Making Our Place: Exploring Land-use Tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand

Fascination with the interplay of people and place inspired the editors to bring together New Zealanders from differing backgrounds and disciplines to explore some of the stories and sites of conflict and change to be found amongst our sacred, historic, rural, urban and coastal landscapes. All engage with the underlying question: are there better ways to reconcile the tensions inherent in our struggles with the land and each other? Issues fundamental to identity are placed at centre stage: indigenous rights and restitution, development and conservation, claiming and naming. The authors are from fields as diverse as architecture, ecology, design, history, planning, law, theology and tourism. They discuss issues ranging from the early-settler surveying lines to the Wanganui/Whanganui naming debate, the legal arguments over wahi tapu and Maori customary land to dairying in the Mackenzie Basin. In exploring different ways of framing landscape tensions, they seek new understandings of why such passion, reverence and contest is generated and ways to identify new approaches to resolving problems.