RS2: The Orang-orang and the Hutan
Qing Lan
Qing Lan is an MA Environmental Architecture graduate from Royal College of Art. He completed his undergraduate degree of BEng Landscape Architecture at Beijing Forestry University.
In RCA, his research focus on the Borneo indigenous shifting farming and their cognitive system. With his background of forestry and vegetation knowledge, he designs a vegetation classification system, aiming to help indigenous people communicate their knowledge with outside and together solve the conflicts.
In his first year, he studied with Borneo Studio and the soil group with Gan. He went to Borneo, Indonesia to have local survey in the studio field trip and try to design a knowledge sharing platform for the local indigenous people. In addition, he organized the story and theory of indigenous life in his CHS dissertation and got distinction.
In his individual research project, he continued to focus on the indigenous knowledge, and aimed to solve the conflicts of their knowledge with outside, not only within their community group. He used the vegetation knowledge of his background and made a vegetation classification system to help indigenous people translate their knowledge to scientific language and map.
Contact
Through his MA, Qing gradually developed a method of analysing the environmental problems and improving it with his background knowledge. In his first year, he tried to analyse the environmental problems not only from ecological, but also social and economic perspectives and found a tool that can show and connect the above changes.
In his individual research project, he used vegetation classification system as a tool and made a detailed research of Borneo. Finally, he designed a participatory system based on the research and tested it with the local survey.
Peatland Ecosystem
Capitalist Human impact System
Indigenous Cognitive System
Cognitive Rubik's Cube
The peatland ecosystem is the ecosystem most affected by the relationship between vegetation and soil. They have close relationship in carbon cycle, water conservation and bio-species, and can directly affect the entire ecosystem in many ways. Therefore, the study of vegetation is the most important research for peatland protection.
Under the capitalist system, soil is regarded as a resource to provide a suitable environment for crop growth so that the companies can get profit from it. In this kind of cognitive system, the human impact on the soil is linear and can be predictable.
Different from the people who came here from outside for profit, the indigenous people in Borneo have lived there for hundreds of years and formed a relationship of coexistence with local natural environment. In the cognitive system of indigenous people, rather than describing their relationship as management, it is more like a result of long-term interaction and respect between human and nature.
The agricultural activities of indigenous community can be summarized as a small-scale slash and burn cultivation and a long fallow period for forest succession. Their knowledge about the activities can be divided into mainly two parts, and they both relate to vegetation identification. It is because the plants take the most significant role in the ecosystem and they are sensitive to the changes in the peat soil and ecological conditions. Also, they are rich in species so they can be easily recognized and classified into different meanings. The first part of their knowledge is about the selection of their customary forest, which is the core of the design project. It can present indigenous people’s identification of natural signs and their definition of self-sufficiency.
The second part of their knowledge is about the various skills in their activities, which is my main research topic in the first and second terms in Borneo studio. I designed a report card with Gan to help indigenous people to upload and share their knowledge to protect it from loss. With their reports, a new soil cognitive system can be generated. However, it is only a communication within the communities, and there is a huge difference between their cognition and outside. So I made a soil Rubik’s cube to show the split of soil understandings. Its six faces show the three levels of cognitive systems in the past and the present.
Under the capitalist system, soil is regarded as a resource to provide a suitable environment for crop growth so that the companies can get profit from it. In this kind of cognitive system, the human impact on the soil is linear and can be predictable.
Different from the people who came here from outside for profit, the indigenous people in Borneo have lived there for hundreds of years and formed a relationship of coexistence with local natural environment. In the cognitive system of indigenous people, rather than describing their relationship as management, it is more like a result of long-term interaction and respect between human and nature.
The agricultural activities of indigenous community can be summarized as a small-scale slash and burn cultivation and a long fallow period for forest succession. Their knowledge about the activities can be divided into mainly two parts, and they both relate to vegetation identification. It is because the plants take the most significant role in the ecosystem and they are sensitive to the changes in the peat soil and ecological conditions. Also, they are rich in species so they can be easily recognized and classified into different meanings. The first part of their knowledge is about the selection of their customary forest, which is the core of the design project. It can present indigenous people’s identification of natural signs and their definition of self-sufficiency.
The second part of their knowledge is about the various skills in their activities, which is my main research topic in the first and second terms in Borneo studio. I designed a report card with Gan to help indigenous people to upload and share their knowledge to protect it from loss. With their reports, a new soil cognitive system can be generated. However, it is only a communication within the communities, and there is a huge difference between their cognition and outside. So I made a soil Rubik’s cube to show the split of soil understandings. Its six faces show the three levels of cognitive systems in the past and the present.
Medium:
Digital Drawings / Physical modelsSize:
297 mm (Height) x 420 mm (Width)
History Of The Relationships Between Cognitive Conflicts And Laws
Current Land Use System
Possible Communication Plans
The conflicts of land ownerships in Borneo can be attributed to the conflicts between the non-privatized customary laws based on experience and customs of indigenous people and the modern civil law system of Indonesia. Generally speaking, law is a system of rules made to regulate people’s behaviour. However, the law is not always fair, because its main use is to maintain the good order of the society. The order can be based on different principles, which usually incorporate morality from the law makers’ perspective. In Indonesian modern civil law system, the law is made by a group of rulers to promote the modernization and development of the country, which inevitably sacrifices the human rights and interests of some minority groups.
Therefore, if we want to establish an equal communication system, we must, on the basis of studying the existing legal framework, look for the possibility of developing legal pluralism by reinterpreting the indigenous value and right in a non-dogmatic language against the formalism and the vested interests.
Generally speaking, Indonesia's legal system can be divided into four parts: the 1945 constitution, government and local regulations, and the indigenous Adat law. Every time when a new law is issued, it is affected by the interest groups formed by the former law, and this phenomenon is called path dependence theory in historical institutionalism. With the help of path dependence theory, the author will analyse the critical junctures of the important law-making activities related to land use.
Nowadays, the indigenous people’s forests are encroached on by two things, the concession permits, and the conservation area, which works as a medium to transmit the encroachment. From economic perspective, it is a typical capitalist system, production, causing disasters, and recovery. But sometimes the loss is more than the output, this is why indigenous knowledge can help.
So I think there are two plans to fit the indigenous self-sufficiency and management system into the capitalist production and waste system. The first one is making a closed system, which is the ideal target. The second one is helping them take back part of their land step by step in the process of shifting farming. The government can also save the recovery funds so they can reduce the money taken from the company and outside. But first of all, they should have map to show their boundary and sustainable value.
Therefore, if we want to establish an equal communication system, we must, on the basis of studying the existing legal framework, look for the possibility of developing legal pluralism by reinterpreting the indigenous value and right in a non-dogmatic language against the formalism and the vested interests.
Generally speaking, Indonesia's legal system can be divided into four parts: the 1945 constitution, government and local regulations, and the indigenous Adat law. Every time when a new law is issued, it is affected by the interest groups formed by the former law, and this phenomenon is called path dependence theory in historical institutionalism. With the help of path dependence theory, the author will analyse the critical junctures of the important law-making activities related to land use.
Nowadays, the indigenous people’s forests are encroached on by two things, the concession permits, and the conservation area, which works as a medium to transmit the encroachment. From economic perspective, it is a typical capitalist system, production, causing disasters, and recovery. But sometimes the loss is more than the output, this is why indigenous knowledge can help.
So I think there are two plans to fit the indigenous self-sufficiency and management system into the capitalist production and waste system. The first one is making a closed system, which is the ideal target. The second one is helping them take back part of their land step by step in the process of shifting farming. The government can also save the recovery funds so they can reduce the money taken from the company and outside. But first of all, they should have map to show their boundary and sustainable value.
Medium:
Digital DrawingsSize:
297 mm (Height) x 420 mm (Width)
Mid Level Vegetation Classification System
Lower Level Vegetation Classification System
Online Report System
Local Cognitive Map
Modified Prediction Map
First of all, we need to understand the basic model of vegetation classification. Obviously, because our research site is based in Central Kalimantan, a provincial scale, we have no demand for the upper level classification.
The vegetation classification system starts from the middle level, which is decided by the regional ecological types, namely topography and soil. In Central Kalimantan, the terrain is a quite flat basin, and there is no barrier until the central mountains. Therefore, the first sublevel of the middle level, namely the vegetation division. The second sublevel is macrogroup, which is decided by soil types. The third sublevel of middle level is vegetation group, which is classified according to the impact degree of the ecological factor of a macrogroup.
Then I use the supervised classification in ArcGIS to identify and classify the satellite map of Landsat by machine learning. Finally, I combine several maps and find the four stages of forest succession. Finally, I combine the distribution map of vegetation groups, and then get the complete vegetation classification map at the middle level.
Then in the lower level or floristic level, I use color bar to analyze the species composition. I have research in many existing papers and sort the local dominant species by abundance. I do research about the tolerance of species and make the color bar of forest succession.
There are two aims of the participatory platform. The first one is that indigenous people can use phone app or their knowledge to make the map more detailed and more continuous. And the second is to get the local definition of suitable and unsuitable for shifting farming in local cognitive system. We can use the vegetation to draw the rotation cycle of shifting farming. It can show their definition of sustainability and self-sufficiency.
In ideal condition, there is no concession or conservation forest, indigenous people can use their map to take back their land.
But in most cases, there is other land use type inside their boundary so it should be taken into account. In this situation, people can still have customary forest for shifting farming but it is settled to a smaller area. It is a progress from a complete ban of shifting farming now and people can expand their forest step by step. When using the platform, the data must be protected so it is just used within the community.
The vegetation classification system starts from the middle level, which is decided by the regional ecological types, namely topography and soil. In Central Kalimantan, the terrain is a quite flat basin, and there is no barrier until the central mountains. Therefore, the first sublevel of the middle level, namely the vegetation division. The second sublevel is macrogroup, which is decided by soil types. The third sublevel of middle level is vegetation group, which is classified according to the impact degree of the ecological factor of a macrogroup.
Then I use the supervised classification in ArcGIS to identify and classify the satellite map of Landsat by machine learning. Finally, I combine several maps and find the four stages of forest succession. Finally, I combine the distribution map of vegetation groups, and then get the complete vegetation classification map at the middle level.
Then in the lower level or floristic level, I use color bar to analyze the species composition. I have research in many existing papers and sort the local dominant species by abundance. I do research about the tolerance of species and make the color bar of forest succession.
There are two aims of the participatory platform. The first one is that indigenous people can use phone app or their knowledge to make the map more detailed and more continuous. And the second is to get the local definition of suitable and unsuitable for shifting farming in local cognitive system. We can use the vegetation to draw the rotation cycle of shifting farming. It can show their definition of sustainability and self-sufficiency.
In ideal condition, there is no concession or conservation forest, indigenous people can use their map to take back their land.
But in most cases, there is other land use type inside their boundary so it should be taken into account. In this situation, people can still have customary forest for shifting farming but it is settled to a smaller area. It is a progress from a complete ban of shifting farming now and people can expand their forest step by step. When using the platform, the data must be protected so it is just used within the community.