Abstract:
From the advent of agriculture, mankind settled to cultivate the land and the urban fabric was informed by the land’s ability to produce food. In post-industrial times, our relationship to the land has changed with our increasing ability to manipulate and mechanise. This shift has manifested itself in a turnaround of man’s dependence on nature, to man’s expenditure of nature. Where the land once shaped man, man now shapes the land. As increasing amounts of urban land is used as a resource to propagate expansion and dense inhabitance, food has become the ultimate victim in this paradigm. In Auckland, the current agenda of land use has pushed edible landscapes further into the unseen domain. This urban invisibility of the full food spectrum has been the chief stimulus for this thesis. Through observing both global and local conditions of urban landscapes, this thesis sought to examine architectural and landscaping precedents that have mediated the nuances between edible and inhabited landscapes. These precedents fall into research titled, The Agronomy of Scales. Imbued by these precedents this thesis postulates, through a narrative of multiple treatments across Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill, architecture as a commentary on the control and use of urban land. These specifically surround ideas of: food production, urban and community adhesion and the real and existential relationship to nutrition- both bodily and by way of land rejuvenation. Maungakiekie/One Tree, a once large and significant Maori pa is reimagined through a profoundly public and deliberate ‘kit of parts’ inserted across the hill domain. It tackles the sites accumulated history of pre-European occupation, layout and food production with the continually contentious issue of colonial imprints upon sites of cultural significance. While land ownership makes up much of New Zealand’s history, this thesis abandons a tentative treatment in its negation of the sites history. Instead, it capitalises on the highly fertile and historically rich volcanic crater on the Auckland isthmus, and makes a considered and conversational proposition of a newly imagined cultivated landform.