9.3 A Pan-archic Perspective: Secondary Contributions in Summary

“The universe to Dee was characterised by ascalar geometry and divided by a series of almost infinite cyclic distillations” Spiller, 2004.

While the foci of the research programme as documented in this thesis was reconciling human and non-human systems at the wildland urban interface through the re-modelling of the former to be biochemically, behaviourally, and systemically synchronous to the latter, as a transdisciplinary study, the task was interrogated through not one, but several disciplinary lenses. The undertaking revealed insights both surprising and pertinent, and particularly with respect to how and why the current WUI architectural and urban design paradigm came to be, and the possible implications to alternative propositions, such as this one.

Upon reviewing the history of wildfire and WUI policies within the study region, it became clear that neither wildfire science nor anecdotal wildfire experience in regions impacted thereby have been foremost influencing factors in the authoring of policies. On the contrary, since the 1800s, politics, and that which underpins politics, namely psychology, philosophy, and the values, beliefs, and aspirations born therefrom, together with fiscal matters including insurance and government budgets as relate to WUI development, and to a not incidental extent, communications as produced by both public and private sector organisations, have been instrumental in the development of the guidelines and legislature that govern wildfire and WUI development. Collectively, the publications as document these guidelines and legislature number several thousand pages, and specify copious requirements that WUI building types of myriad form need meet. Yet, the study revealed the codes accommodate not for leading-edge developments in material science, information communications technologies, nor for the now fast-shifting fire frequency, intensity, severity, and behaviour parameters of current and possible near future wildfires at the interface of wild and urban lands. Furthermore, the guidelines and legislature are designed to accommodate only for architecture and urban infrastructure that adheres to Western architectural ideals, and the thinking upon which they rest. Therein, the need for reconciliation extends beyond the interface of human and non-human systems, to human-to-human systems: to reconciling non-indigenous and indigenous approaches to living with wildfire. But, the imperative thereof extends beyond matters of equality, human rights, and politics in their broadest sense.

Native American peoples have inhabited fire-prone regions of the western United States, including the territory today known as ‘California’, since prehistory. While conspicuous by its absence from mainstream architectural publishing, the literature review made evident that theirs is an architectural paradigm that is perfectly adapted to persist with wildfires and environmental change more broadly. As with Panarchistic Architecture, Native American architectures are foremost a product of their environment. Consequently, the periodicity with which indigenous structures were historically rebuilt was discerned by, amongst other factors, fire-frequency. Thus, in mixed-to-high-frequency, low-to-mixed intensity fire regime regions, Native American tribes, such as the Pomo, ‘built to burn’, wherein structures typically lasted until the onset of the fire season, to be renewed thereafter. Yet, not merely materially are Native American and indigenous architectural solutions to living with wildfire relevant to the Panarchistic paradigm, and, potentially, to wildland urban interface architectural and urban research projects generally, but philosophically too.

Having extended the literature review to encompass the history of fire and humanity, and in the physical, intellectual, and emotional sense, a critical factor became apparent. Though a species of which the birth and life is intimately bound with wildfire, whereas indigenous peoples, as did our ancestors, hold fire and the myths of origin of humanity’s control of fire in reverence, many non-indigenous peoples vice versa. Therein, in non-indigenous communities, this thesis argues that the nature of the reconciliation as needed between human and non-human systems is not solely technical in nature, but extends to how we relate to wildfire intellectually and emotionally, and to the ‘wild’ in its broadest sense. In examining the origin of fire myths of several extant and extinct peoples, commonalities in the structure, content, meaning, and intent of those myths and their affiliated rituals and paraphernalia became apparent, as did, in Indo-European myths, linguistic relations. Since the advent of research siloes and of disciplinary divisions between the sciences, humanities, and arts, these mythologies have been treated as products born solely of the human imagination. This thesis challenges that notion, the act thereof a consequence of the application of the lens of fire ecology to the origin of fire myths of the Greeks, Vedics, and Native South and North Americans, and more specifically, analysis of the narrative as relates to the interplay between fire and fire persistent genus, including two of they that are central to the architectural and urban proposition that is Panarchistic Architecture, they being Pinus and Quercus [Fig. 86]. The findings present relations therebetween that speak to profound understanding of fire- prone habitats and of the pyrophytes found therein. In the instance of the former, analysis of the myths suggests that this knowledge emerged prior to the Bronze Age, and thus, though adapted to the environmental particulars of the places to which early humans migrated, including the pyrophytic biota bespoke thereto, and to the differences as emerged in their languages, rituals, and cultures more generally, the myths are, to all intense and purposes, legacies of one in the same origin. The connectivity between origin of fire myths of both ancient and contemporaneous indigenous communities of regions including the western United States, renders them living knowledge systems, which like the pyrophytic species to which some speak, either explicitly or metaphorically, evolve over time. The relevance thereof extends beyond matters anthropological, literary, and artistic, and to politics, and to the policies and codes born therefrom. Presently, First Nation peoples have varying degrees of influence over the development polices as relate to their territories, they being territories as largely reside in or at the interface of wildlands. However, that influence is, within policy, restricted to those lands. Many are the contributing factors thereto, of which the most pertinent is arguably that of absence of wider recognition of how indigenous knowledge systems work, and of why those systems, they being complex systems, have particular relevance now, it being a time when essentially imperialist approaches to land-use not merely continue to encroach on indigenous lands, but at tremendous pace in regions as far flung as the Americas, Asia, and Africa. The absence of awareness of indigenous knowledge systems amongst the wider populous is not accidental, but a consequence of a long tried and long tested tactic on the part of they that seek to suppress the influence of the peoples of whom the lands they have acquired through acts of aggression, both invasions and otherwise. Cultural imposition is a strategic act as old as recorded time, of which the premise is the notion that the imposters’ belief and value-systems are more credible than they from whom lands are being taken (Frankopan, 2015). But, no matter the millennia that have now past since the first recorded accounts, the problem persists to this day.

The act of reconciliation requires of mutual understanding and respect, and thus this thesis calls for architects, planners, policymakers, and the community at non- indigenous large to step beyond the architectural and urban narratives of the Global North and into conversations with peoples of whom the perspective on living with fire may be very different to their own, and do so in recognition of the fact that these peoples have preserved knowledge born from observations and reflections thereupon as stretch back for innumerable generations: to our common origin. Conversations, be they between human-to-human or human-to-non-human systems, require compatible modes of exchange of information and of accuracy in translation, for in the absence thereof data is at best compromised, at worst mis-interpreted. Second only to fire in its significance in the emergence and development of our genus, communication, be that in audio or visual form, is elemental in our every societal development. The advent of a new communication modus – of proto-writing – was integral to the inaugural urban revolution, and to the extent that in the absence thereof civilisation and its by-product, cities, may have either emerged more slowly and/or chaotically, or perhaps not at all, for writing facilitated the creation of the principle organising modus of urbanisation, it being the scripting of building codes. Since humanity embarked on its latest revolution – the digital revolution – the possible impact of emerging information communication technologies on the cities of the now, near and far future has been interrogated by scientists, filmmakers, authors, futurists, technologists, and more alike. However, few such interrogations have accommodated of alternatives to the dominant narrative, which inherently technocratic and largely crafted by white middle class males and they in the employment, therein influence thereof, has relied heavily on assumptions including, but not limited to the sum of the future populous, the distribution thereof, the availability of resources thereto, and the bandwidth of environmental circumstances within which all reside. In contrast, this thesis has not merely evaluated the integrity of emerging potentialities through not a narrow, but a wide-lens, such for example as whether built environment proposals hold up to possible future resource constraints in combination with climate trajectories and the fire behaviours affiliated therewith, but has presented of ways in which we may challenge our perception of what constitutes information and why. In the process thereof, new ways and means by which architects, planners, and others in the built environment community may analyse complex socio-ecological scenarios and their implications to their projects have been proposed. For example, in the triangulating both contemporary and historical data on fires in both wild and urban environments, correlations between the fire frequencies, intensities, severities, and behaviours were identified, of which possible applications include use in assessment of proposals for timber and other biomass structures, and structures of which the exteriors are populated by plants, both within and beyond historically fire-prone territories. Therein, this thesis, though presenting not of a template per say, provides of examples of how the emerging yet to be established field of transdisciplinary wildfire research may produce of novel and potentially useful developments in the years and decades to come [Fig. 87].

>Continue to Chapter 9.4 here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.