that important. That comes back to aesthetics, that comes back to who wants to deal with the problem at the time, that comes back to cost, it comes back to the project manager, it comes back to the client. A lot of the time when I’m speaking or talking to audiences or doing any sort of advocacy work around Lo-TEK, you really know that there’s a group of people you’re not going to persuade and you’re not going to get to, and that’s fine.
JW: But there’s a lot of people who are really interested in understanding and trying to know as much as they can about how do they, as a person, try and change and deal with this really existential crisis that we call climate change? I think a lot of people feel incredibly disempowered and one of those ways is thinking about our public realm and its relationship to nature, and advocating for bringing as much biodiversity back, pulling up as much bitumen and asphalt and pavement as we can, allowing all those things around us like wildlife, our wind, our water, our soils. All the things that we think of as not alive, that are actually alive, allowing them to filter as much as we can through our urban environments and really peeling back the layers and the surfaces that we have created that restricts all of those conditions from working their way into our landscape and into our surroundings as holistically and as pervasively as they can.
PH: I was just thinking while you were speaking about a colleague of mine, Dr Keri Mills, and how she was telling me when we had flooding during Cyclone Gabrielle, about newspaper reports saying Queen Street, which is the main street here, has become a river, when in actual fact, that was always the river. And the city was built over it and there’s a whole incredibly vibrant taonga around it. She showed me an incredibly moving video which I will link to in the show notes. Do you have any examples of how biodiversity can be used as a building block?
Biodiversity as a Building Block and the Rewilding of the Rockefeller Center (22:17:20)
JW: It’s funny that you mentioned that about your colleague, because I always talk about Canal Street in New York City, which was obviously a waterway as well. I think Sydney has that same problem down on the harbour there. There was one of the streets that always floods because these literally were springs and water corridors. It’s interesting that we are surprised by huge hydrological cycles reemerging and making themselves known in flood events and we’re like, wait, didn’t we fortify ourselves against that? Why is that there, how dare that appear again? Here in New York, one project that I’ve been involved with for the last couple of years was actually a rewilding of the Rockefeller Center, which is one of the most well-known and prominent public domain spaces in the city. During Covid, I was brought in to change the whole campus of Rockefeller Center, which is a 22 acre campus and was actually the site of the first botanic garden in the United States. That rewilding was a transformation of the entire way, the ideology around how that public domain should be landscaped, bringing in mostly native species.
JW: One might think that that’s kind of a small gesture. But really, in the large scale, what had been happening previously is that plants were being brought up from Florida, which is huge transportation costs and costs for fuel. They were non-natives. There was no literacy in terms of the education of people experiencing that space to understand that most of the plant species were not really from that particular environment. I think it’s also really important to use native endemic species or rewilded species, so that people visiting those spaces really have a basic understanding of, what is my native palette of plants? So when you start to plant those native species, you find all those species coming back, because it’s not just about seeing those species, hearing those species, hearing those species calls and starting to notice the bird calls of your local environment. It’s supporting pollination and that supports your food crops, that supports your honeybees. That really does have a much larger ecological effect on a large scale, and Rockefeller Center is right near Central Park as well. So you have these urban islands becoming actual islands for flora and fauna, insects, to be able to visit throughout the city to help pollinate different species.
2020 Barbican Exhibition: Our Time on Earth (24:58:04)
JW: Thinking on a larger scale, yes, I was involved in an exhibition at the Barbican that’s now been touring around the world for the last couple of years, and it was an exhibition called Our Time on Earth. It was thinking about solutions for climate change. It was a very optimistic exhibition that was put together by FranklinTill, who are an English design duo, and the exhibition involved, I think, 18 different artists. There were a couple of other Australians who were involved in that, Tim and Ed, and the particular piece that I did, I was working with a really big global engineering firm, Buro Happold and they said my brief was to design technologies for the year 2040. I was like, right, okay, how do we do that within the lens of Lo-TEK? I’d been working with a number of communities for really long periods of time actually, whether it be projects or assisting them with some of the issues that they were facing and so I reached out to three of those communities and said to them, how would you feel about being involved in this exhibition whereby you work with myself and some specialist engineers from these engineering firms to come up with solutions?
JW: Lo-TEK hybrid technologies from the year 2040, based upon the traditional knowledge systems of your community that we’ve identified in the book. They were all excited and we worked together for a period of time. I think it was six months and it was through Covid. It was through workshops that were done by Zoom and with the teams from Buro Happold, the specialist engineering teams having these meetings and participatory design workshops with the community. We came up with three new technologies for the year 2040 for three different types of cities. One was for Indian cities to help reduce the urban heat island effect and bring down ambient air temperatures, based upon the living root bridges that you can see on the front of the book, Lo-TEK, which are these incredible living bridges that are grown over the rivers in Meghalaya in northern India that allow transportation over these really swollen rivers in monsoon season.
JW: We created this growing, sustainable canopy, this living canopy that we designed so that it would actually trace and track over a sustainable transportation network and become this canopy over a walkable transportation network that followed a sustainable urban transportation corridor, because a living root bridge actually uses this thing called inosculation, which is when two different species of plants are almost grafted together, but there becomes a hinge and in the living root bridge, they’re wrapped, and the two trees, their vascular systems become one. So we use that type of technology to create a really large infrastructure, and then in this exhibition, exhibited through projection mapping the impact of that particular environment and the performance of that living structure over that city, how that would change the urban heat island effect, how it would change the microclimate, how it would bring different types of flora and fauna into the city environment, how that could change moisture levels, evapotranspiration. What are all those impacts on a large scale that could grow with an actual different type of infrastructure that was expanding through the city, like transportation?
Water management technology: the subak system (28:45:05)
PH: I read a 2019 co-authored paper with you in Spool that talked a lot around water technologies. I was particularly struck by one of the case studies you use where a group of people are growing rice paddies and it’s quite an integrated social and cultural system whereby the people at the top, yes, have the best crops and could potentially cut things off below, but then there would be this disease potentially coming in.
JW: So the subak system is actually in the first book. I started working with the Subak community, the system and the community of farmers are called the same thing, back in 2011. I believe I was working on the first UNESCO World Heritage landscape for Bali, and it was a cultural landscape of rice terraces and subak systems and the system itself is really incredible. It’s rice terraces that they flood at the scale of watersheds so they don’t have to use pesticides. There’s no fertiliser used in this entire agrarian system, and the reason there’s no fertiliser is because they’re actually syphoning water that is coming down off the volcanic landscapes. This water is full of phosphorus and nutrients and potassium, and it’s feeding naturally into all these terraces. These terraces have been in the same location for a thousand years. An individual terrace has been there, the same wall has been just repaired and maintained for the last thousand years.
JW: What’s really interesting is that there was a period of time in the 70s, 80s and 90s when the Balinese and Indonesian government introduced this thing called the Green Revolution. You might think it sounds really fantastic. What it actually entailed was the use of fertilisers, the mandated use of fertilisers and pesticides in all the rice terraces. What they saw was what we see all around the world in farming. The reason why regenerative farming is so important and has such a spectacular following that keeps on growing and growing is that they would see bumper crops in a couple of years and then this terrible decline because the soil structure would be completely destroyed. All of the different species, like the ducks and the insects that you’d have seen, all this wonderful diversity of different species who would actually assist the farmers in creating these incredibly productive crops before the Green Revolution, they all disappeared as well. You had these dead soils and you had these dead landscapes, and it would put the farmers into this cycle of having to keep on using more and more and more of the fertilisers.
JW: So the World Heritage Project was actually put in place because there were a couple of regions that still hadn’t really converted, and they were still using the traditional methods of no pesticides and no fertilisers and flooding these watersheds of the subak at the same time, based upon a system of water temples that were run by priests. So it was super interesting about the subak, the religious life of this landscape and the priests that control the water temples are actually controlling the agricultural calendar as well. You can see this really strong relationship between spirituality and agriculture and hydrology, because the farmers and the water temples are actually working in symbiosis with the production of rice, which is the basis of life in this community. You see this really beautifully complex relationship between things like the goddess of rice, who lives at the bottom of the lake, at the top of the volcanic landscape where the water comes from. There’s just such an incredible geological and geospatial relationship of the entire scale of the island that works all the way down to how one single rice terrace is filled with water, and the whole calendar is based upon the end cycle of life of a grain of rice.
JW: I was just working with the community and really becoming so involved with the conservation and planning how to create circular economies in addition to assisting the farmers in the off-seasons and around different types of material resources that were available in the landscape. So it was the project that launched me into first thinking about Lo-TEK. And I’d been studying sacred landscapes in my postgraduate studies. I had connected that these spiritual landscapes, natural landscapes in these traditional contexts were really about survival and often about agrarian landscapes. I hadn’t, though, identified this underpinning of technology in those landscapes. It was within that project that I really started to see that some of the rice terraces were cleaning water, and these terraces were providing incredible carbon sinks and doing a lot of the landscape services as we call them, that we design in technologies in landscape architecture. Sort of a little bit off topic, but that project was kind of the moment that everything just for me fell into place around the concept of Lo-TEK.
Teaching sustainability, advocacy and research (34:41:21)
PH: I was struck by something you said in an interview many years ago around how, in your teaching practice, you’d started to instil this idea that’s a very base point for students or for any designer, which is to include sustainability, because clients wouldn’t ask for it. They want stuff that’s economical. They want stuff to be built faster. You’ve worked in academia as well, and there is this idea that we perhaps need to stay, or there was an idea, that academics need to stay very neutral, very reserved, very away from that, so their research can be pure data, so to speak. But increasingly, academics or researchers and people that work in these professions that are right at the forefront of climate change are feeling it’s crucially important to be involved in advocacy and in activism. That’s something that you’ve been increasingly moving into. I’d like you to tell us a little bit more about that, and I’d like to hear a little bit about the next book coming up.
JW: I was teaching, as I said, technology. I came to the US to go to the school that I was teaching in because I just thought it was the place that had the most groundbreaking research that was at the forefront of the profession. You really swallow the Kool-Aid. And these are incredibly wonderful and inspiring spaces and places and people and pedagogies. But what I also found was, when I was teaching, is that a lot of the students would come just like I had come, but from non-English speaking backgrounds, from regions all over the globe. There was an idea that the places and spaces that they’d come from and the practices were lesser, and I think one of the, and this goes back to the advocacy, sort of subliminal advocacy, maybe, in my teaching practice. I would really press the students to think about infrastructures and technologies and design methodologies that they could construct from their landscapes that they had come from, and the traditional communities that they had lived near or were from and to try and change the thinking and shift the paradigm around what local and traditional was and how it related to what we thought of as the most cutting edge, the most innovative practices that were really at the forefront of design. It was so interesting that the students that were in my seminars, they would really resist, number one, thinking about where they had come from and thinking that it was innovative.
JW: Number two, that when I would say to them, okay, think about something and document a technology, everyone would bring a house. I would say, no, we’re not looking at habitation. We’re looking at landscapes and infrastructures that work at a really large scale. We need to document and think about it. You’d have this natural progression, and after a couple of weeks, the students would come and they would be so excited to speak of the places that they’d come from and the technologies that they’d found and lived near. And then to say, I live in this space, and I had never, ever, thought of this as a technology or this particular region. I had always thought that that was a traditional agriculture that was not really relevant in today’s times or in modern times or related to progress. That really epitomises the type of thinking that I’m trying to dissolve and to subliminally divert into a really different paradigm shift.
JW: So that’s where a lot of this, I think, activism emerged from, just seeing the happiness and the joy that people really got about exploring spaces that they were super familiar with, but yet realising how unfamiliar they were with some of the knowledge systems from their particular regions. The work that I’m doing now, most recently, I have started an institute called the Lo-TEK Institute, and that’s where, after having two children and stopping teaching at Harvard and Columbia, I really just wanted to look at, how could Lo-TEK transform into a curriculum that I could teach? I worked with a high school teacher, and we spent about two years turning the first book into something that we can now call the Living Earth Curriculum. It’s an online digital database, and it’s based on traditional knowledge systems and understanding what these traditional nature-based technologies are. So, from the Lo-TEK Institute, there is the Living Earth curriculum. There will be the Living Water Curriculum. It’s based upon the next book, but there’s a couple of other projects that, and the Institute’s mission is to really foster environmental literacy and to work on environmental advocacy.
JW: So the advocacy side is one of the technologies that I didn’t talk about that came out of the Barbican exhibition, in accompaniment to those three urban technologies, it was a legal technical innovation that I evolved, because midway through this process of having a big corporate giant introduced to these three communities and sharing knowledge, I realised that I hadn’t protected the communities. So I immediately realised that I had to redress the scenario. I started working with a community called the ENRICH Hub, and they’re indigenous academics who are really working on indigenous intellectual property. So I started to develop this thing called an SOOU, a Smart Oath of Understanding. It was a nine paragraph, spoken-word oath that would replace an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding.
JW: It was to take the idea of what would traditionally be used to protect intellectual property, which is incredibly Western and very asymmetrical to Western law, and to create something through smart contracting that took up a middle ground or a space that was more synonymous with indigenous values, indigenous knowledge systems, transmission of indigenous knowledge. To take into consideration, how can we protect indigenous intellectual property in a way that really advocates for the protection of value, community knowledge, and leave the power and control in the hands of the community? A couple of projects I’m working on with some different organisations, like the ISAPD, which is the Indigenous Society of Architects, Planners and Designers here in the States, where we’re doing some challenges, some projects within the curriculum where we’re working with those organisations that are really trying to bring together a platform for indigenous designers to start sharing their knowledge and providing a space for understanding and learning and leadership in that space.
CONCLUSION: What to expect from the WGIC 2024 (41:57:00)
PH: That sounds incredible. So we’re going to be having all of these young people coming out of high schools with some form of environmental literacy, and you’re certainly collaborating with communities as opposed to cultural appropriation, which is always just really positive.
JW: One of the reasons why I created the curriculum was because, in my 12 years of teaching, and I think in my maybe 1500-2000 students I had taught, four of them were from indigenous and native Hawaiian backgrounds. What I thought was so eye-opening about that was that, in a space where the knowledge and the histories of communities was so important and so critical for imagining our future, it wasn’t really foregrounded, that those particular students and their languages, their indigenous knowledge systems, had so much value. They weren’t being shown that, in the built environment, this is where their knowledge was absolutely applicable.
PH: So to end off: you’re going to be here presenting at the World Green Infrastructure Congress. For those who may still want to come along, what can they expect from your talk and from the Congress?
JW: I think from the talk, there’s going to be a little bit of the previous book. There’s going to be a little bit of the forthcoming book, which we didn’t talk about, Lo-TEK Water, and really an evolution of, if you’re familiar with Lo-TEK, really an evolution of some of the critical thinking around traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems, what that knowledge is capturing, and also what the SOOU is and how important this protection of indigenous intellectual property is.
PH: Fantastic. Well, I think you’ll find it quite interesting to be here in Tāmaki Makaurau, we’ve got some really cool projects happening around the waterfront. So we look forward to having you here. Thank you so much for joining us today.
JW: Thank you so much.
PH: This is Pauline Herbst, and you’ve been listening to me speaking with Julia Watson about circular design, about Lo-TEK, about biodiversity as a building block in our urban environments on the Sustain podcast, which is a project of Ngā Ara Whetū: Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society.
Dr Pauline Herbst, podcast host and writer; Julia Watson, international landscape designer and keynote speaker at the World Green Infrastructure Congress 2024. Music: “What Goes Up” © Tim Page 2024; Production: Ben Goldson, Pauline Herbst, Tim Page; Webpage: Pauline Herbst & Ben Goldson.
The ideas expressed in this podcast reflect the host and guest’s views and are not necessarily the views of The Big Q.
