A Place to Navigate With / In: Negotiation of the Design of Urban Environments in Aotearoa New Zealand A Short Summary
Nicholas Denton Victoria University of Wellington
Working title Abstract
A Place to Navigate With / In: Negotiation in the Design of Urban Environments in Aotearoa New Zealand It has been argued that contemporary urban environments in Aotearoa New Zealand remain as either European colonial or Western globalised constructions, and that they give little recognition to Māori cultural landscapes that inhabit and imbue these places. But a consideration of their physical appearance alone is too limited as an approach to this field of study. Instead, both architectural design and its processes must be open to discussion and challenge. It is argued that of critical importance to the construction of truly Māori urban places is an ongoing negotiation with mana whenua in the design and implementation of urban environments. What this thesis aims to study is how architecture can open this negotiation with the publics of an urban environment, inviting an exploration of this environment through the perspectives of mana whenua. It asks:
Research question
How can architectural design and its processes enable an equitable negotiation with mana whenua and the publics of an urban environment?
Proposal
The thesis proposes a ‘place to navigate with / in,’ being a place where this negotiation may take place both with and in the environment being discussed – and where navigation is used to capture the intentions of the negotiation: sharing an understanding of where we are, and where we are going next.
Following from my personal heritage as a Pākehā scientist, astronomer, and architectural student, I proposed that the methods I used would attempt to negotiate an intersection of knowledge, where a navigational ‘observatory’ might be re-configured as a third-place - a device that actively listens, and in which observation of the stars, whakapapa, whenua and land are shared.
Figure 1. 1840 Town Plan of Wellington a series of grids projected over a land
Figure 2. Survey of native reserves in Newtown, as part of the native ‘tenths’ set aside in the 1840 plan.
Figure 3. Trig Station
Figure 6. An east-west transect through Newtown, and the property boundaries and land parcels this line intersects.
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Figure 4. Trigonometric Survey by Percy Smith in the central North Island
Figure 5. Survey Peg (1852)
Much of the criticism of the urban environments in Aotearoa stem from their often unjust acquisition, and their division of land into grids that were projected onto land without adequate consideration or negotiation with the land itself (Salmond, Hoskins). This kind of relationship with the environment can be seen in most town and city centres, such as Wellington (Fig. 1). This thesis aims to both acknowledge and challenge this relationship with the environment. It draws on the observations of Justice Joe Williams, who has stated that a necessary precursor to a post-grievance partnership is an acknowledgement of the different world views of each party; “particularly the historical and cultural reasons behind the Māori expression of connection in a relational way, kaitiakitanga, and the Pākehā preference for expressing connections with the physical world as property rights” (Williams).
As a method to challenge the existing colonial urban fabric, I have drawn a line of pure east-west latitude, not as a way to divide and categorise land like the colonial land surveys - but instead to renew relationships, connect places together, and explore outside of traditional urban and suburban boundaries
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Figure 7. An east-west line of latitude that circumnavigates the Earth
Figure 8. At any point on this east-west line, the constellations of stars visible are the same.
Altitude of reference star
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Figure 9. The observation of the sky was important for Māori, who created a maramataka to understand the environment
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Figure 10. The observation of the sky was important for Europeans, who created a ‘lunar method’ for determining longitude for navigation
From this latitude, the constellation ‘the Hook of Maui’ (highlighted in Fig. 8) just dips into and out of the horizon as it circles around the sky -fishing up Te Ikaa-Māui. It marks to those travelling on the seas or oceans how to navigate here.
This line of latitude extends the conception of the urban environment into the wider cultural landscape, and begins to form relationships with places outside of these traditional urban boundaries.
Zooming into the suburb of Newtown, the question becomes how to explore and reference this wider cultural landscape within discrete moments and architectural interventions along this line.
Figure 11. Collage of views of Newtown, at various times and places in history
Figure 12. Collage of two landscapes into one - central urban Newtown and the ridge line of Te Ranga-a-Hiwi above Newtown.
Following critiques of traditional European methods for urban design, such as those made by Tracy Ogden Cork where concepts of orientation, scale, hierarchies and views are challenged (192), I began to look at how architecture could operate beyond these boundaries. Using methodologies described by CJ Lim (207) and Jane Rendell (219), where art practice, including collage and writing, are used to understand architecture in a relational way, I explored how scales might collapse, both spatially and temporally (Figure 11, 12).
How time may be explored architecturally could be a series of ‘observatories’ that invite an understanding of the environment at different scales of time - from the ephemeral nature of weather and wind, to the pattern of seasons, to the solidity and stability of the movement of the sun and stars.
This is a challenge for architecture. It is as if the very modes of current traditional architectural practice are predicated on the methods and methodologies of a colonial past - of the division of land into parcelled boundaries, and the view of the land as a primarily visual, physical, and geographic object. A consideration of the environment as understood through time offers an approach that may be able to challenge this view. This follows the description of MÄ ori architecture by Bill McKay and Antonia Walmsley as being primarily temporal, where process and procession through space - the relationships the space holds and creates - are perhaps more important than the spaces themselves (201).
Intervention A
A sharednegotiate intersectio
Along a transect, a series of architectural interventions that act as observatories for the environment, observing different scales of time. Their aim would be to invite another way of sensing the environment, that connected to a possible understanding of place as shared by mana whenua.
A nest for Kohoperoa Te Ranga-a-Hiwi ridge. A view to the mountains; a seat of Greywacke bedrock
A community garden linked to local maramtaka
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A staircase on the ridge. A place where Tui live
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Another difficult aspect of the transect to negotiate is the purity of the east-west line, and the possible ways to move along the line on the ground. These intervention ‘programmes’ are not finalised - but possibilities...
A series of observatories that investigate and explore Maori Environmental Knowledge specific to a place and its specific micro-climates: When the Kohoperoa stops singing, the wind is about to blow from the south (Te Ati Awa) The continuing cry of the Matuku as it moves around at night indicates floods are likely (Ngati Ruanui) Source: NIWA
Intervention A
A canopy that responds and moves with respect to variations in weather and climate.
At another time scale, Greywacke bedrock and gold are both very stable and chemically unreactive. Architectural interventions constructed out of these materials might serve as ‘anchor’ points points of reference... where the transect may be able to exist for centuries.
Zooming into the centre of Newtown, the place on the transect most populated by European planning - an intervention into the urban fabric that could explore a shared-space I think what this intervention is missing is a relationship to a natural, perhaps more chaotic, environment. There are references to a river and a series of ponds in the area in the late 1800s which could be drawn out again here. What I think I need is a better, stronger, more detailed understanding of the cultural landscape in order to find the moments of importance and intersection...
References: Salmond, Anne. “The Land.” The 2014 Rutherford Lectures. Radio New Zealand. 2014. Web. March 2015. <http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/ programmes/rutherford-lectures/20141207> Hoskins, Rau. Interview with Justine Harvey. “Conversation: Bicultural Architecture.” Architecture New Zealand. 4 (2012): 31-40. Print. Ogden Cork, Tracy. Towards a South Pacific Urbanism: Tikanga Māori and Urban Design in the Context of Tāmaki Makaurau and the Auckland Region. Master of Architecture Thesis. University of Auckland. 2009. Lim, CJ. “London Short Stories.” Explorations in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer. Ed. Mathew Carmona. Ashgate Publishing. Surrey. 2014. Print. Rendell, Jane. “The Siting of Writing and the Writing of Sites.” Explorations in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer. Ed. Mathew Carmona. Ashgate Publishing. Surrey. 2014. Print. McKay, Bill and Antonia Walmsley, “Maori Time: Notions of Space, Time and Building Form in the South Pacific.” Progress: Proceedings of the 20th Annual SAHANZ Conference Ed. Maryam Gusheh and Naomi Stead. 2003. 199-204 NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research). Maori Environemtal Knowledge in Natural Hazards Management and Mitigation. NIWA. Wellington. 2006. < https://www.niwa.co.nz/sites/niwa.co.nz/files/ niwa_report_akl2006-055.pdf>