1. Mihimihi, my places and our awa
Who this mahi (work) comes from.
Ko Hereheretaura te maunga My mountain is Hahei peninsula
Ko Te Whanganui a Hei te moana My sea is Hahei, Mercury Bay
Kei Kāpiti, Pōneke, Albuquerque, Berlin tōku kāinga i mua I have lived in these places
Kei Whakaoriori, Te Kauru rohe tōku kāinga ināianei I live in Masterton
Ko Kirsten Browne ahau I’m Kirsten Browne
He kaihoahoa I am a designer
Nō reira therefore
Ko tēnei taku mihi ki ngā tāngata whenua o te rohe nei, Wairarapa ki Tararua. Ka mihi hoki au ki ngā tohu o te rohe nei. Nō reira, tēnā koutou katoa.
I acknowledge the indigenous people of this area, Wairarapa. I acknowledge the important landmarks of this area. Thus, my acknowledgement to you all.
Although I have taken care to remain professionally objective for this work, it has also been a deeply personal exercise. Identifying my background, influences and current relationship to place is becoming central to my whole design practice.
Manaakitanga (Respect)
To show manaaki (respect) in this work, which heavily references te ao Māori concepts, I have been encouraged to state my relationship to Māori.
Ko Hereheretaura te maunga My mountain is Hahei peninsula
Ko Te Whanganui a Hei te moana My sea is Hahei, Mercury Bay
On November 3, 1769 James Cook’s Endeavour sailed from its first Aoteraroa foray in Te Tai Rāwhiti, to Te Whitianga a Kupe (Mercury Bay) on the east coast of Hauraki (Coromandel Peninsula). Over a 12-day visit the Endeavour crew were fed, traded with, and hosted by Ngāti Hei at the behest of their rangatira Toawaka. Toawaka saw this new relationship as a positive omen (a sentiment expressed 250 years later by his Ngāti Hei descendant, rangatira Joe Davis). The Endeavour leadership, with Tahitian navigator and arioi (priest) Tupaia, received a pōhiri (welcome) onto the marae at Wharekaho. Cook was given space to record the transit of Mercury from the shore we call Cooks Beach today. On that beach, in a ceremony conducted before The Endeavour set sail toward the estuary he would name Thames, Cook raised the British Colours and claimed the area in the name of King George III (Gates 30). So who am I?
It’s a story with a twist: On my dad’s side we had an ancestor with a wandering eye, Ebenezer Browne. We were descendants of one of his relationships with wāhine Māori. We didn’t know who she was but one day we might find out. Dad thought he might be one-sixteenth or thirty-second “Māori blood”. He was never all that invested in lineage, but I held this story like I held my mum’s Fry family story. Henry Fry settled in Riwaka in 1841 to farm tobacco and hops. He’d arrived from Wiltshire on the New Zealand Company ship “Will Watch”. When I was 15 we attended a big Fry family reunion in the Riwaka Memorial Hall and a fascinating family tree package was collated. He’d been started with 16 acres, eventually owned 153 acres, and seven of his children settled around him. Today there’s Fry Hops, Fry’s Pharmacy, Fry Builders, Fry Holdings, etc. The place “Riwaka” was a wetland, originally named “Riuwaka” (the hull of the canoe). Recently I set to digging up records of dad’s genealogy. I found Gordon Browne, who at the age of 20 arrived in 1820 Aotearoa New Zealand, and was able to choose to live within te ao Māori with his Ngāti Pāoa wife and child. Gordon, like us, had roots in Hauraki, but this didn’t show a clear descendent link to us. So I took a DNA test to find a relative in the database who might join the dots. When the result came back there was no ‘Polynesian’ (including Māori) DNA described. It said genetically I’m mixed European and a little bit Malian. In that moment I went from tracing my Aotearoa-Indigenous heritage to ‘ally’.
I know whatever my DNA whakapapa is, my way of thinking must be shaped by Moana Pasifika, my home. But over time I’m learning how profoundly its ‘way of seeing’ was/is suppressed and tokenised in my time. (Indigenous designer and educator Johnson Witihera talks about the disadvantageous effect of this on his mainly Pākehā design students). My experiences have led me to perceive ‘Indigenous’ as a personal inheritance and ‘indigeneity’ as indigenous principles and practices we can uplift or suppress. I choose to uplift indigeneity.
As my Rangitāne friend Jason Kerehi reflected—after the (overwhelming) tour he gave me of Masterton through mana whenua eyes — today we are all the colonisers and the colonised.
Numbers don’t work and labels don’t help
I am wary of the binary, exclusive and divisive use of labels in Aotearoa New Zealand today. When local archivist Gareth Winter referred to himself as Pākehā to me, he qualified it: “by that I mean I am of a race that rose in New Zealand. But it is a confusing term…I am not sure exactly what it means”. Tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty), feels a bit like a secret handshake, and like Pākehā, loaded with multiple interpretations. I’m for embracing Te Tiriti partnership principles as a nation, but a treaty isn’t why this works, culture is. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (Drucker). Trust relationships, connection to place and indigeneity will come from koha (mana enhancing reciprocity). When Masterton District Council’s Kaiwhakarite mahere (Māori and General Policy Advisor), Nerissa Aramakutu addressed me as “e hoa” in the context of work we are doing to reclaim the indigenous names of local awa, my heart sang. When Kahungunu ki Wairarapa researcher Joseph Potangaroa wrote “Kirsten — now I realise it is you” before his outpouring of local indigenous place names and locations, I needed no other label.
Kotahitanga (Unity)
I suggest Nerissa, Joseph and I are motivated by mutual inclusiveness — a ‘pluriverse’ — a world where many worlds fit (Escobar xvi). I hope we can evolve a secure feeling of belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand for those identifying Māori, non-Māori, the continuum between and those beyond, acknowledging that we’re all jumping around. The late local matua Hoani Paku seemed to make a study of this. He took pains to explain in public gatherings his combined Aotearoa Indigenous and British whakapapa, and to draft this continuum for Māori cultural identity…
My neighbours, artist Robin White (Ngāti Awa) and her partner Mike Fudakowski live within the Baháʼí faith which is based on unity—the unity of all religion, and of humanity. When we spoke about our town centre I lamented the dis-unifying effect of bumping spaces like the Hunting & Fishing store moving out of our town centre. We spoke about the cultural potential of a rejuvenated Town Hall if we were bold enough to see it through a unity lens (something we might think we’re doing, but we’re not). Robin suggested Masterton needs “a meeting house, a modern marae where town meetings are held and everyone is welcome and can learn the protocol by it being our common space”. I scribbled as she spoke.
I asked them “what’s your favourite thing about our town?” Mike replied “proximity to Wellington” (he’s said this repeatedly). Robin replied “the people, all kinds, hoodies and spiffy suits”. Robin champions community collaboration through her art process. She is also a Dame of the New Zealand Order of Merit. In 2005 she collaborated with local graffiti artist Auri Olsson on a series of wool-bale-paintings that respond to the history of farming in the Wairarapa. The result is an activist commentary reminiscent of the collaborative concrete galleries under our local bridges.
My places
I grew up in Raumati on the Kāpiti Coast, a spaghetti of poor town planning, sandwiched between the bush-clad Maungakotukutuku Valley and the beach. Today my parents live in the same Raumati house, but its setting has completely changed. A new Expressway slashes over the middle of town, however rather than cutting off corridors, beneath the road a vast interconnected network of forested trails have re-joined townships with coastlines, rivers, wetlands and neighbourhoods. This ecological regeneration, these corridors now full of people, not cars, was inconceivable for us until it was built.
Wellington is my city. The approach is like a single-shot movie intro: it opens with a panorama along the edge of Te Whanganui-a-Tara (the harbour) — it’s a city with treehouses, backed by the Town Belt. It ends intimately, usually the discovery of a newly reoccupied back alley niche, where someone is making chocolate or cutting hair under a warm light. Wellington City Council has a laneway development policy, “small-scale connections within large city blocks that connect pedestrians to shorter and more attractive routes. Laneway projects are part of a bigger plan to transform the city centre into a walkable capital.” Recognition that large-scale retail and new developments aren’t the only, or the most important components of a capital.
Growing a young family in the high desert of New Mexico — home to rattlesnakes and prickly pear cacti — had its similarities to home. Over six years in urban Albuquerque I noticed the imposition of a Western resource-hungry city on a strikingly beautiful, culturally ancient landscape. New Mexico has a 500+ year history of Hispanic occupation and 1500+ years of Native American occupation including Pueblo (village) tribes, Apache tribes and the Navajo Nation. ‘Burque’ is a river city, the legendary Rio Grande running right through, with historic acequia (community ditches) feeding the farmed land along its path. Water scarcity has long been on the radar for Burque’s local government who have incentivised native and resilient planting (ie “treebates”) since the 1990s. It is currently accommodating pollution, water mismanagement, invasive plant species, heating, and ecological collapse among other settlement pressures (Robbins). The city’s climate change forecast is further increasing pressure.
For a period in late 2015 we lived in central Berlin as the city absorbed 1000 refugees per day. There was enormous goodwill and collective effort made by Berlin locals to assist those escaping war in their places, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. My daughter’s 12 year old friend Maya (who arrived with her family from Syria) spoke five languages, and was learning German as her sixth. Everybody intermingled in the schools, streets and supermarkets. Five years later, according to the Centre for Global Development, this support remained high.
Another aspect of Berlin left a lasting impression on me — the willingness of the city to prioritise public open spaces over development. Many of Berlin’s former brownfield sites, legacies of its industrial past, have been converted to parks and mixed use. These include Tempelhofer Feld (a former airport) and numerous former rail yards like Gleisdreieck, Nordbahnhof, and Natur-Park Südgelände.
Since 2006 I have lived in Whakaoriori Masterton, pop. 27,000 and growing, the largest of five ‘rural service towns’ in the Wairarapa. My family moved 1.5 hours north from Wellington City and bought a bungalow in Pownall Street, the urban zone. We are opposite the Bridge Club and former Bentley Street Gasworks—a contaminated site. A significant awa (stream) runs along one boundary of the property — home to huge native eels (tuna), little freshwater crayfish (koura) and the odd kōkopu (a native fish). It flows from deep in the Tararua ranges through to the Ruamāhanga River with the township cutting across it. It took some digging to discover its name, Mākakaweka.
In this new context, I relied heavily on digital connectivity and fabrication for my design work. I wondered how this practical, land-oriented community might affect their physical world with digital tools. In 2015 with John Hart I co-founded a local open access digital makerspace (Fab Lab). In the process of weaving this into our local fabric we learned that face-to-face conversations, in-place demonstrations, and pictures of our potential future were far more compelling than wordy reports. A local property developer, local community trust and Masterton District Council contributed key funding to get this established, but we knew consistency would be key to having a real effect. Today Fab Lab Masterton operates in the heart of town under the wing of MDC’s 2018 Wellbeing Strategy, and lives through the dedication of the citizen experts who turn up to ‘make and share’.
In 2016 I became involved with parallel Council-commissioned initiatives: Letting Space’s Urban Dream Brokerage brought empty, untenanted town centre spaces alive; and Massey University research area Toi Āria - Design for Public Good led our community through the creation of a 50-year vision for our CBD called Our Future Masterton. Both were externally-facilitated (by artists and designers) and community-powered (by locals). My ears were pricked. Urban Dream Brokerage gave blood and oxygen to the town by bringing local innovators and fresh possibilities into the light of our collective consciousness. Toi Āria brought a process that gave townspeople free rein to critique, imagine, visualise — contribute to their future township. I wondered: why not keep these going? Would Whakaoriori Masterton continue these processes as the way we do things? But when the band left town so did the music, Toi Āria later reflecting they’d had “traces of success”. Why just traces? What would real success look like?
I became active in Sustainable Wairarapa — an environmental restoration group that connects local iwi, councils and community volunteers. Through their Mākoura Stream Restoration Project (an important urban catchment), we transformed a previously barren stretch of ‘creek’ into a bush-lined awa fanning east and west of our urban property. Locally endemic species such as kahikitea, totara, titoki and tawa are growing through an established nursery of hardy natives. Now we are pest trapping through this corridor, pairs of piwakawaka have staked their territories, and tūī fly its length, jetting over cars where the road cuts through. Neighbours report hearing ruru morepork at night now, and asked if kererū might return to town?
A serendipitous visit to Costa Rica in 2022 opened my eyes to the potential future of this in townships. 25 years ago, in response to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) the Central American country, home to an outsized proportion of global biodiversity, pioneered comprehensive regulations and incentives through its Biodiversity Law of 1998. Through this law, the country has redirected its economy toward ecology-related activity, mainstreaming environmental development as the basis of economic development. Its towns and cities are part of this process. Since 2010 capital San Jose has been replacing exotic trees with native and locally endemic species in La Sabana Metropolitan Park. Surveys have recorded an explosion in native bird species, in turn seeding further native rehabilitation through dispersal. In a nearby urban district, Curridabat’s Sweet City initiative is utilising indigenous biodiversity as the foundation pillar of a five-pillar wellbeing strategy: biodiversity, infrastructure, habitat, coexistence, and productivity. The city treats “nature as an urban actor”, “defeating the city-nature antagonism”. Walking around an urban community that was purposefully regenerating natural systems was palpable. What would this mean in Whakaoriori Masterton? Aotearoa New Zealand has the highest proportion of threatened indigenous species in the world with biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth. Could we dismantle the distinction between ‘natural areas’ and ‘town’?
Aotearoa New Zealand’s response to the UN CBD is a comprehensive framework: Te Mana o te Taiao Aotearoa New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy (2022) “for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity, particularly indigenous biodiversity, in New Zealand, from 2020 to 2050”. Its Implementation Plan assigns several aspirational objectives, actions and contributions to district councils, eg: “restorative initiatives that extend from the mountains to the sea” (Te Mana o te Taiao 36). Mauri Tūhono (2023) is our regional biodiversity framework. It is a bold government document, devised in te ao Māori then translated to English. “For us to see positive changes in te taiao (the environment), first we must change” (Mauri Tūhono 7). Both these national and regional frameworks are strong, compelling and visionary. How do we reflect this in local policy and regulation?
Recovering our urban awa (waterways)
In 2019 I collaborated with retired lawyer and citizen scientist Tony Garstang on a placemaking project he’d begun. He was providing a guided walk along the Waiwaka, a mostly ignored urban stream (awa), part of a large network running through and under the Whakaoriori Masterton township. His walk began at its gushing spring in the Wairarapa College grounds (to local’s delighted astonishment), continued along its channelled and culverted town section, and ended at its confluence with the Mākoura stream in the Garland’s Bush remnant just off Dixon Street. Tony had researched and recovered the forgotten names and pathways of the entire urban stream network, creating pencil maps as he foot-traced their original paths. To accompany the Aratoi Museum exhibition WAI — Manga Maha, Awa Kotahi | One River, Many Streams, we designed a wall-sized map that ‘daylighted’ the network, layering named awa over the township like the London Underground. The map fascinated, resonated and reproduced in the community — everyone had a creek story, like the one about the WaiCol science teacher who brewed beer made from the constant spring water gushing from a grassy bank in the school’s back yard. It was gifted the name Ngā Waipikopiko Rau o Whakaoriori by mana whenua matua Mike Kawana.
We swiftly devised a follow-up proposal to install 60+ signposts (rākau) at natural awa junctions through town. Masterton District Council supported this and our small team were enthusiastic that this would lift the map from the museum wall and restore the awa to our daily lives. But as the design developed I started to question whether these rākau would contribute more to footpath clutter than to our goal: a permanent collective sense of our urban watersheds, and a whakapapa connection to our cultural landscape through mana whenua names. I was noticing a bigger context around this: the layers we rarely consider together as a whole — known layers, forgotten layers, and potential future layers of our township, our story of place. Our awa are foundational to this story — our past, present and future, our whakapapa (discussed in chapter 5). Is the absence of identity what makes a project in a place feel inauthentic? How might we achieve the goals of this project if we approached it with a deeper understanding of our place? How can we meaningfully bring the whole community on this journey?
My role as designer for this project was evolving. Beyond being signage, awareness, or ‘indigenous countermapping’, we wanted to challenge our town’s regulatory systems to uplift the awa. Might we better achieve the goals of this project if we approached it with a deeper understanding of our place? How can we meaningfully bring the Council and mana whenua community into the design team?
Finding our story of place
I was introduced to the work of Regenesis Group who conduct infrastructure projects and interventions across the globe using a regenerative development and design approach. This group formed to ask how infrastructure development can be an active agent in enabling (versus undermining) natural systems. It is the deliberate creation of conditions so a self-perpetuating ecosystem kicks in, a co-evolution of development with nature. Infrastructure is defined as an all-inclusive living system, not just the objects we build in and on the land.
Regenesis describe their method beginning with creating, and then maintaining a “Story of Place: a research-based understanding of how a place works, what it strives to contribute to the world [and how its community] yearns to transform”. This resonates here. “When a place’s essence is articulated clearly and concretely it becomes possible to design, develop, and plan for the future at an entirely new level”, meaning a maintained Story of Place is an active catalyst for “authentic investment”. Regenesis Executive Director Shannon Murphy suggests a ‘story of place’ process can be both a compass for how to move forward and a touchstone. Connecting back to a story can reawaken a force that needs to be sustained through time. I sense my town is missing this.
Regenesis’ story-finding begins with “ecological patterns — the stories of geology and hydrology, flora and fauna — that gave rise to the cultural patterns that those that live in the place know deeply, live with daily, and joke about with each other”. Cultural pattern finding comes from “scientific data, historical records, ancient legends, regional arts, and kitchen-table conversations…that reveal the timeless essence of a place and its whole living community” (How We Work). This is much more expansive place knowledge than Whakaoriori Masterton currently uses. Regenerative design and development shares its core ‘world view’, ecological connectedness, with Aotearoa indigenous whakapapa principles. How might we collect this knowledge and embody it locally? As a local designer looking for our ‘essence’ this observation resonates for me:
“The most globally important sustainability projects undertaken in the world today are conceived and executed by local actors at the local level. The reason is simple: a single, particular place is the only scale at which the interface between people and natural systems is immediate and accessible”
—Regenesis, How We Work
Our town is built over faultlines and cuts across catchments. It holds layers of natural and cultural habitation. Very little of this lives in our consciousness, but as the Aratoi Exhibition showed, we are hungry to connect to it, and we wind up connecting to each other because it is our common space.
How might we turn stories into space?
In Whakaoriori Masterton we tend to deliberate within physical boundaries: a facility, an infrastructure object, perhaps a ‘precinct’. Regenesis argues for embracing complexity — that what hinders us is reductionism — isolating problems to ‘solve’ separately to the wider context they exist in (Krieger). We might believe we’ve considered Project X as a contribution to a bigger working vision when we actually haven’t, because that vision is blinkered. We miss opportunities by under-considering how our projects might also contribute to (or detract from) our much wider social-ecological landscape — our whole machine of life — our cohesive sense of place.
But bringing this to life, evolving new approaches to development in our township, already deeply invested in legacy structures, sounds like a complicated, expensive, possibly impractical goal. Regenesis: “anyone who has undertaken such a process has learned, making progress at the local level can be a surprisingly complex challenge. Each and every place on earth is characterised by a unique set of cultural, social, and political dynamics…project leaders seeking to deliver a transformational result must employ a transformational process in order to get there” (How We Work).
Regenesis describe the second part of their method as an ‘Integrative Design Process’ “that moves regenerative development and design from an exciting concept to an actual working process that delivers tangible results.” They draw attention to the edges “between human intention and nature’s intelligence”, to see the potential in these edges as “places of diversity and abundance, adaptation and exchange.” Regenesis’ Aotearoa-specific methods are described as “binocular vision, an approach that allows for the two circular thinking lenses of Te Ao Māori and regenerative development to sit alongside each other in a complementary relationship.” Could we begin by considering our natural spaces and pathways, those we currently perceive as incidental to our destinations, becoming our destinations? Could we use binocular vison?
All of my experiences, encounters and the whakapapa (genealogy) of work before my time in Masterton led to the activation of this work, which felt to be a koha to my place; whakapapa-informed spatial communication for Whakaoriori Masterton.
