Indigenous Methods

New Zealand’s landscape is an invaluable resource that is often taken for granted and undervalued in today’s economy. Providing economic benefits alongside cultural identity, the natural landscape is fast diminishing as the population expands and development sprawls. Currently development is driven by economic benefits, often having adverse effects on New Zealand’s landscape. A shift in thinking is required to ensure the natural environment is protected for the future, a shift that sees the amenity values of the land having equal value to the economic return of development.

This paper brings Lake Wairarapa as the third largest lake in the North Island, only 80km northeast of the capital Wellington. The lake in its historic state reached 210km² holding some of New Zealand’s most significant wetland systems. Today reaches a surface area of 78km². This sufficient drop in area was a loss to farming in both agriculture and horticulture, which have also now become the primary sources of pollution, adding to the decline in quality of the lake and leading to a landscape in desperate need to be healed. 

This paper explores how this threatened natural land can be used as a bridge to design in creating and/or regenerating ecosystems that not only provide amenity value but also begin to mitigate the adverse effects that inevitable development has. The study uses traditional indigenous Māori healing methods to restore the underlying ecological function that benefits the environment and the Greater Wellington Regional Green/Blue Infrastructure.

Shifting current thinking to consider landscape as a valuable asset that adds to our cultural identity, this paper investigates how landscape architecture can adapted to cultural concepts and then be able to deal with certain infrastructural problems in order to produce much needed natural amenity in the modern built environment.