KIA ORA TE MARAE RA NUI

A new research project (with Hannah Hopewell)

2019

In Aotearoa New Zealand, traditional Maori landscapes are particularly vulnerable to the changes that are predicted as a result of the current climate emergency. Many coastal and riverine settlements, farms, productive gardens, sacred sites, customary food-gathering areas, urban and rural marae, and other community landscapes are located on land that is well below the 1m threshold (current science reports likely inundations of at least 1.2m and up to 3m within the next three generations). Maori ecological knowledge systems have developed over centuries on the basis of shifting sea-levels and adaptive ecologies. Resilient settlement patterns that shift accordingly are part of customary land-use practices. Urbanization, industrial development and concomitant social adjustments, however, have dramatically affected the adaptive spatial and relational land-use typologies that evolved within the ecologies Maori communities inhabited.

 This research studies how Maori environments can adapt to the new topographies that climate change is predicted to bring. The inter-disciplinary design-led research investigates techniques for enhancing and restoring the resilience and biodiversity of vulnerable ecosystems through the lens of the landscape. It focuses on human-nonhuman relationships within adaptive ecosystems that infuse the development of coastal marae and hapu. A design-led research project, it  acknowledges the entangled co-existence of all life forms (soils, plants, insects, animals, humans), and involves the participation both of local communities and Maori scientists. In accord with stakeholder intentions, the research aims to facilitate change and well-being benefits for specific Maori landscapes culminating in the production of a beautiful, unique, place-specific Hapu Plan for two at-risk coastal marae.

 Working with Maori landscape ecology professionals and the Global EcoHealth Network (including the following disciplines: population biology, restoration ecology, plant science, hydrology, soil science) we are developing a model for resilient settlements led by landscape architectural planning and design strategies. The methodology is comparative and interactive. The goal is to design two coastal hapu (and associated biophysical systems), using mataurangi “data” and information from the geological, ecological and biological sciences. The rohe, or geographical infrastructure of a hapu, is a complex system of human geography and spatial interconnectedness, and for this reason a certain amount of resilience is built in. However, many low-lying coastal marae and their environmental support systems are likely to experience sea-level rise that will force some difficult decision-making. If marae have even greater degrees of resilience and adaptability integrated into their socio-spatial layouts they are more likely to be able to work with the coming changes. 

 What currently we are calling “adaptive settlement design” encompasses much more than the layout of a marae. Being closely interwoven with all the systems in which they are embedded, from the biotic to the artistic, marae cannot evolve without other changes occurring in other systems.  Landscape architecture is a systems-based design discipline. Its designers work with unpredictability, openness, dynamic and slow change, with feedback systems and with disequilibrious ecologies. It aims  to integrate infrastructure and natural systems using new technologies and highly-informed empirical strategies at the same time as deploying traditional ecological epistemologies derived from the particular sites that are being “re-arranged.”

 Marae are traditionally located in places where the topography, the biota, the water, aspect and orientation, soils and climate intersect with reciprocal social geographies of inter-hapu communication, including marriage, trading and manaakitanga. Ceremonies that relate to mahinga kai, gardening and the provision of food from the soil, and to harvesting kai moana according to maramataka, clearly show how each marae is lived in its location, and yet is part of a larger network. In the era of climate emergency and radical seawater rise, accurate and appropriate analysis of the network of local conditions is required, to help hapu and communities prepare for the inevitable and be as resilient as possible - upholding the unbroken chain of local custom and technologies, not only by preserving them, but by improving and enhancing their ability to adapt.

 The project is an extension of previous work carried out in the Pacific islands and the Caribbean archipelago of Puerto Rico

2019 Barnett, R (Forthcoming) Nonsovereignty: Designing Political Ecologies in Puerto Rico, Forty-Five: A Journal of Outside Research

2018 Barnett R Is There Any Other Way? e-flux architecture / US Pavilion Venice Biennale https://www.e-flux.com/

2016 Barnett R Designing Indian Country. Places Journal https://placesjournal.org

2013 Barnett R. and J. Margetts, “Disturbanism in the South Pacific: Disturbance Ecology as a Basis for Urban Resilience in Small Island States” in S. Pickett, M. Cardanasso and B. McGrath, Resilience in Urban Ecology and Design. New York: Springer Publications.

2008 J. Margetts and R. Barnett R. ‘A Disturbance Ecology Approach to Post Cyclone Reconstruction in Pacific Settlements.’ Proceedings of i-Rec Conference, Building Resilience: Achieving Effective Post Disaster Reconstruction. Christchurch, NZ.  

2005 Margetts J. and R. Barnett   ‘A Disturbance Ecology Model for Pacific Urbanism: Education at the Sustainable Edge.’ Industrial Technologies and Sustainable Development. Published online at http://www.esc.auckland.ac.nz/people/staff/smit023/SPPEEX/#2005

2004 Margetts J. and R. Barnett   ‘Limits on Alofi: A Nonlinear Approach to Urban Redevelopment in a Small Island State.’  Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne: Routledge, 307-312.