Lo—TEK Water makes the case that the infrastructure best suited to a climate-altered world already exists—built by Indigenous communities over millennia, and largely ignored by the discipline that most needs it.
About This Book
Julia Watson's second Lo—TEK volume narrows the focus of her 2019 survey to a single element, and gains force in doing so. Water is the axis on which four climate emergencies turn—drought, flooding, sea-level rise and extreme storms—and Watson argues that the technologies capable of absorbing them are ancestral rather than novel. Mexico's chinampas, China's dike-ponds, Bangladesh's floating farms, Micronesia's tidal traps: each is examined as working infrastructure rather than heritage, organised across salty, brackish and fresh water systems.
What distinguishes the book is its refusal to leave these systems in the past. Watson pairs them with 22 contemporary projects—reed-insulated housing in Peru, terraced rooftop farms in Thailand, China's sponge cities—to argue that traditional ecological knowledge remains a live design methodology. The result reframes aquatic infrastructure from something extractive and industrial into something regenerative, and reads as both field guide and manifesto.
Key Features
- Foreword by Dr. Lyla June Johnson (Diné/Tsétsėhéstȧhese)
- Co-authored with Indigenous knowledge-keepers rather than written about them
- Case studies organised by water type—salty, brackish and fresh—across diverse ecosystems
- Twenty-two contemporary TEK projects demonstrating current application
- Illustrated throughout by Lina Müller; designed by Piera Wolf and Stephanie Specht
What You'll Discover
- How chinampas, dike-ponds and tidal fish traps function as engineered systems, not folk practice
- Why water behaves as a linking element across drought, flood, sea-level rise and storm risk
- The design logic connecting ancestral hydrological technologies to contemporary sponge-city thinking
- How biocultural resilience offers architects and policymakers an alternative to hard engineering
About the Author
Julia Watson is an Australian-born designer, educator and author of Greco-Egyptian-English heritage, trained as an architect in First Nations knowledge systems. She founded the global Lo—TEK movement and co-founded the Lo—TEK Institute and the Lo—TEK Office for Intercultural Urbanism, both co-led by Indigenous and non-Indigenous designers and scientists. She lectures at Harvard and Columbia, and is the author of Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Taschen, 2019).
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover, Swiss binding, five foldouts
- Dimensions: 170 x 244 mm
- Pages: 558
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783836594448
- Publisher: Taschen
- Publication Date: 15 April 2026 (Australian release)
Perfect For: Landscape architects and urban designers working on water-sensitive design, architects and planners engaged with climate adaptation, and readers of the first Lo—TEK volume wanting its argument tested against a single element.