What if our most sustainable innovations aren’t green skyscrapers but traditional ideas rooted deep in indigenous history?

Julia Watson, designer, activist, academic, and author, is trying to  join bridges between traditional architecture and technology in her new book, titled "Lo_TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism."

Hundreds of nature-based technologies that have been constructed by indigenous cultures across the globe have proven as potential climate-resilient infrastructures. It is possible to intertwine multi-generational knowledge on how to live symbiotically with nature into how we shape the cities of the future before this wisdom is gone forever. Exploring examples from indigenous communities across the globe including:  Brazil, Mexico, Benin, Iran, India and Iraq, Lo-TEK describes alternative solutions to climate change. With a foreword by the anthropologist Wade Davis, this book is divided into  four chapters "Mountains", "Forests", "Deserts" and "Water".

“This book is dedicated to the next seven generations.” With this opening sentence, Lo—TEK addresses the gap between the fast modern cities lifestyle and indigenous communities. Lo-TEK is different from low-tech. TEK stands for Traditional Ecological Knowledge and argues that this knowledge is essential for a resilient future of our planet and opposing the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. Julia Watson considers the role of designers as being catalysts and the friends.  catalysts for changing future and friends for indigenous communities. The author calls for a new vision, a changing policy, government and mindsets, scaling up and hybridizing conventional technologies with modern ones can enrich the existing vocabulary of sustainable innovations in the built environment.