While traveling across Louisiana, the low coastal delta where the Mississippi floods across the land it is hard not to reflect on the the overly simplistic images pop culture paints of the South.

Tamati Kruger

The Hauraki Gulf, known to Māori (New Zealand’s indigenous people) as Tīkapa Moana \ Te Moananui a Toi, has endured decades of pressure from land-use management, extractive industries and the country’s largest metropolitan centre. These have severely diminished the ecological health of Tīkapa Moana \ Te Moananui a Toi. To help mitigate the decline in ecological health a comprehensive spatial planning exercise has been carried out.

More than three hundred years ago, tupuna of the Taranaki iwi of Aotearoa New Zealand carved marks to put mauri, an intangible spiritual essence, into free-standing stones or living rock. Lines drawn between these taonga created an eco-philosophical container, acknowledging tribal responsibility and authority, or mana whenua, for the area bounded within.

Landscape Architects are concerned with change. Not with its initiation but as moderators, facilitators and directors. This is true whether working on broad-scale planning or site specific design. The intent is always the same. To try and ensure that the right changes occur in the right place by the right means.