Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism

Julia Watson, an Australian-born landscape architect well known for her approach to the challenges of modern societies in relation to nature, was the centre of attention at an event last week organised by Partners for Water and the University of Delft. Watson inspired students and other visitors with her enthusiastic message about the importance of “knowledge that is being ignored, and the intelligence lying around us.” 

The morning session at the faculty of architecture was hosted by Steffen Nijhuis, professor of landscape-based urbanism at TU Delft. His work aligns with Watson’s view that sustainable cities must be rooted in living systems and local knowledge, rather than imposed on top of them. He describes this approach simply as “landscape logic” for sustainable urban planning.

The term nature-based solution (NBS) has become too technical, he argued, reduced to planting a few trees and ticking a box. His team at TU Delft is proposing a shift towards landscape-based solutions, treating the cultural dimension of a landscape as inseparable from the ecological one. Landscapes, he reminded the audience, are not just natural systems. They are the product of centuries of interaction between people and their environment.

Meetings with indigenous community leaders at COP16 in Colombia, where TU Delft hosted a pavilion with Partners for Water on indigenous water knowledge, showed how little Western institutions are only just starting to understand. To begin with; “water is alive”, continued Julia Watson, “it remembers, it warns and it teaches.”

To illustrate the point she has been making for many years, Watson used a bridge in northeast India, not built from steel or concrete but grown. The Khasi people of Meghalaya plant two fig trees on opposite banks of a river, then spend decades training their roots across bamboo scaffolding until the root systems touch, fuse, and become one living structure that can withstand monsoon floods and grow stronger over time.

“I’ve been there,” Watson said. “I’ve held these trees. You knock them, and they resonate –because there’s water inside. It’s living tissue. It’s growing.” A design philosophy she calls Lo-TEK: Traditional Ecological Knowledge with “Lo” referring to low-tech as opposed to high-tech industrial solutions, taking into account the accumulated wisdom of indigenous communities who have engineered living systems over millennia.

Humans should be returning to their relationship with nature, a connection that seems to have been lost, in the belief that technology can solve everything in modern cities. Instead, we should work with nature not against it. “Many indigenous people don’t even have a word for nature. They don’t see themselves separate from it,” said Watson.

The alternative Watson proposes is not a rejection of technology, but a radical re-definition and a different way of thinking. Drawing from her book “Lo-Tek Water, a field guide for TEKnology”, elaborately described and explained with infographics, at TU she described five examples from around the world, to show what this looks like in practice.

Clam gardens

Firstly, the clam gardens in North America. For 4,000 years, indigenous communities along the Pacific Northwest coast have built shoreline terraces by stacking rocks at low tide, creating warm shallow shelves where clams thrive. The efforts on Quadra Island in British Columbia have truly paid off, as the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation have turned 35 percent of the coastline into a productive clam habitat, feeding not only the human community but also the otters, minks, and waterbirds around them.

Today the Swinomish people of Washington State are reviving the practice, constructing the first such terrace built in the United States in over 400 years to protect shorelines from storms, erosion, and rising seas.

Kelp farming on Long Island

Just two hours from Manhattan, the Shinnecock Nation is running the first indigenous-led kelp farm on the entire East Coast. The community has maintained a relationship with the sea and with sugar kelp for around 13,000 years. Their operation cleans the heavily polluted waters of Shinnecock Bay, sequesters carbon, restores biodiversity and generates income by selling harvested kelp to local farmers as a replacement for synthetic fertiliser.

Organic rooftop in Bangkok

Designed by landscape architects Landprocess, the organic rooftop garden of Thammasat University covers 22,000 square metres and is modelled on traditional Thai rice terraces. Students harvest food which is sold in the campus cafeteria. The building collects its own irrigation water, cools the surrounding air, and runs on renewable energy, creating a “food-water-energy nexus” built on ancestral logic.

The Chinampas of Mexico City

In the southern districts of the capital, a pre-colonial agricultural system is struggling to survive. But farmers still use shallow lake beds and plant willow trees along the edges, with a few harvests a year. The system also filters wastewater, lowers local air temperatures, and buffers against both floods and droughts. They are still proof of what cities can do with water, but are slowly being lost to urbanisation and the pollution that comes with it.

The Mulberry dyke system of the Yangtze Delta

In this Chinese system dating back centuries, farmers plant mulberry trees on embankments between fishponds. Silkworms feed on the mulberry leaves, their waste falls into the water and feeds the fish, the fish fertilise the pond bottom, and once a year farmers dredge that rich silt onto the dykes to nourish the mulberry trees again. Nothing is wasted. The system also forms an intricate network of canals that protects the city of Huzhou from flooding.

The city as a sponge

Perhaps the clearest proof that ancestral knowledge can directly shape contemporary urban design comes from the late Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu. When developing his “Sponge City” model – now replicated in nearly 100 cities worldwide – Yu drew directly from the Chinampas and the Yangtze Delta dyke systems. Sponge City uses a different urban drainage system: instead of expelling water as soon as possible through pipes and drains, it absorbs and retains it, then slowly releases it, putting it to use in much the same way a landscape does.

The panel produced a few examples of how abandoned ancestral systems were recovered in the 1990s, when researcher Stephen Lansing created a computer model simulating how the water temples in Bali coordinated water flow across the island’s rice terraces. He showed that the priests were managing a sophisticated, landscape-scale pest control and irrigation system. Examples from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Italy showed that Europe has its own long-neglected traditions of working with water, many of which are preserved in monastic landscapes or were only recently rediscovered through aerial surveys.

Students at TU Delft are increasingly drawn to these topics. One graduate asked what ethical principles should guide working with indigenous communities. He referred to multinational companies like Nike, which Watson has worked with as a sustainability consultant. She responded that these relationships should be made more equitable and regenerative. A Smart Oath of Understanding (SOU) has been developed as an alternative to standard Western legal contracts, using oral agreements encoded in blockchain technology to protect indigenous intellectual property and ensure communities retain ownership and control.

Various students asked how ancestral knowledge systems can be scaled to meet the pace of urbanisation: 165 new cities by 2040, and half a billion potential climate refugees. There is no easy answer. But everyone in the room agreed that the transition must happen simultaneously at every level; education, governance, finance, legislation, and the way we gather proof. The biggest challenge is to measure progress not primarily through economic growth. “Then transition begins.”

The city as a sponge

Perhaps the clearest proof that ancestral knowledge can directly shape contemporary urban design comes from the late Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu. When developing his “Sponge City” model – now replicated in nearly 100 cities worldwide – Yu drew directly from the Chinampas and the Yangtze Delta dyke systems. Sponge City uses a different urban drainage system: instead of expelling water as soon as possible through pipes and drains, it absorbs and retains it, then slowly releases it, putting it to use in much the same way a landscape does.

The panel produced a few examples of how abandoned ancestral systems were recovered in the 1990s, when researcher Stephen Lansing created a computer model simulating how the water temples in Bali coordinated water flow across the island’s rice terraces. He showed that the priests were managing a sophisticated, landscape-scale pest control and irrigation system. Examples from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Italy showed that Europe has its own long-neglected traditions of working with water, many of which are preserved in monastic landscapes or were only recently rediscovered through aerial surveys.

Students at TU Delft are increasingly drawn to these topics. One graduate asked what ethical principles should guide working with indigenous communities. He referred to multinational companies like Nike, which Watson has worked with as a sustainability consultant. She responded that these relationships should be made more equitable and regenerative. A Smart Oath of Understanding (SOU) has been developed as an alternative to standard Western legal contracts, using oral agreements encoded in blockchain technology to protect indigenous intellectual property and ensure communities retain ownership and control.

Various students asked how ancestral knowledge systems can be scaled to meet the pace of urbanisation: 165 new cities by 2040, and half a billion potential climate refugees. There is no easy answer. But everyone in the room agreed that the transition must happen simultaneously at every level; education, governance, finance, legislation, and the way we gather proof. The biggest challenge is to measure progress not primarily through economic growth. “Then transition begins.”

Julia Watson is the author of Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (2019) and Lo-TEK Water (2024). She teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.