Examining rhetoric and spatialisations with Dr Hannah Hopewell

Within the scope of your research, what is a significant issue facing Aotearoa New Zealand's landscape and urban environments?

“The climate emergency and the uneven forms of social, spatial, and environmental injustice it manifests through landscapes, built environments and certain communities is the most significant issue, or I should say set of issues, facing Aotearoa.

“Yet in the same breath I’d equally say decoloniality and how land is understood, imagined and thus designed-with. Decolonial approaches unsettle inherited settler-colonial practices of curating nonhuman and human life in our built environments, at the same time advancing possibilities for the coexistence of difference and modes of inter-cultural relationality. There is urgent demand to recognise and ‘delink’ from the epistemologies, systemic structures, and ingrained spatialities that continue to unwittingly endorse land-based practices that give rise to environmental, and therefore concurrent mana whenua, harm.

“As I understand it, we are in a new context, signalled most overtly by the enactment of legal personhood for natural phenomena, like the Whanganui River, coupled with the absolute imperative to support mana matuhake—self-determination of mana whenua in land-based issues.

“Legal personhood turns thinking about environments, including landscapes, on its head and indicates a shift from land as a resource to be possessed, to a reciprocal coexistence, a being with land, or what mana whenua have always known as kaitiakitanga. Land as living entity amounts to an ontological shift for Pākehā and necessitates radical changes to design practices.”

How does your research approach the climate emergency and its forms of environmental injustices? 

“The current research task as I see it is less to assume we can create solutions to climate change impacts with the same forms of knowledge-making that ‘created’ it. Much of my research effort is directed to less a climate emergency problem-solving mindset, and more a problem-setting approach, that often promotes forms of un-learning.

“I work towards provoking and disseminating the possibility of alternative ways of being-with and designing-with current land-based issues alongside reframing the role of the designer amidst social-spatial and environmental injustice manifesting through urban landscapes. Being Pākehā and tangata Tiriti in the allyship dance of standing up or standing aside conditions this pursuit.

“My recent exhibition, Ko Wai Au? | Who Am I? is a case in point here. The project is premised by how landscape, as a (western) spatial technology, is transited in the setter-colonial imagination of Aotearoa. In addressing the pursuit of flatness through naturalised techniques of cut and fill, the project attends to systemic land modification at scale to highlight how the horizons of history as told by the soil are continually effaced in the everyday.

“I am currently working on a project called Hypervisibility: A Field Poetics. It is developing visual syntax in setter landscapes through situated research in Porirua. The project will produce a series of images and texts in book form that catalyse unsanitised ways of looking at vernacular landscapes.”

What can New Zealanders to do address the climate emergency and its forms of environmental injustices?

“If there is any one thing climate change brings, it is greater need for attendance to how we might collectively relate to and share land and land-based processes and responsibility beyond individualised land parcels. It’s my hope this century will see accelerated reliance upon sharing resources and living lightly with the earth that evolves a form of broadscale regenerative urbanism alongside the reindigenisation of environments.

“Built environment designers must urgently think about what it means to practice design as a people of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and how commitment to the Treaty bears upon values and thus design decisions.

“Aotearoa’s current landscapes, urban and rural, are landscapes of colonisation, where the question lies in how to design with these colonised landscapes in ways that do not circulate (spatial and environmental) injustice.

“What might decolonial landscapes look like is an open-ended question and one that needs urgent pursuit.”

Read more about her recent exhibitions Ko Wai Au? | Who Am I? and Ko wai hoki koe? | Who the hell are you? 

Dr Hannah Hopewell contributed to the chapter ‘Beyond Landscape’ in the book The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, which addresses appropriation and displacement through analogies of gardening and urban design showing how harbours, bridges, railways and roads are implicit in the production of relationships between land, body and notions of performativity, entanglements and intra-actions.