Literature Review

“Our choices in the future will not only be informed by what is possible (the science), but will involve more and more philosophical, moral and creative decisions based on what kind of civilization we want to live in. To make informed decisions here, we must bring to bear our historical knowledge, as well as a wider arts and humanities understanding to be able to inform our discussions.” Prof. Michael Scott, 2018, personal communication.

2.14 Summary

As advocated by several leading wildfire scientists, including Stephen Pyne, Max Moritz, and David Bowman, the literature review that informs this thesis extrapolated and analysed data from both historic and leading-edge publications from the sciences, humanities, arts, and design to deliver a truly transdisciplinary perspective on a complex socio-ecological issue, that being humanity’s possible future relationship with wildfire at the wildland urban interface. The scientific, technological, and design reviews largely discussed in the forthcoming chapters, in this chapter issues fundamental to the theoretical and practice framework within which this work resides were discussed, with conclusions therefrom summarised as follows.

The original modus of scientific and philosophical enquiry, transdisciplinary research has a long and distinguished history of illuminating discoveries, ideas, innovations, and inventions that are inaccessible when working within not beyond disciplinary boundaries. But, while consistently employed by many notable scientists, philosophers, designers, and architects from pre-Classical to contemporary times, in the post-Newtonian age, its prevalence declined, as enquiries, scientific and otherwise, tended become more specialised, the paradoxical price thereof being the greater our grasp of the details of scientific and philosophical matters, at times, the lesser our grasp of the big ‘systems’ picture, and not least as relates to wildfires. However, as the research community confronts both locally and globally connected issues of which the causations and effects ricochet from one region to the next, one system to the next, and one peoples to the next, transdisciplinarity and variations thereof, including ‘antidisciplinarity’, are beginning to come full-circle. Hence, it’s not just ‘things’ that are being ‘recycled’, but methods, approaches, and ideas more generally.

Though the term ‘resilience’ has manifold interpretations, within socio-ecological systems thinking it relates to the elasticity of an ecosystem’s response to disruption, be that disruption of ‘natural’, ‘human-made’, or hybridised causation. Of its various theoretical strands, that of foremost relevance to this thesis is Holling, Gunderson and peers’ construct of Panarchy, which a product of interrogations into ecological system dynamics and trajectories, provides of an organising structure through which socio-ecological disruption of a cyclic nature, and the legacies thereof, can be understood throughout space and time (2002). Conceptually, one may conceive of Panarchy as a set of ‘rules’, which if transferred to the built environment would become its codes. Visually, the construct of Panarchy is elegantly conveyed in Holling’s ‘The Adaptive Cycle’ (1986), which expresses the relations between an ecosystem’s various states, and in the process acknowledges that disruption is fundamental to enabling renewal in some ecosystem-types. As are all scientific and philosophical fields, Panarchy is a field-in-progress, hence, over-time, its hypotheses have been subject to revisions. The version of Panarchy as relevant to this thesis perceives of ‘Nature Evolving’, which construes of ecological systems as evolutionary and adaptive (Hollings et al 2002).

Concerned not with the creation of ‘objects’, but of ‘processes’, be they natural, human-made, or hybrids comprised both, imperative was the need to establish the processes that drive the destruction and renewal dynamics within the WUI of past, present, and possible future. Ecological, wider Earth, and human systems being intimately integrated, not discreet entities, any paradigmatic proposal drawn from the examination of not all, but one system, may render it fit for theoretical, but not practical enquiry. This thesis concerned with finding solutions to, what for many, is an all-too-real and urgent challenge that places their lives, properties, and livelihoods at risk, investigation of key socio-cultural-political issues was imperative. Both within, and beyond the case study region, psychology, cognitive behaviour, philosophy, and the values, beliefs, and rituals, both religious and secular, as stem therefrom, have significant bearing on how and why individuals perceive of wildfire, and fire more generally. The extent of the variances in human perception of wildfire becomes apparent whereupon one compares and contrasts the fire myths, modern and ancient, by which societies live. Fire myths reveal how their authors and audiences relate to fire, and to the environment at large. Upon cross-analysis of Origin of Fire mythologies with wildfire science data, including the fire persistence traits of pyrophytes indigenous to both the Mediterranean and temperate-type climates, and the fundamental dynamics of the fire-regimes they form, such are the correlations therebetween as to suggest that both ancient and indigenous peoples had/have systemic understanding of their environment, and of wildfires’ relation thereto. The matter thereof supports further interrogation of fire and other environment-related myths as data sources of possible relevance to fundamentally-scientific enquiries of the nature of that undertaken by Bowman et al in 2015, while partially, if not wholly discrediting the idea that ancient and indigenous peoples were/are ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’. The political implications thereof are significant in the context of wildfire research, for as discussed earlier and in forthcoming chapters, both in the wildland urban interface and beyond, Native Americans and their fire cultures and practices have, and continue to be, systemically subjected to imperialist attitudes and actions, the latter of which are facilitated through government policies and the codes as manifest therefrom. However, having populated regions to which fire is native since prehistoric times, they are peoples of whom the beliefs and thus practices, architectural and otherwise, have coevolved therewith. Whereupon the WUI canvas is to be wiped clean of an ostensibly invasive architectural paradigm, such that a reconciliation of human and non-human systems can occur, architects, planners, and policymakers will need understand, respect, and value the foremost tenants of Native American fire culture.

A profound irony of efforts to entirely eradicate fire from the architectural and urban design WUI and wider narrative is the fact that fire was, at a long distant time, integral to not merely buildings, but to cities, and their planning. In examining the relations, both theoretical and technical, between fire and building of past, we gain insight into potentialities future. The proposal thereof infers not that we replicate architectures of old, but that we examine how these architectures tackled issues of environment, thereon extrapolate therefrom that which has present and possible future relevance, and, having integrated all such insights, innovations, and inventions as have evolved in the interim between the concepts’ points of architectural origin and now, may improve upon the original solutions: an approach that if using the terminology of genetic-engineering would involve ‘splicing’ old ideas with new technologies. But, it’s not merely the myths that we tell that expresses how we think, it’s the way that we tell those myths. Just as Western modes of thinking have shaped the global built environment narrative, so too has the way we convey the tenets of that thinking: our communications. Be they visual, auditory, or other, both at the technical and conceptual level, communications are in constant evolution. In expanding our understanding of communications modus from the present to the past, and across cultures and civilisations, we gain a sense of how different peoples have and do perceive and thereon mentally process external events. While of general relevance to tasks that are concerned with researching future scenarios and the risks and opportunities affiliated therewith, the subject has particular pertinence to issues at the interface of human and non-human systems. Whereas, art aside, contemporary Western communications modes tend present information linearly, vice versa is true of both ancient and indigenous cultures, with evidence thereof as diverse as the structuring of the Kayapo origin of fire myths and their visual and auditory enactments, to the structuring of proto-writing, including cuneiform, to both the ancient and contemporaneous writing systems of the East, including China. However, for reasons including, but not limited to the dynamism inherent in geopolitics, globalisation and other routes through which ideas, paradigmatic and otherwise, travel, and innovation and invention in both communications apparatus and the infrastructure that supports it, status communications quos are, relatively speaking, ephemeral. None have yet answered how an architectural system that sits astride both the wild and the urban, and in regions populated by both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, would accommodate for the variances in how different species and different cultures communicate. Though beyond the scope of this thesis to answer this question in its entirety, the matter of how information may be migrated between these parties will be discussed in later chapters, for be it conceptual or technical, a reconciliation can only occur whereupon those to be reconciled can ‘hear’ and ‘speak’ to one another. Bringing context to the significance thereof, as discussed in detail later, lives and properties have been lost due to fundamental failures in WUI wildfire warning communications systems.

The ‘architecture of architecture’ they may be, but the building codes of present are not so different from the building codes of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, in that, now as then, be it in Global North or Global South nations, building codes determine what can and cannot be built, why, and in the process, like myths, illuminate how their authors and enactors perceive/ed of the problems they seek to solve. Likewise, both ancient and contemporary building codes are largely consumed with the concept of relative architectural and urban permanence, which, as will be discussed later, is the antithesis of the paradigmatic principle that underpins indigenous architectural solutions to living in wildfire-prone territories and their various fire regimes. But, as highlighted by Maranghides et al, within the case study region, WUI fire construction codes and the research and practice upon which they are built are, technically speaking, in their ‘infancy’ (2015). Yet another ‘industry-scale’ knowledge gap, not one, but several dozen theses would be required to address the issue. However, the question of how WUI building codes may legislate for leading-edge and emerging technologies of multiple variants will be addressed in later chapters.

Having examined issues fundamental to humanity’s relationship with wildfire at, and beyond the wildland urban interface, the most contentious of all was discussed: policy. Their purpose and intent that of ‘protecting’ people and environment, within the case study region, the extent to which wildfire and WUI policies have helped not hindered their inhabitants, both human and non-human, has been highly variable. Historically, ignorance of the fire regimes and their spatiotemporal cyclicality was a primary factor therein. However, political and otherwise, vested interests have played a constant role in undermining the process of policy research and development, thus, while scientific understanding of wildfires and the risks and opportunities they present has grown, to date, exponentially, this is only partially reflected in current wildfire and WUI policies and their affiliated legislature. The issue thereof has bearing both within and beyond the case study region, and in nations as diverse as Brazil, Australia, Canada and China.

But, if we are to change wildland urban interface building policy and codes, and propose a paradigm anew, what is that paradigm? Which brings us to architecture, urban design, and the material and the information systems fundamental thereto. Whereas, as will be discussed in detail in the chapters that follow, fire is integral to the material and information systems that underpin the lifecycles of flora and fauna indigenous to fire-prone regions, and the trait thereof is mirrored in both ancient and contemporaneous indigenous vernacular architectures, vice versa western WUI architectural and urban design approaches. Nonetheless, many are the signs that a new architectural age is, and has for some decades, been dawning, as researchers and practitioners from myriad disciplinary fields, many of them increasingly overlapping, examine how living organisms and systems solve both material and information problems, including resource shortages, climate change, biodiversity loss, and more. While wildfire is not a common topic of discussion within the domain of experimental architecture and urban design, many concepts in development in these fields more generally are potentially transferable. Thus, in the chapters that follow, this thesis builds on the wider body of research and practice at the edge of human and non- human systems.

Echoing the words of a well-known theoretical physicist, the nature of the risks and the opportunities wildfires present in the wildland urban interface is such that, the former will be not addressed if we apply the ‘same thinking’ that created them. Equally, if we are to identify, let alone harness the potentialities as may be inherent in the phenomena of wildfire, we need think differently. Thankfully, as discussed above, many are the fire cultures from which we can draw insights, inspiration, and ideas, if only we have means to ‘see’ those cultures. Having discussed the methods by which the findings, conclusions, and outputs of this thesis were generated, some ways of ‘seeing’, sensu John Berger, scientific, philosophical, and psychological will be examined.

Footnotes

[7] Tack is sailing term used to describe a manoeuvre that turns the bow toward the wind, therein changes a vessel’s course.

[8] In reference to Da Vinci’s Ideal City, which is documented in sheet 36, 39, and 47 of his manuscripts (www.museoscienza.org).

[9] The most accomplished cryptographer in 15th century Europe, Alberti harnessed Arabic knowledge of frequency analysis to pioneer supercipherment in the form of the cipher disc, which described in his De Cifris treatise of 1467 enables cryptographers to decrypt polyalphabetic ciphers in multiple languages.

[10] Popular in classical Greece, pyxides were vessels used for the storage of personal items, such as cosmetics and jewellery, and it is to a pyxis, not a ‘box’ that classical Grecian poets and playwrights referred in mythological accounts of Pandora.

[11] One of the oldest extant Indo-European texts, the Rigveda is a collection of over 1000 Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the Rigvedic deities including Indra and Agni.

[12] Zoolatry refers to the ritualistic worship of animals in the belief that they incarnate of deities and other supernatural forces.

[13] Therianthropic refers a mythological human-animal hybrid.

[14] Integral to Egyptian creation myths, the sacred Bennu bird, as descried in some pyramidal texts as “He who came into being by himself” (Hart, 2005), was symbolic of rebirth and periodic self-renewal.

[15] The foundation of filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron.

[16] His works foundational in the development of the field of hermeneutics, transdisciplinary researcher Schleiermacher drew on insights from disciplines as diverse as philosophy, psychology, politics, pedagogy, aesthetics, ethics, dialectics and more in an effort to evolve Kant’s theory of there being subjectivity interpretation of external phenomena, described in his own words as, “the art of understanding” (Schleiemacher, 1978).

[17] Within the belief system of the Ge peoples, and of the wider indigenous community of South America, the jaguar is sacred. Mirroring those of, amongst other Indo-European fire-related deities, Athena, the jaguar’s mythological attributes include strength, power, wisdom, and strategic skill in warfare. More significantly still, in some Amazonian tribal communities, the jaguar in its dietic form is revered as the god of terrestrial fire, with rituals of worship in honour thereof involving various artefacts representative of fire-captured [i.e. torches].

[18] The Amazon basin’s apex predator, to this day, Jaguar (Panthera onca) pose a lethal threat to Kayapo and other Amazonian peoples (Neto et al, 2011).

[19] In reference to user-privacy breeches on the part of social media companies, such as Facebook, and the implications to Western democracy.

[20] In reference to Clarke’s research mapping how Neolithic settlements impacted upon regional landscapes [i.e. slash and burn forest clearance in agropastoral societies]

[21] In reference to the Kennedy Ridge Fire, Sequoia-Kings Canyon.

Continue to Method 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.