The Future is Behind Us: Raising Indigenous Knowledge through Multifunctional Urban Agricultural Practices in Honolulu, HI

127 pages. Committee chair: Yekang KoWith the closest port of call approximately 2,400 miles away, the Hawaiian Islands are one of the most geographically isolated and food-import dependent populations in the world. The Hawaiian Islands imports approximately 90-percent of its food and energy making it vulnerable to any natural or human-caused disaster that could disrupt shipping and supplies. Urbanization practices in Honolulu allow for limited space for urban agricultural practices, higher concentrations of people, and an increase in high-rise condominiums and hotels. Most importantly, Honolulu faces an even greater loss in its historical agricultural identity. Understanding the indigenous agricultural practices of the Native Hawaiians along with what remains today is essential to charting a pathway forward. The Native Hawaiians coevolved with their landscape and engineered a social-ecological system, called the ahupua’a unit, that maximized ecosystem services. The ahupua’a was a multifunctional land division that separated agroforestry practices in the forest zone, urban agricultural practices in the lowland or plains, and aquaculture practices in the coastal zone. Reflecting on the richness of this past system with the current design and planning of Honolulu’s Ala Wai watershed challenges us to rethink new strategies of implementing urban agricultural practices that raise indigenous knowledge while enhancing Honolulu’s resiliency. This research project is motivated by the ahupua’a model due to its multifunctionality and importance within Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The three zones of the ahupua’a model are examined using four selected precedent studies, ranging within the Pacific Rim. Each precedent study is examined based on its use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) composed of local knowledge, resource management, and worldview, and multifunctionality composed of production, ecological, and cultural functions. These studies will help formulate a design framework that can be applied towards spatial typologies within the Ala Wai watershed