The Floating Islands of Al Tahla | Julia Watson

Urban Designer Julia Watson takes us to the southern wetlands of Iraq, where the Maʻdān people construct islands & houses from a single species of plant, using a 6,500 year-old technique.
From the Long Now Seminar, “Design by Radical Indigenism” by Julia Watson. Watch the full talk here:
• Design by Radical Indi...
Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable.
There is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems. Watson's work reconnects with this sophisticated global body of knowledge.
Julia Watson teaches Urban Design at Harvard and Columbia University and is author of Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism (02019). Her work focuses on experiential, landscape, and urban design, with an ethos towards global ecological change.
"Design by Radical Indigenism" was given on September 15, 02020 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:
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