Culture as Base for Landscape Design

_AFSTUDEERWERK_ door Michelle Leemkuil

The case of an earthquake-safe community centre for the Nepali mountain village Ashapuri.

Before I started my MSc-thesis, I was searching for something that fascinates me; a topic that I
wanted to work on for more than half a year. Culture has always fascinated me and Buddhism
inspired me because of its simplicity in way of thinking but at the same time complexity of
images, colours and meanings.

This is why I chose to work with Buddhism. The only thing I had
to do was connecting it to landscape architecture. With the help of Pieter Germeraad, who knew
Ben and Tanja Kruk, who knew Benjamin van Ooij, I came into contact with Herb Nepal.

Nepal
Nepal is a small country in South Asia, four times as large as the Netherlands. Geographically
speaking, Nepal can be divided into three main regions: the Himalaya in the North, the hills in
the middle and the Terai plain in the South (figure 1)[1,2]. Nepal is caught between the two Giants China and India. With Buddhist Tibet as part of China and India with a Hindu religion, Nepal is a  meeting place of different cultures. There are several casts or ethnic groups in Nepal, and 81.3%  of the people follow Hinduism, however it is not the state religion. With 9% of the population, Buddhism is also an important religion[3].

Case
Herb Nepal is a Western organization located in the village Ashapuri, 30 km from the Capital
City Kathmandu. They have set up a farm with a training centre to improve the lives of the
farmers in Ashapuri. The community space around this farm should also serve as crisis centre
when natural disasters happen, such as the huge earthquakes in April 2015, which destroyed 161
of the 180 houses in Ashapuri. In Ashapuri live the Tamang, an ethnic group that has a Buddhist
origin. This is why I though that I could focus on the Buddhism. I decided to take the design question of Herb Nepal about their community space as the case for my research. To design a training centre with an emergency assembly area based on their ownership (figure 2).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Culture
To create a valuable space and a better environment for communities, culture needs to be
incorporated. Using culture in place shaping ensures that people can identify with a place, trust
a place, and will move on intuition when an emergency happens. So to participate on the design
question of Herb Nepal and to combine it with culture, I came with my own design question:
How can cultural manifestations be integrated in the design of a safe, earthquake-prone
community centre in Ashapuri? (figure 3).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fieldwork
To find answers I did a literature review to create a coding scheme about Buddhism, and went
for two months to Nepal. I did interviews, workshops and surveys to acquire local knowledge
from the people In Ashapuri. In addition, I made systematic photographs in the village and hills
around Ashapuri for the visual content analysis in the Netherlands of the cultural manifestations
in Ashapuri. My aim was to code all the fieldwork results with my coding table of Buddhism,
but during fieldwork I already found out that the village was not all about Buddhism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coding
For example in figure 4, I coded all the Buddhism elements in the picture that I found with the
literature review before my fieldwork. I found prayer flags and Stupas that could represent
villages or Buddha. I even found mani stones and snakes, which I did not see in first instance, but I  needed the help of an expert. This expert also noticed some other elements, which he related to other ethnic groups, for example Newar ethnic group. This Newari elements could be there due to the fact that Ashapuri is located on the boundary of two districts. In Kavre are mainly living Tamang people that follow Buddhism from origin, and in Bhaktapur are mainly living people from the Newar ethnic group that follow Hinduism. People from a local ethnic group follow a certain culture. But when two ethnic groups are living close to each other, the cultures can intertwine, as well as the religion (figure 5).

Although the people in Ashapuri call them selves Tamang, they have Newari cultural elements
too. So I looked again at the literature and created a new coding table. With my new coding
table I coded all cultural elements in the pictures. Orange for Tamang, purple for Newari and
blue for the things I only got from the fieldwork (figure 6).

Preconditions
The next step was analysing everything, and creating preconditions of culture for my design
starting points (figure 7). Staring with orientation to the East, temples should be placed in the
East, and houses should face the East and be placed in cardinal direction higher up in the hills.
Second, good and safe infrastructure is important to stay connected and to make life easier,
especially during the monsoon. Third, sacred sites as the place of snakes, confluences of rivers,
clusters of trees, groves and temples should have special attention. There are more
preconditions, but I will only focus on the three main elements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because of my research in landscape architecture, I analysed the landscape too. The three main
elements to improve the landscape are that there should be protection from landslides, river
overflow and wind (figure 8). Because of the unstable position of Nepal, I also looked at the
earthquake-safety. Preconditions of an outdoor space that is earthquake-safe are having an open
and flat surface, being away from edges and taking evacuation routes into account (figure 9).