| Summary: | Like many countries of the New World, Aotearoa New Zealand’s national parks bear the legacy of 19th Century landscape concepts, imprinting a nature-culture divide that perpetuated ideas of the wilderness as pristine. How can designing imagine scenarios for national parks which transcend the binary of ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the park? And while ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ are cultural constructs, in the New World post-colonial nations like New Zealand, the Americas, and Australia, national parks tend to be perceived as places where culture stops and nature starts; culture is suppressed, nature is ‘preserved’ as a terra nullius (Park 2006). How can national parks be conceived as places where culture and productivity actively contribute to landscape health – rather than the presumption that human activity contradicts parks’ status? (Weller 2015) Using design-directed research (Roncken 2011), we juxtapose elements that are commonly considered as mutually exclusive and from this generate possibilities for other concepts of national park. The high country of the Mackenzie basin, where research was undertaken, is made up of large leasehold farms cut across by rivers and infrastructure including roads, farms, and canals that form part of the hydroelectric power generation system. The area abuts Aoraki Mount Cook National Park, a spectacular mountainous landscape. Recognising that we need to overcome our blindness to the interaction between the complex relations between natural and cultural landscapes (Phillips 1998), the scenarios explore how rivers, farm infrastructure, canals, and remnant ecologically-rich pockets provide the armature for new national park concepts. Our paper presents six drivers and five resulting concepts that build on these ideas, and can be hybridised in terms of both spatial configuration and phasing to produce further potential frameworks. We critique these concepts not only for their relevance to the Mackenzie basin, but also for their transferability to other settings as a means to enrich interactions ...
|
|---|