Designing Alongside Māori: Theorising Experiences of Relational, Place-Based Architectural Practice in Aotearoa

The research project “Designing Alongside Māori: New Possibilities in Practising Architecture as Tangata Tiriti” grew out of an observation of the lack of literature available for non-Indigenous architectural practitioners and students wanting to support Māori tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Qualitative interviews were sought with non-Indigenous architectural practitioners identified by Māori architectural practitioners as having culturally sustaining architectural practice. A thematic analysis of these interviews explored the relational, place-based approach that allowed practitioners to remain in their own cultural traditions while centring Māori ways of being, behaving and perceiving the world. This deeply relational approach to people and place strengthened interviewees’ identities as tangata tiriti (people of the Treaty) in collective relationship with tangata whenua (people of the land), and through this, relationship with the whenua (land) itself. These relationships and connections to place are strong enough for interviewees to be able to face Aotearoa’s colonial settler history, harm caused by mainstream architectural practice, and to persevere even though they know they will make mistakes as they seek to practise architecture in culturally sustaining ways. Interview themes are placed within the context of more established tangata tiriti literature developed in other professions in Aotearoa, and in the context of relational, place-based approaches underpinning non-Indigenous decolonial literature in other countries with dominant White-settler populations. In place of an abstracted morality of culturally competent design practice, a relational, emplaced, culturally sustaining architectural practice is put forward with an emphasis on developing healthy relationships.