Landscape conflict is usually understood as a battle of wills between competing interests: archetypal binaries of development versus preservation; realising resource potential versus protecting natural phenomena. In this chapter, I want to look beyond these more overt tensions to explore the inner conflicts inherent in our relationship with landscapes – conflicts that influence the paradigms of both development and preservation.
What a landscape is or, rather, what we mean by it, differs from person to person. As John Stillgoe has noted, as a concept landscape is decidedly ‘slippery’[1]. It has a variety of meanings: its heritage, as many have noted, is deeply rooted in an aesthetics that finds expression in idyllic scenes;[2] more recently, landscape’s temporality, sociability, ephemerality, and event-like properties have been explored.[3] Moreover, the apparent clarity provided by verbal definitions of landscape typically dissipates when one is experientially immersed in a special landscape. Significant new dimensions invariably spring to mind: landscape is ever-accommodating in its inclusiveness.[4]
However, with such inclusiveness there is arguably implicit danger. Architectural critic Richard Somol has asserted that the notion of landscape, and in particular its suffix ‘scape’ has lost its value as a term because of its prevalence. Consequently Somol asks, by it being able to mean all things to all people, is such ‘endlessness just another word for the terminal?’[5] While landscape’s meaning is certainly broad, it is however a term attached to very particular locales. And when so attached, it takes on idiosyncratic characteristics: the specifics of a place not only express landscape’s qualities, but also rein in the term’s breadth.
For this reason, while the scope of landscape will be considered, I intend to examine a very specific spot – and what for me is a special place – Observation Col in the headwaters of Canterbury’s Rakaia River. My intention however is not to add further to those ever-expanding, ever-embracing definitions of landscape. As a designer working with landscapes, increasingly I find myself less concerned with what a landscape is, and more with what that landscape does. For while much comment is made of what people do to landscapes – for instance, through infrastructure proposals, housing development or tourism ventures – little is said of the ways landscapes shape us. To explore this issue, I would like to ask a somewhat obvious question: ‘where does a landscape begin?’ It is through examining a landscape’s beginning, and from here its power to affect people’s actions and thoughts, that the more tangible issues of landscape conflict can be better understood, and at times resolved.
Landscape’s Image
The above image is a self-timed picture which I took a number of years back from the top of Observation Col during a solo journey along the South Island’s Main Divide.[6] I’m standing in the centre of the image, alone, heavily laden, and surveying what lies beyond the crest of the Pass. The image can be read a number of ways. Compositionally, it has been arranged so as to draw the viewer’s eye to the figure looking out. This use of a solitary person is, as Francis Pound observed, ‘a stock figure type in European Art from the renaissance on. He stands for us. He gazes; we gaze… he is our … deputy. Through him it is the act of our seeing that we see.’[7]
Landscape images like this, viewed on the printed page, produce an understanding of landscape that is primarily aesthetic. Here, as per the Col’s name, landscape’s content is something to be observed. Conflation of this visual image of a landscape with the landscape itself – much as the metaphors of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’ are habitually conflated in conversation (‘I know what you mean’/ ‘I see what you mean’) – has proved powerfully problematic in our relationship with landscapes. Such conflation significantly directs how we interact with our public conservation lands, and with them other ecologically indigenous places.
Ecological historian Geoff Park considers the roots for this understanding of landscape lie in nineteenth-century picturesque values.[8] Based on a way of looking at land, we readily imagine the ‘lake, mountain and tree’ as pristine and untouched.[9] This ‘particular sense of beauty’ that the picturesque demands, of ideal scenes that frame nature as a spectacle, of us as its admiring patrons, and of the conservation estate as ‘theatre country’, continues to dominate our regional and international tourist activities and literature: 100% Pure.[10] Hence, though our public conservation lands carry the kernel to this land’s deep history – as complex ecologies have sought and maintained purchase in the changing fabric of this land – our current urge is to package our endemic flora and fauna as some form of outdoor museum exhibit.
Such aesthetics, by placing the viewer outside the image being viewed, render people as passive spectators rather than active participants. Landscape is reduced to an image, to be consumed either from a viewing platform or in the pages of a sumptuously-produced coffee table book. The conservation estate is likewise rendered down to scenery: a place where it is easier to imagine dinosaurs, moa and hobbits than a more connected future for ourselves within these lands.
Grounding Landscape
The image taken from Observation Col certainly echoes this picturesque framing of landscape. Yet it also triggers a more visceral sense of landscape: the one that remains with me after the camera is packed away, and I sit down on my pack to grab a bite to eat. In that moment I experience a powerful sense of landscape’s expansiveness. Mountains, snow, and sky move off in every direction. And without doubt further ridges, peaks, valleys, lakes, forests and clearings unfold beyond those that make it into the image frame. Nor is this sense of extensiveness confined to what can be seen. Directly below, the snow, packed against the rocks, slowly melts to join trickles, streams and rivers that materially transport this landscape far beyond the surrounding countryside. In other words, the landscape that this image portrays does not end at the edges of either the camera’s or my panoramic field of view. Instead, it goes on.
It is not possible to determine where this particular landscape ends – is it where a glacier finishes, a forest starts, a silted river dominates, a range becomes less steep, or an ocean crashes? This lack of clear perimeters – of not being contained within a certain border – that suggests landscape is something other than a determinable territory. Indeed, it seems that landscapes can readily overlap and blur from one to another, as for example those here in the Rakaia meld in places with the adjoining Rangitata, Whitcombe and Waimakariri catchments. It is this continuum of form, of landscape’s tendency to both peter out and merge, that reinforces my interest in landscape’s beginnings rather than where its borders might lie.
The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe the multitude of ideas that pervade culture as an ad hoc or ‘rhizomatic’ array of plateaus, whose particular, mobile and somewhat chaotic qualities congregate at their ‘middles’.[11] Deleuze and Guattari’s description of culture is also apt when reflecting on landscape. Rather than at some distant edge, it is at the centre – in this case the snowy plateau on which I’m standing – that this particular landscape (the one with the camera packed away) begins to become distinct.
Inextricably bound up in the distant view from Observation Col is the requirement that to see something is to also perceive from somewhere. And the ‘somewhere’ that holds this very particular landscape together is the intimate and grounded locale upon which I stand. Imagine for instance if, instead of snow, the ground on which I ate my lunch was tussock. Or perhaps it was in the middle of a forested clearing. In each variation, while the vista might remain unaltered, a key element of this landscape would have changed.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that landscape coalesces on the particular spot and moment that this image ‘captures’. Being on Observation Col is not a static event. Instead, it is but one moment in an unfolding series of movements that both brought me there and will continue with my departure. The snowy plateau is not just somewhere to stand, but also the material in which these movements were made. It was through my movements that I came to know certain qualities of this landscape: steps and handholds while moving up the narrowing gully to arrive at this place. This haptic knowing – a knowing grounded in touch – is more embodied and physically intimate than that which emerges from simply regarding the view.[12] In this way landscapes are revealed as much by what we do within them as by what we observe.
In the context of such movement, it is clear how different journeys can result in various qualities of landscape being emphasised. The landscape I perceived on Observation Col would be different if the mode of access had been a helicopter flight from a tourist chalet further down the Rakaia Valley, and not a slow early-morning scramble criss-crossing the creeks that feed Cattle Stream. In the former, the landscape might seem grand, exhilarating and full of contrasts: in the latter, it seemed worn, eroded and devoid of life. (Still sleepy, I had slipped on an iced-over rock with painful consequences for the following three days, which doubtless shaped my understanding of the landscape). As has been explored fruitfully in works like Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines and Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, the practices of walking draw out a distinctive sense of landscape.[13]
Of course, it may be objected that a personalised understanding of landscape – in which my own position and activities are a key element in its resulting sense – is less useful than recognising landscape as something separate and ‘out there’. Yet the significance of such constructions should not be dismissed just because of this inherent subjectivity. Indeed, people routinely develop their positions on contentious environmental issues like whether to dam lakes and rivers, open up the Mackenzie basin for dairy farming, or erect wind farms on the barren tops of the Otago uplands, on the basis of subjective experience. The ‘intrinsic’ values that we ascribe to landscapes are something which people both bring to and draw out of a place. It is through such ongoing interactions that our sense of place is built.
Returning to Observation Col, a critical question arises: does accessing the Col by helicopter, rather than on foot, reveal that only a perception of landscape has been changed, or has the landscape itself materially changed? The distinction between objective and subjective understandings of landscape which is implicit in this question dictates where landscape is deemed to begin, and consequently our relationship with it.
Landscape’s Beginnings
In the photograph can be seen a line of footprints that leads from the camera to me. It can be readily inferred that I made these tracks and also, after the shutter released, another line of steps was made back to the camera to pack the equipment away. Beyond revealing a specific narrative of travel, the tracks pose crucial questions about where a landscape begins: are such footprints part of the landscape, or do they belong to the individual? In these footprints, where does the person end and the landscape begin? Indeed, can such a distinction be sustained?
To me, what these footprints manifest is a landscape that is in part being delicately made and remade by the accumulated footprints of successive groups of people. Of course, it may be assumed that the next southerly change will obliterate any imprints, such that the landscape may appear to return to some ‘original’ and potentially ‘Eden-like’ condition. Yet nonetheless, in such a cycle, the landscape has been modified more than just through my perception of it. Similarly, in the case of the helicopter, the valley being filled with noise, the marks left by the landing gear, and the pollution caused by climate-warming aviation fuel, create changes that likewise are more than just perceptual.
Nor is it just a one-way case of people shaping the land. The reverse also occurs: the bluffs and waterways of Cattle Stream directed the route taken to the Col. Yet while the conditions shaped the route, they did not limit it to being the only possible way up. People do not travel uniformly, and often find themselves negotiating routes that are unlikely to be repeated. The anthropologist Tim Ingold describes the open-ended, generative way paths work to build the landscape: ‘Paths and tracks “impose a habitual pattern on the movement of people”’[14] even as they ‘arise out of that movement, for every path or track shows up as the accumulated imprint of countless journeys that people have made.’[15]
In the snowy line of footprints, the land and people are being mutually interwoven. In the foot imprinting the snow – and the snow-directing footprints – can be found an example of the iterative choreography by which a landscape takes form. Likewise, further down the valley, more robust traces of this conversation can be found: rock cairns built to mark the way ahead (successively added to by different parties), as well as the various camps, shelters, tracks, boardwalks, bridges and signs.
Landscape, then, doesn’t begin where people’s physical presence ends. There is no figurative gap to be found between the two. Instead, the landscape begins exactly in those very places and moments where collectively and individually both people and their environment mingle. It is the possibility of such interactions, and the resulting opportunity not only to describe landscape, but also perform it, that leads to a sense of ‘being landscape’.
While the less ambiguous ‘doing landscape’ might adequately explain the cause-and-effect consequences of accumulated footprints, it also relegates landscape to being an object on which people act. This position leaves unacknowledged both the instrumentality of particular places in our lives (of landscape’s similar capacity to be ‘doing people’), and also the opportunity, as Ingold puts it, for ‘landscape [to] become a part of us, just as we are part of it’.[16] In this understanding, landscape is not some external resource or asset – to consider it such is to treat it as merely the waiting stage for our actions. Nor is landscape simply a spectacle to be gazed on from some removed viewing point, for this restricts landscape to the visual plane and people to being outside observers, purveyors of its aesthetic form.
Our Public Conservation Landscapes
Our national predilection for viewing landscape as a picturesque backdrop is not dissimilar to the appeal of ‘being one with nature’ that is commonly applied to the public conservation estate. Evocations of immersion in nature are ubiquitous: whether to market a guided walk, sell the benefits of outdoor equipment, advocate the inclusion of a new tract of land into the conservation estate, or describe an author’s sense of reverie at a pivotal moment of his or her adventure. And yet while an assimilation into nature is often claimed, closer analysis suggests a more conflicted relationship.
Figure 2 is a series of stills of my son walking two adjoining sections of the track that leads from Aspiring Hut to Shovel Flat in Mount Aspiring National Park. The track in the upper series was recently cut by roading contractors, replacing a track similar to that in the lower set. In the images can be discerned two very distinctive dialogues between the walker and the surrounding environment that each track generates.
In the top series, the manner of walking bears little connection to the topography. While the walker can still gaze on the diverse landforms and biota through which the track travels, these qualities are not kinaesthetically learnt. Where the land momentarily dips, the track, levelled so the digger might travel to cut the next section of the path, does not. Where a spur abruptly turns, the track, by being cut deeper into the land, curves gradually. Instead of leading the walker into the forest, this form of track only leads people through it. The track is not part of the forest in which it is cut: one may infer that the National Park, and in terms of content everything meaningful, lies beyond the track. Such paths mimic the sense of distanced appreciation created by state-of-the-art aquariums: one travels along a transparent corridor, wondering at the alien world that lies on the other side of the glass.
The track in the lower series demonstrates a different engagement with landscape. The walker’s limbs are kinaesthetically negotiating the forest, responding to the land, as the entire body and all its senses engages in acts of movement. In the process of travelling, both the track and the moving person weave more closely with trees, rocks and the folds of the land. The forest, rather than being located left and right of the track, envelopes. Indeed, it is more difficult to determine if the track is separate to the forest in which it travels, or whether the track, the person walking it, and the forest are all part of a common landscape.
Ingold considers when we watch people in their activities – for example, the cook preparing a meal or the guitarist making music – the separating-out of people, movements, object and environment seems contrived.[17] Much like the ecological weaving found on a forest floor, all parts gain their substance from each other. Ingold and co-author Terhi Kurttila propose that ‘knowledgeability’ of a place does not come from a preconfigured concept of place which is then applied to the land; rather, it unfolds from the interactive context ‘that has its source in the very activities of inhabiting the land, [one] that both brings places into being and constitutes persons as of those places, as local.’[18] Becoming part of landscape – being landscape – is an outcome of activities undertaken, such that the identity of a landscape emerges hand-in-hand with the identity of its people.
Much like Ingold and Kurttila, philosopher and psychoanalytical theorist Michel de Certeau considered that walking is both an expression of place and a making of place. With footsteps, people ‘weave places together’; conversely, different types of footfall and movement can make places distinct.[19] De Certeau’s observation touches on the difficulty which I have with the recently-upgraded track shown above: by creating the same metronomic cadence of walking, uniform tracks make diverse places similar. At an experiential level, it becomes difficult to distinguish between walking, for instance, the upgraded West Matukituki track and the first section of Southern Fiordland’s South Coast Track, though the first is located in Aspiring National Park while the other leads along the Waitutu coastline. Each track’s uniform width, gradient and design homogenises our experience of the environment.[20] While the intention behind such uniformity is to provide safe passage and reduce trampling, this uniformity diminishes the land’s capacity to substantively shape us, excluding elements that foster a more intimate dialogue. Happy to admire nature beyond the track, we remain unchallenged and unchanged by it.
Indeed, many of the facilities, equipment, wayfinding and management strategies involved with the conservation estate amplify a separation between people and the land.[21] This separation can be readily discerned in Figure 3. On the left is an image of a bridge recently installed across the Beans Burn in Mount Aspiring National Park, a valley less commonly travelled despite its proximity to the Dart River Te Awa Whakatipu. The modular bridge is of a generic design that, because of its prefabricated dimensions and the particularities of the massive rock on which it rests, was difficult to fit. The right-hand image is a close-up of the bridge’s north-end. Here can be seen the series of modifications made to the rock and the bridge’s bearer so that one could be fixed to the other. Despite the Department of Conservation’s pervasive conservation slogan, ‘Toitu te whenua …. Leave the land undisturbed’, and that moss and ferns may in time soften the scars, the material marks made by both the Matukituki track and the Beans Burn bridge will remain for many generations.
Geoff Park considered that there are two landscapes that ‘have equal power in shaping New Zealanders’ sense of themselves’:
In the one in which most of us live, one of humanity’s most dramatic transformations of nature anywhere has removed indigenous life almost entirely. The other one, in which our living is prohibited, is still as solidly indigenous as anywhere on Earth, and as devoid of humans; maintained as though it were a world without us. Our terra nullius, no less.[22]
For Park, there was an urgent need to find middle ground in which these two landscapes could be bridged. His understanding of landscape tended to the territorial: he anticipated suitable regions, like the Waitakeres near Auckland, as middle ground beyond this country’s public conservation lands. Yet just as landscape’s beginnings can be found as footprints are made in the snow, so too the potential also exists to begin a ‘middle landscape’ within our public conservation lands where, for instance, a bridge and a rock meet, and a path and a forest cross.
Ways To Begin
Paths and bridges may be only one aspect of the public’s relationship with the conservation estate, yet they illustrate how middle landscapes could come to exist. The development of either is a basic practical exercise, yet not one so simple as to render redundant the complex communities of interest that gather around such enterprises: funders, providers, consulted parties, contractors, construction teams and recreational users, among others. Once built, paths and bridges provide a tangible, idiosyncratic record of their making and use. They provide an opportunity to develop moments, both in time and place, that show sensitivity not only to the qualities of specific places, but also to the experiential and cognitive possibilities that these places afford.
Approaches elsewhere give a sense of what is possible here. Fieldwork I undertook in North America reveals a number of differences. The Appalachian Trail, on which the newly constituted Te Araroa Trail (NZ) is modelled, is maintained without the use of motorised equipment such as the diggers, explosives and chainsaws that are routine in New Zealand. Instead, manual tools are used including rope-and-pulley systems, crowbars, pick-axes, hand tools and wheelbarrows. This different palette of technologies directs the methods of construction (Figure 4). It also requires different personnel. Instead of using roading contractors, the trails are built using teams of University students on summer vacation, as well as crews of volunteering public. A different type of expertise evolves. Suitable rocks for creating steps or buttressing paths are lowered from above the trail and massaged into place. Each section of the 2180-mile trail becomes a localised conversation between different teams, tools, geologies and ecologies. For the volunteering public it generates a connection and a set of skills that will long outlast the specific project.
On popular tracks like the Highline Trail in Canada’s Jasper National Park, foot bridges are crafted from single nearby trees (Figure 5). As much of the tree as possible is used, with the straighter branches kept for use as handrails. The skill required for such work takes time and experience to develop, and is learnt from working with the local timber and also passed on by those who are already expert. Both the tree and the requirements of the bridge are understood through the process of construction. Similar qualities can be found in boardwalk construction. On British Columbia’s Meare’s Island, cedar rounds are cut from trees felled beside the track, then split into short planks using wedges and an axe (Figure 6). The resulting surface is materially part of the forest: the undulating surface creates a textured quality unique to the timber which machine-dressed wood cannot replicate.
The use of local materials is also undertaken on larger scales. In Washington State’s Olympic National Park, the high-use Sol Duc Waterfall footbridge is built on two large cedars felled in the 1930s, with handrails and boardwalks cyclically replaced using local materials (Figure 7). This use of local timbers means the structure, when it reaches the end of its life, can be discarded directly into the same ecosystem from which it grew. In New Zealand, this is not possible due to the toxicity of the chromium, cadmium and arsenic used to treat pinus radiata, and the resulting requirement that all structures using such timber be removed and buried in landfills. In Maine’s popular Arcadia National Park (Figure 8) granite slabs, hand-drilled and hand-split, are used for the paths and creek crossings. In the latter, carefully-placed stones allow the creek and the crossing to merge seamlessly. Such examples reveal how a different set of landscape qualities, that enhances both the material and experiential connection between an environment and a person, could be readily established.
It is important not to confuse these qualities with the rustic aesthetic that pervades of North America’s National Parks. Their key value lies not in some visual appeal, but rather in the change in relationship with the surrounding environment that the trails stimulate. Working out which tree to mill, or where to site the bridge, requires much greater care than simply determining where a helicopter should hover to lower a pre-built steel structure.
Different timbers work in different ways. The most suitable forms that can be crafted from cedar are likely to be quite different from our totara, rimu and beech. These differences in material occur not just between countries but also regions. In New Zealand, this means solutions and structures will be specific to, for instance, Te Urewera National Park in the North Island as compared to Fiordland National Park in the South. One size should not be made to fit all. From this variety, different experiences for the walker will also emerge as local materials and topographies shape the types of movement. For both construction team and walkers, there is over time a greater opportunity of becoming ‘local’ – of being the local landscape.
What are the types of landscape that we could begin in the public conservation lands of Aotearoa New Zealand? One opportunity lies in the network of huts located along tracks throughout the country. In the context of our current relationship it is unremarkable that, on the recently completed Motatapu Track in Otago, the three new huts used the same basic design, construction methods, materials, and teams to build them. Each hut offered the chance to foster a greater sense of community connection with the land. A challenge, for instance, might have been issued to the Design and Building programmes in South Island Polytechnics to work in conjunction with local specialists, businesses and community members to plan, design and construct the shelters. Elsewhere, foundations for both huts and bridges could be filled by getting walkers to add river rocks to empty gabion baskets. Perhaps those helping could leave an email address so that later their contribution could be acknowledged by forwarding images of the finished outcome. A more local solution would be developed, a more participatory landscape begun. Currently, however, the same base design is being used for new huts in locations as diverse as Dunedin’s Silverpeaks, Lewis Pass’s Nina Valley and along Kahurangi National Park’s Karamea River: an unfortunate contrast to the diversity of forms, and construction methods and processes evident in many older huts found throughout the backcountry.[23]
Our relationship with the conservation estate is complex, and there are a myriad of ways to support more intimate relationships. Design research at the University of Otago has explored how types of equipment, mapping, wayfinding, pest-trapping, mobile computing applications and education programmes can all enable a more participatory landscape to begin.[24] The goal is to prompt behaviours that might heighten both the user’s sense of involvement, and the landscape’s capacity to shape actions and perceptions. Like the footprints on Observation Col, the type of physical and figurative steps we take determines what sort of landscapes emerge.
Those sites with the most potential for people to develop a sense of being local and indigenous are likely to be those that are similarly most ecologically indigenous – namely, the one third of this country that is public conservation land. By rejecting the position that our public conservation lands are something apart from people, we open both them and ourselves to creative and imaginative possibilities. As we engage within our most ecologically indigenous places, we can, through what we do, progress what it means to belong amongst that which already belongs here: to being people of this land.
[1] Stilgoe, J. (1980). Landschaft and Linearity: Two Archetypes of Landscape. Environmental Review, Vol 4 No 1, p2.
[2] See Corner, J. (1999). Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice. In J. Corner (Ed.), Recovering landscape : essays in contemporary landscape architecture (pp. 1-25). Sparks, NV: Princeton Architectural Press
[3] See in turn Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment : essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London ; New York: Routledge.; Olwig, K. (2002). Landscape, nature, and the body politic : from Britain’s renaissance to America’s new world. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.; Thrift, N. (1999). Steps to an ecology of place. Human Geography Today, 295–322.; Massey, D. (2006). Landscape as Provocation. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2), 33-48.
[4] See Ruru, J., Stephenson, J. and M. Abbott. (2010) A Generous Landscape. In Beyond the Scene: Perspectives on landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand. Otago University Press, Dunedin.
[5] Somol, R. (2001). All Systems GO!: The Terminal Nature of Contemporary Urbanism. In J. Czerniak (Ed.), CASE–Downsview Park Toronto. New York: Prestel, Harvard University, p126.
[6] Abbott, M. (1989). Over the Tops: South Island Traverse. New Zealand Geographic, 4, 22-33
[7] Pound, F. (1983). Frames on the land : early landscape painting in New Zealand. Auckland: Collins, p12
[8] Park, G. (2006). Theatre country : essays on landscape & whenua. Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria University Press.
[9] This phrase of Denis Glover’s is used as the title for Temple, P. (1998). Lake, mountain, tree : an anthology of writing on New Zealand nature & landscape. Auckland, N.Z.: Godwit
[10] Tourism New Zealand. (2001). 100 years pure progress : 1901 – 2001, Tourism New Zealand, one hundred years of tourism. Wellington: Tourism New Zealand
[11] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. London Athlone Press.
[12] See Spinney, J. (2006). A place of sense: a kinaesthetic ethnography of cyclists on Mont Ventoux. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 709-732; Foster, R. J. (2007). Embodying the Haptic. New Zealand Alpine Club Journal, 59, 108-111
[13] Chatwin, B. (1987) The Songlines. New York: Viking;Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust : a history of walking. New York: Viking
[14] Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge, p204
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid, p191.
[17] Ibid, p194-200.
[18] Ingold, T. and T. Kurttila. 2000. Perceiving the Environment in Finnish Lapland, Body & Society, Vol. 6, No. 3-4, p185.
[19] Certeau, M. de. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press, p93
[20] The Department of Conservation adheres to the uniform standards set out in: Standards New Zealand. (2004). Tracks and outdoor visitor structures. Wellington: SANZ
[21] See Abbott, M. (2011 forthcoming) From Preserve to Incubator: Giving a New Meaning to Wilderness: in Wild Heart: the Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand. M. Abbott and R. Reeve (eds).;Abbott, M. (2009) Designing Participation in the Conservation Estate through Innovative Paths, Boardwalks, Maps and Wayfinding Systems. Conserve-Vision Conference Proceedings, 4-7 July 2007, University of Waikato, Hamilton. www.waikato.ac.nz/wfass/Conserv-Vision/proceedings/Abbott.pdf
[22] Park, G. (2002). Our Terra Nullius. LANDFALL, p65
[23] See Pickering, N. (2010). Huts: Untold Stories from Back-country New Zealand. Christchurch NZ: Canterbury University Press.
[24] see www.appliedsciences.otago.ac.nz/scopedesignlab
