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For most of the twentieth century, architecture has learned to read cities through roads. Street hierarchies define urban plans, intersections organize movement, and buildings are understood by the façades they present to sidewalks. Roads appear so fundamental to urban life that they are often mistaken for a universal condition. Across much of Southeast Asia, cities developed according to an entirely different spatial logic. Long before automobiles reordered urban landscapes, rivers served as streets, marketplaces, civic spaces, and public infrastructure. Movement occurred primarily by boat, commerce unfolded along waterfronts, and architecture addressed water rather than asphalt. Reading these cities through their waterways changes how architecture itself is understood. Infrastructure, in this case, is not the road but the river.

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Anyone expecting the following words to discuss materiality, sustainable construction techniques, woodworking methods, or ways of weaving thatch will be mistaken. This article seeks precisely to shift the focus beyond the aspects that so often define discussions about Indigenous cultures when the subject is "architecture."

In a universe where the very term "architecture" is foreign, approaching Indigenous constructions—or whatever word might best describe them—through an exclusively material or technological lens is itself an attempt to fit their ways of producing space into Western categories. In doing so, a complex cosmology is reduced to a set of measurable attributes, as if it could be transformed into a checklist applicable to any form of architecture, erasing precisely what makes it distinct: the relationships between territory, body, and memory.

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