HAWAI‘I-FUTURES (b.2010) is a visionary digital land art project forging conceptual pathways toward cultural resurgence, food sovereignty, homebuilding, and land justice, rooted in the ocean-earth-island-cosmos reality of Hawai‘i.

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Datamap: rain, wind, soil, native land divisions, and fisheries, Hawai‘i Nei.

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Contents

Moku Systems Framework for Ahupua‘a Recovery ︎︎︎

Hawai‘i-Futures Studio Supplements  ︎︎︎

Overview

Hawai‘i-Futures leverages the success of indigenous knowledge of the built environment to transform urbanism into systems of nourishment and sustenance, or 'Āina (that which feeds). The project accomplishes this artfully and architecturally with two interventions: a conceptual “Moku Systems Framework for Ahupua‘a Recovery” coupled with a tangible activist-driven “Design Studio Supplements” that blurs the lines between academic institution and community. At the core of the framework and studio intervention is a videographic, open-source, revolutionary mock-compendium of alternative design concepts focused on implementing Native land use ordinances that aim to repair the fragmented systems caused by Western zoning paradigms.

Impact

Hawai‘i-Futures champions 'Āina as a proactive measure to enhance wellbeing in our built environment. Central to our strategy is the introduction of innovative concepts that propel the discourse forward. The term “recovery,” to describe 'Āina work, is used over the term “restoration” to express a nuanced understanding of the process not as a return to the past but as a contemporary futurist process of reclaiming lost, stolen, erased, corrupted, or destroyed land, water, and other island resources essential to the native bioculture. “Agromilitourization,” a term coined by the artist for Hawai‘i Futures, is a portmanteau of agriculture, “militourism”—a concept by Teresia Teaiwa describing her initial encounter with Honolulu—and urbanization, used to identify the specific forces shaping the built environment of the Hawaiian Islands in promotion of US urbanism—a dynamic system of settler colonialism that continues to impose ecological devastation upon the occupied Native territories of the United States while perpetuating racial injustices against Native people.

Metrics

Since it’s humble launch in 2010, Hawai‘i-Futures has accumulated global influence in thinking about the built environment through the lens Hawai‘i, and has been utilized in various curriculum in educational institutions both in Hawai‘i and nationally, most notably in graduate programs of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Columbia University, and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, emphasizing the global relevance of the future wellbeing of built environments in Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond.