El País (English) Global
Julia Watson's Lo-TEK documents ancestral systems that cities can learn from
Knowledge recapCleared for publication
In the 1960s, the "green revolution" in Bali replaced the irrigation practices managed by the priests of a Hindu-Buddhist temple to the lake goddess Dewi Danu. The new approach used fertilisers and new seeds. Designer Julia Watson says the system collapsed within four harvests, and the traditional subak system, built on cooperation among farmers, took decades to restore. Watson's books call this kind of knowledge Lo-TEK, after low-tech and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. They document the living root bridges the Khasi people grow in Meghalaya, Persian yakchal ice houses and China's Sangjiyutang mulberry-silkworm-fish system. Her 2024 book adds 23 urban projects that adapt such methods. "When communities start working with engineers and scientists, we see climate technologies evolving like never before." — Julia Watson
Why it matters
The article presents these systems as working technologies that communities, engineers and scientists are now adapting. One example is Bangladesh's floating farms, used as models for floating wetlands in Seattle and for cleaning waterways in Pakistan.
Read the original at El País (English)
Origins, evidence and credits
Original headline: What is Lo-TEK, the ecological alternative to extractive technology
- Origins and holders
- The subak farmers and the water-temple priests of Bali, the Khasi people of Meghalaya, the Persian builders of yakchals, and the farmers of the Guangdong river deltas, as described in the article.
- What was checked
- The article cites Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who reports that complex-systems research about 30 years later found the Balinese temple-managed method to be the most efficient solution.
- Limits reported
- None stated in the source.
People and institutions credited
Julia Watson (Australian architect and landscape designer; author of Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism and Lo-TEK Water; professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design); Balinese subak farmers and the priests of the temple of Dewi Danu; the Khasi people (living root bridges); the Achuar people (Kara Solar project, cited by Juan Manuel Crespo); Pablo de Soto (architect and art curator); Yuk Hui (philosopher); Juan Manuel Crespo (Ecuadorian sociologist); Bernardo Gutiérrez (reporter, El País).