Decolonizing Building Cultures in the Anthropocene (Robert Cowherd CC BY).LSAI@30
Channel: Robert Cowherd
Date: 28/09/2020

The inaugural lecture of a six-lecture series celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Lembaga Sejarah Arsitektur Indonesia (LSAI, Society of Indonesian Architectural Historians). Before examining the current and future practice of Indonesian Architecture, this lecture takes a long durée perspective to ask: What can we learn from pre-European contact building cultures to shed light on more holistic complex adaptive systems required by the challenges of the Anthropocene?
The famine induced by 20th century modernisms Green Revolution rice program in Bali called attention to the great sophistication of the Hindu-Balinese subak temple system for negotiating sharing arrangements between what would otherwise be competing interests. The elegant simplicity of the subak conceals a sophisticated system that too USC computer scientists a decade of study and testing to replicate. 
This template for ethno-archeology is applied to the sambatan (mutual self-help construction) from the living cultures of a dispersed Southeast Asian archipelago Zomia. 
Anticipating the later presentations