Draft 6: What might this look like in real life?
Creating new, whakapapa-informed ways to envision, speculate and activate Whakaoriori Masterton’s awesome story of place.
Here I describe three methods investigated:
Whakahīkoi — an active method for generating place knowledge
Pūrakau — a whakapapa-informed research framework
Whenua — a dynamic cultural landscape model
I began all of this by jumping in the middle. Animated sketches for improving the spatial experience of our township (eg: before/after to spread via social media). Activating locals to think critically about our built environment (eg: a giant bushwalk projected onto the Regent Theatre wall of Jackson Street). I still like these ideas, but realised they would just add to the same pile of ideas based personal visions to genuinely koha to Whakaoriori Masterton I had to go back to the source—learn from my place before critiquing it.
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So my first question became: “Who is Whakaoriori Masterton?” The next: “What placemaking processes can this town maintain, and refer to, as we determine our spatial future?” Then: “How can I make these processes activating and repeatable for my place and others?”
In an overcomplicated ecosystem of local government legislation, strategies, plans and reports, any new tools I design need to see the parts as one, and transform collective intent into collective action.
“Art and design are both generative research methods, and media for representation…to catalyse adaptation”.
— from National Science Challenges — Climate adaptations for coastal farms: Bridging science and mātauranga Māori with art and design; Allen, Bryant & Smith
Whakahīkoi
An active method for generating place knowledge
Purpose of this work:
To gather insights into the diverse human experience of our township.
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I invited a diverse range of individuals to ‘wander’ around town, relating to me their experience of Whakaoriori Masterton. These were mostly local, some non-local people. All were adults who had invested thinking about our place in terms of experience and belonging.
The purpose was to let insights from each hīkoi steer my investigation and inform the development of methods or tools for finding Whakaoriori Masterton’s story of place. I considered this group to be representative of a potential ongoing local citizens assembly, continuously collecting a diversity of perspectives on urban Whakaoriori Masterton.
I composed four prompting questions, but after just one hīkoi (with Ethan), I learned the most revealing perspectives came after the questions were abandoned (although Ethan requested them in written form to prompt an artwork—the typed responses I received later). With each successive hīkoi I found tone and body language was as important as dialogue. I noticed unconscious decisions were the most revealing, like the habit of a certain path, or a physical reaction to learning what was previously under our feet. Describing hīkoi as data gathering might seem like an alarming lack of rigour, but rich, experiential knowledge emerged as a result of me relinquishing control. How might this constitute data? When allowed to steer, hīkoi contributors revealed two clear themes:
A: how we live and belong in our township, and
B: how we want to live and belong in it.
This led to universes of enquiry otherwise unknown to me, profoundly expanding the scope of this work, expanding the way I understood our shared town, both as a citizen and spatial designer. Their influence is in everything produced here. For example a story created using scenes from Whenua (a cultural landscape model) investigates something important to Jason Kerehi—the possibility of our town’s cultural centre (CBD) to provide sightlines to significant maunga.
Following is a list of whakahīkoi contributors and their perspectives that ‘stung’ for me.
Ethan Eade, Artist
A: Feels an outsider in their home town.
B: Colour, celebration of diversity.
Jason Kerehi, Mana whenua Māori health leader (Rangitāne, Muaūpoko, Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Kahungungu, Kai Tahu)
A: Sees two clear townships, what’s here now and what was.
B: Cultural sites, sightlines to maunga brought to life.
Joseph Potanagaroa, Mana whenua researcher (Rangitāne O Wairarapa)
A: Senses potential through story, education, kotahitanga (unity).
B: Cultural mapping, the treasure of knowing place through time.
Robin White DNZM, Artist
A: Sees beauty in all local people.
B: Kotahitanga (unity), collaboration, tīkanga made normal.
Frazer Mailman, MDC Councillor emeritus
A: Observes we are reactive, which makes us conservative.
B: A big vision we can aim for.
Gareth Winter, National Archivist (former Masterton Archivist and author of numerous Whakaoriori Masterton histories)
A: Knows there is only one river in this rohe, Ruamahanga.
B: More walking: “it’s better than cycling (which is better than driving) for ‘noticing’.”
Nina Boyd, Pōneke Wellington architect (visualiser for Our Future Masterton)
A: “Typical NZ town, not enough space carved out in the built fabric to reflect all the facets of the place.”
A: “Notable willingness of Masterton community to contribute skills and time.”
Mercia Abbott, Māori spatial designer
A: Aotearoa’s dominant spatial development systems are built on individual sites and transactions. It still sees relationships—the life between stuff—as inconsequential or incidental. Fears digital twins could perpetuate this.
B: Calls for cultural consideration in the use of digital taonga—eg: shape libraries of Aotearoa-indigenous rākau (trees) and ngāhere (forest).
Simon Miller, Tree engineer & consultant
A: On Whakaoriori Masterton’s parks and open spaces: “All these conifers — everything is just dead around them.”
B: On tree consulting for Kainga Ora: “We’re at the top table because trees are being recognised as first priority infrastructure”.
Nerissa Aramakutu, MDC Kaiwhakarite mahere (Māori and General Policy Advisor) —emeritus
A: Sees siloed workstreams dulling progress.
B: On implementing Masterton District Council Wellbeing Strategy: “Councillor will is important, but internal will as well — how can all of Council’s business areas contribute?”
Lisa McLaren, MDC Climate Policy Manager —emeritus
A: Sees the siloed practices of local government work areas creating bureaucracy and complacency.
B: On climate action we need “a combination of regulations, incentives and disincentives. And probably a few decent storm events.”
Odell Sugrue, MDC Parks and Reserves Planner
A: On the implementation of the MDC Parks and Open Spaces Strategy: “I just muddle on, we don’t have the beauty of a plan. When we have an opportunity, like a traffic island, we model what we want to see”.
Whakahīkoi knowledge became the heart of the story of place research framework
Pūrakau
A whakapapa-informed research framework
Visit the live document in Mural.com
Purpose of this work:
To gather and survey broadly-scoped content relating to Whakaoriori Masterton’s past, present and future, our story of place resource centre.
To create a whakapapa-informed process for finding pūrakau, stories of place in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Design criteria:
As this research progressed I experimented with existing models for mapping sources. None were adequate. The framework I needed became a design project.
- Reflected a whakapapa way of thinking. This meant a connected ‘story’ with clear relationships between sources.
- Wide and deep within one space. This meant a kind of zoom lens for an overview of the structure and focussed interrogation of each source.
- Could be easily navigated by others, used as a resource.
- Could expand, be edited, or its ‘naked’ framework used as a resource.
How it happened:
There was a lot of material, bulging folders full of arrows and post-its, and it was expanding, purposefully broad and deep in scope. It was a mind map to begin with, but mind maps are like dumps — too jumbled to make sense of. I needed a framework for organising stories of place (my place) that helped me see the interrelationship of everything, the big-picture, a kind of whakapapa. It needed capacity to expand in size and scope while preserving fine-grain detail. To be koha, this framework needed to act as a living resource, or wiped and used as a blank framework for a fresh investigation.
I began with the circular infographic of the Our Future Masterton (OFM) Framework. This centred the goal: a citizen-led vision for our future township, with guiding principles circulating around it — a one-page distillation capturing ‘place’. The OFM body of work remained a compass throughout my mahi (work), but was aware its presentation had not resonated with Councillors at the time. Was it useful to populate my sources under its layout so it could be an ongoing reference to sources? I found the circular infographic limiting as a working tool, and a quadrant framework turned up its own limitations. It lacked relationships between quadrants and provided no through-line to follow.
The resulting Pūrakau (story of place) research framework is inspired by whakapapa — a way of making sense of the world grounded in the connectedness of everything. It allows research material to be collected around subject nodes (pītau) which pull apart to provide capacity. Related pītau form layers — likened to the lenses we pass through in the process of a design investigation; ka mua ka muri—walking into the future with our eyes on the past. The framework is built in the online platform Mural.com, a live, cloud-based whiteboard. In this single digital-physical space, both a wide-angle view and focussed interrogation feel natural. (Similar to the Whenua cultural landscape model.) For me this framework has the potential to be repurposed for any whakapapa-informed research process.
Whenua
A dynamic cultural landscape model
Purpose of this work:
To collaboratively envision Whakaoriori Masterton in the context of its broad cultural landscape, within existing local capability.
To visualise our place through time, to see relationships between built and natural infrastructure through local cultural and environmental lenses, to envision possible scenarios and draw data for planning.
“I have always found myself asking, ‘What is the picture we need to create in the mind of the audience, and how can we make that picture without the benefit of actual visuals?’”
— Erskine Childers, UN civil servant, ICOGRADA (Frascara 40)
Design criteria:
- Simple to update and evolve locally, anytime. Not expensive or complicated, but within Whakaoriori Masterton’s existing resources and technical skills.
- Enables participation, collaboration, contribution and sharing of perspectives.
- Encourages us to perceive our town beyond typical urban boundaries, to include the landscape that affects, and is affected by, our township. Our whenua context.
- Enables us to see our specific mix of spatial aspects in relation to one another: geographic, climatic, historic, indigenous, western, and to explore blended potential futures.
- Accommodates data from diverse sources including local data creation, and exports out to diverse formats for sharing.
- The model can be imported to photo-realistic rendering software to simulate materiality, atmosphere, the movement of life and climate phenomena. Historic cultural occupations like Matua Pā or Bridge Street can be brought to life. (Eg: Autodesk Revit, Enscape, Twinmotion and Unreal Engine, such as Wellington City’s digital twin project).
- GIS accurate, 1:1 scale and vector-based to allow real visualisation and data extraction, eg: what number of a species of tree is required to populate an awa corridor, or what effect a building added or removed from Queen Street might have on Tararua paemaunga (mountain range) viewshafts.
- Instantly recognisable as our place and immersive enough to sense the experience of different scenarios, but not so photo-real it seduces and concludes without a robust design process.
- Contributes to a local big-picture vision by visualising how our written or spoken strategies could be reflected physically in our environment. This can inspire us, direct our compass, and be specific shift us from speculation to action. This is a way to move us from speculating to planning
The Masterton District Council online map viewer is the closest tool we currently have to satisfy this criteria, but it visualises our space the way our District Plan sees our space: land use is prioritised above landscape values. Eg: the closest representation we have of our urban awa network is the ‘Stormwater’ layer in the ‘Water Services’ maps. Here, piped ‘drainage’ is represented much more prominently than the natural watercourses they deviate.
How it happened:
Inspired by the Isthmus Group visualisation of the Tauhara maunga and plains (Barrett et al 213), Whenua is built within Sketchup — a common 3D spatial visualisation tool for landscape architecture. I chose Sketchup for its universality and ability to accept diverse source material for combining inside one model. It allows collaborative contributing and viewing, and outputs common file formats that other software will recognise, Eg: GIS mapping, rendering programs, and slicers for 3D printers.
All maps prioritise certain information based on the needs and values of their creator or audience, so what is important to communicate through a map in Aotearoa New Zealand today?
Spectra of sources: old to new, global to local, government to citizen-endorsed, colonial to mana whenua. I compiled an array of paper and GIS maps of urban Whakaoriori Masterton and its broader Wairarapa landscape. These became source layers for Whenua, a blended 3D digital model. As data was interpreted into the model, trails of evidence were maintained by layer labelling (tags), or directly preserving original sources within the digital file.
For me, a hundred possibilities arrived that could be explored through this ‘digital twin’. In one space we can better see the past, and consider “what-ifs” to help inform the future. Will restoring a blocked off laneway create viewshafts to our Tararua paemaunga (mountains) from the heart of town? Which areas of today’s township were bush or wetland when Masterton was first surveyed? Did this follow the awa (stream) corridors that today enter underground culverts at the margins of town? What would it be like to uncover these waterways, restoring Bridge Street as a modern bio-corridor and climate-ready infrastructure? Can our awa become destination spaces? How might we evolve this over time?
I extracted three demonstration stories to explore these aspects of Whakaoriori Masterton placemaking:
Awa: Recovery of devalued, forgotten, piped and drained surface waterways.
Ngāhere: Potential urban biodiversity corridors featuring indigenous forest.
Sightlines: Opportunities for viewshafts to significant maunga (mountains).
Draft fly-through recordings are linked below.
