INTRO TO KAIHANGA AWAWHENUA
Te taiao te take, ngā tangata te take, ngā tipuna te take.
Mā katoa ka mahi tātou.
My firm, Kaihanga Awawhenua [Riverland Design], is a non-profit landscape architecture practice, dedicated to the open-ended, self-organising, and productive curation of planetary environments. We design, arrange, and re-arrange landscape systems across a wide range of biomes, creating opportunities for land-based regional networks of community empowerment. Care, vitality and interspecific communication are our goals. We seek to entangle the human and the more-than-human within shared lifeways that respect and encourage diversity.
Working at the intersection of environmental justice, climate activism and community sovereignty we aim always to empower local peoples to enhance and restore the landscapes in which they live. Our practice foregrounds collaborative and participatory landscape design, independent research, public scholarship, and practices of making and distribution based on exchange rather than financial accounting.
In our home base, Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti O Waitangi is the founding treaty between Māori and the colonial settler society. At nonlinear landscapes we put Te Tiriti O Waitangi first in all our projects, and everything is driven by its generative power. Wherever we work across the world, the values and practices of Indigenous peoples are our compass and our guide. Our relationship with other places will always be cultivated, replenished and renewed through projects that grow from the aspirations of the peoples that live in those places.