Landscapes and Seascapes of Connectivity in Moana Oceania

As described by guest editor Hannah Hopewell, the latest edition of Landscape Review: An Oceania Journal of Landscape Architecture “casts a wide net across the vast fluidity of Moana Oceania to draw forth diverse voices and modes of scholarship acting upon landscape architecture”.

Titled Landscapes and Seascapes of Connectivity in Moana Oceania this special edition is now available to read on the Journal site hosted by Lincoln University

Its contents of six contributions, with production support from Tanya Tremewan and Jenny Heine, cover:

Against architectures of degradation: pōhaku and protection on Mauna Kea (Caitlin Blanchfield)
Landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes: safeguarding wetlands, habitat and urbanisation across the East Australasian flyway (Yibin Mu and Simon Kilbane)
Edge reprised (Sean Burke)
Karanga ki ngakengake: the call of the shifting forces (Matthew Wakelin and Hannah Hopewell)
Oceanscape as landscape (David Irwin)
World Blong Yumi (Rod Barnett)

For the author bios see below.

The foreword to the edition by Hannah Hopewell states the following:

We collect under the term Moana Oceania to signal landscapes and seascapes without firm borders; yet equally to resist ‘Pacific’ and its numerous transliterations imposed in 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan. With Moana Oceania, we affirm a more congruous naming that, in the words of Chitham et al (2019), ‘empowers and privileges Indigenous perspectives’ and ‘embodies a worldview that is strongly connected to Aotearoa but has its roots in the wider region vast region of islands’. We are indebted to the Moana Oceania thinkers whose 2018 talanoa (criticality with harmony) endorsed this inclusive usage, and how such a shift demands critical attendance to the ways in whichnarratives of landscapes and seascapes in the in this fluid region are shaped and transited

Hannah’s foreword is complemented by a video abstract here, a distinctive feature of Landscape Review.

Sean Burke’s paper reviews relationships towards the land–sea interface in the currency of landscape architecture practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. He writes:

With changing climates and failing infrastructure, there is urgent demand to repair and, further, to reframe and reposition how landscape practice engages in such modification. At stake is the necessity for repair to be in service of relationships across the many life worlds past and present that move with and through the coastal edge. Drawing on the project Ngā Ūranga ki Pito-One (Ngauranga to Petone) in Wellington, which ‘reclaims’ a strip of land from the sea, the paper takes a journey through this ambition, touching on aspects of the project and context including cultural, legislative and synthetic materiality. Reflective commentary offers an intimate window on current tensions and opportunities in landscape practice at the mercurial edges of the land, where stakes are high.

DIVERSE VOICES

Rod Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa)

Rod is a landscape architect who has crossed disciplinary boundaries throughout his career. He has collaborated with artists, architects, scientists and urban planners on funded design research projects in locations as far flung as the coastlines of Tonga, under-served communities in rust-belt United States cities, and the stone alignments of Carnac, France. Barnett’s firm, Kaihanga Awawhenua [Riverland Design], is a landscape architecture practice dedicated to the open-ended, self-organising and productive curation of planetary environments. He puts Te Tiriti o Waitangi first in all of the practice’s projects, and everything is driven by its generative power. Wherever he works across the world, the values and practices of Indigenous peoples are Barnett’s compass and his guide. Head of the School of Architecture at Victoria University Wellington, Barnett has attracted international recognition for his publications, won awards for urban landscape design, and while in the U.S. for an extended period achieved the national Design Intelligence Award for most admired design educator (2012). His book Emergence in Landscape Architecture (2013) led to a teaching position at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in 2017 Routledge published The Modern Landscapes of Ted Smyth: Landscape Modernism in the South Pacific (with Jacqueline Margetts) in which they place Smyth’s work in the context of tropical modernism. Currently he is researching the whakapapa of the black sands of the west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Caitlin Blanchfield

Caitlin is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonisation in North America and across the reaches of US empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Caitlin received her PhD in architectural history and theory at Columbia University and is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Sean Burke

Sean - BSc BLA(Hons) - is a Principal Landscape Architect at Isthmus and is based in the Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) studio and lives on Waiheke Island where his family have grown up. Sean has 24 years of experience in practice, building on an initial degree in earth sciences from the University of Waikato followed by a degree in landscape architecture from Lincoln University. Sean has interests in design, history and natural sciences and is an NZILA Registered Landscape Architect. Projects Sean is involved in are across a variety of scales; however, some of the larger projects typically unfold over several years. Sean’s involvement in NgāŪranga ki Pito-One began in 2016, when he worked on the consent design, and continues with the design and construct portion of the project programmed for completion in 2026. Similar coastal projects include the Beachlands Maraetai Walkway, Taumanu Reserve and Ngā Hau Māngere Bridge in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Sean is a working-week commuter cyclist, ferry user and pedestrian and takes a multi-modal approach.

Hannah Hopewell

Hannah, PhD, is a Pākehā landscape architect, educator and creative practice researcher. In her teaching and research, she experiments with ways to identify and reckon with the complex legacy of landscape in human–ecological–geological relationships in settler colonial contexts. Hannah has contributed reviews, research articles and experimental text to Architecture NZ, Freerange, Kerb Journal, OraxiomandInterstices and has authored chapters in books such as The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice (2021), Teaching Landscape History (2025) and Collective Landscape Futures (2025). She has also exhibited in the 5th Auckland Triennial, Te Kura Waihanga Window Gallery and Pōneke Wellington City Light Boxes. Hannah is a lecturer at Cornell University and an honorary research associate with Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.

David Irwin

David is a founding Director of Isthmus and Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA) with over 30 years’ experience in the field of landscape architecture and urban design. His experience encompasses a wide range of projects throughout New Zealand, including large-scale urban developments, town centres, coastal edges and residential framework planning. David specialises in providing design leadership in complex project teams. His work has received numerous NZILA awards for its quality, innovation and contribution to place-making for communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Simon Kilbane

Simon is the Discipline Chair of Landscape Architecture in the School of Design, University of Western Australia. With a diverse experience across public, private and academic sectors both in Australia and overseas, he is driven by the pressing need for novel solutions that articulate and strengthen an enduring connection between people, place and ecology. Notable achievements include founding the landscape architecture degree at the University of Technology Sydney and co-founding the award-winning consultancy Rhizome.

Matt Wakelin

Matt - BArch, MLArch (Victoria University of Wellington) - is a landscape architect at SBLA Studio with skills in planting, ecological design, community engagement, and hand-drawing. Matt has played key roles in designing schools, neighbourhood centres, inner-city public spaces, streetscapes, expansive inter-suburban parks, playgrounds, ecologically informed infrastructural systems, and master planned communities. All of Matt’s projects emphasise understanding of a site’s history and its unique natural systems in placemaking initiatives and biodiversity enhancement. He is always looking for ways we can innovate our designs and design processes towards sustainable, resilient and socially just outcomes.

Mu Yibin

Mu graduated from the School of Design, University of Western Australia with a postgraduate degree in landscape architecture in 2024. His research focuses on restoring habitats for animals, especially birds, through landscape design.