Interweaving protected areas and productive landscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: Using design to explore multifunctionality in the Mackenzie Basin

Abstract

The distinctive form of New Zealand’s protected areas developed out of rapid environmental changes during nineteenth-century colonization practices, and is based on valuing endemic nature as something separate from human culture. This binary division has resulted in a ‘fortress conservation’ approach, which separates protected areas from productive landscapes in ways that can limit their potential. Insight in international approaches offers the possibility to integrate protected areas in multifunctional landscapes and social-ecological systems. This study examines these land-use tensions in the context of the Mackenzie Basin in New Zealand’s South Island, where traditional non-irrigated sheep farming, tourism and newly established irrigated dairy farms compete for influence in the region’s future ecological and aesthetic makeup. The authors consider how landscape architecture design methods of scenario development, programme design, mapping and communication strategies might unsettle current norms that separate protective and productive land uses to achieve more integrated expressions of landscape.