This provocative paper discusses the potential for ‘staying with the trouble’ in landscape design practices associated with greenfield suburban developments in Aotearoa New Zealand. In contrast to the disciplinary division of labour governed by settler-colonial land development protocols, this research demonstrates variants of practice it calls ‘thinking-making with’. Influenced by Donna Haraway’s ‘sympoetic tangling’, landscape practice is expanded to enlarge and invent the competencies of nonhuman players in land development process such that ways of being add both ontological and epistemological possibilities. To this end interconnections, overlappings, contingencies and other forms of relational activity between human, human and nonhuman present in the landscape are foregrounded within a case study proposed greenfield settlements. The research reflects upon this practice in regard to urban growth, climate change and contradiction, and speculates on the future of green field housing in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Hannah Hopewell teaches at the Te Kura Waihanga Wellington School of Architecture, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand where her research and teaching occurs at intersections between landscape, the urban, and the complex temporalities of the Capitalocene. Hopewell’s both performative and critical research is concerned with the politics of landscape and urban development. Hannah has a background in the practice of landscape architecture and urban design and a creative practice PhD in Spatial Design.