Blue green infrastructure from the past
Some examples of how the ancients designed with water and nature in mind.
A project I worked on recently with architects had aspects of water sensitive urban design to it. The site was on a river, and our ideas centred around what the built form (grey infrastructure) could do to enhance the river (blue infrastructure) through things like plantings to encourage habitat and flood resistance (green infrastructure). Funny how you do things and it’s only when you start reading the academic papers that you realise you were practising it all along.
During the project (still at EOI stage), we investigated instances from across the world of where humans had used the built form to capture or enhance nature, including trees and water. One example we found was the Nilometer (below). I’ve also included an example from western NSW to demonstrate that scientific knowledge existed here in Australia long before that of Egypt.
Nilometer – Egypt, 861 AD.
Water in Egypt is such a precious resource that being able to predict its flow from the Nile was important. Ancient Egyptians built devices (nilometers) to measure the rise and fall of the river Nile so that they could predict its behaviour in the future, and then use this knowledge for planting their crops.
This example of a Nilometer at Rhodes was built in 860AD and is an exquisite design.
Baiame’s Ngunnhu — NSW. 40,000+ years old
The ancient fish traps at Brewarrina in western NSW are an engineering marvel, eight times as old as the pyramids in Egypt. When functioning, fish would be herded into stone circles which would be closed off and the fish could be more easily caught.
Similar fish traps exist all over Australia (including in my home town of Arrawarra).
These fish traps are also an example of what can happen with shared governance of a resource. Seven tribes meet at the location of the traps, and these tribes would share the management of the traps and the fish that were caught. Each tribe new that they had to keep the river healthy and not catch too many fish as they needed to also take care of their neighbours up river.
