Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Hongxuan Lin, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Along a typical river in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali’s water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process?

Google Earth reveals transitory patterns in the rice paddies that closely resemble phase transitions in physics, like the onset of magnetism. This unlocked a story of hidden order that charms the physics community, perplexes economists and offers everyone a startlingly new way to think about how people interact with nature.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

J. Stephen Lansing is an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, the Santa Fe Institute and INSEAD, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. From 2015 to 2019 he was Director of the Complexity Institute and Professor in the Asian School of Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research on Balinese water temples was the basis for Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 2012, and the focus of an exhibition by a team of architects, artists and researchers from ETH Zurich at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, “the rights of future generations.” His most recent book is Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press 2019) and companion website https://www.islandsoforder.com.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to arios@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the session.