Whose heritage do we in Wellington care about?

Tuesday, 23 February 2021

The Wellington City Council's draft Spatial Plan aims to provide more housing across the city as the population increases (First published in 2020).

OPINION: Te Whānganui-a-Tara, or the place more widely known as Wellington, has always been and always will be a Māori place with layers of history that are buried beneath the concrete culverts that tame, some might say colonise, its many streams and waterways. We are living on top of a veritable panoply of life that we have erased from sight and memory.

This rich history continues to be largely forgotten in any discussions to do with the future of this city. By way of recent example, a draft spatial plan (Our City Tomorrow: A Draft Spatial Plan for Wellington City) put out by the city council for public discussion in 2020, set out a proposal to increase the allowable housing density in particular parts of the city – generally the parts of the city that include and border the city centre.

The contribution of ‘’Pre-1930 Character Areas’’ has been catalogued by the council, taking many people hours. But why was the same amount of effort not expended to catalogue character areas connected with Maori, asks Rebecca Kiddle.

As part of the council’s preparation work for the release of the plan, it undertook an assessment of the existing ‘’Pre-1930 Character Areas’’, identified in the current district plan. This work entailed cataloguing, house by house, the contribution those individual houses – for the most part colonial villas – make to the streetscape character of those areas.

These parts of the city included suburbs such as Thorndon, Aro Valley and Mt Victoria. In addition, heritage buildings and heritage trees are noted. The cataloguing of colonial villas was the basis for identifying key pre-1930s character areas that would be excluded from the increases in density the spatial plan was aiming to achieve. This must have taken many people-hours.

Dr Rebecca Kiddle: ‘’’Because colonisation fundamentally erased Māori identities from our landscapes, we don’t currently see many symbols of this rich heritage.’’

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A drawing believed to be of Te Aro Pa in 1841, viewed from the sea. There is a stream to the right, with a small bridge near the stream mouth, another stream in the distance to the left (probably Waitangi Stream), a single enclosed area with a number of whare, and a large whare or pataka straddling the palisade on the right and towards the rear.

With respect to Māori heritage, hidden in the depths of the online plan – I don’t think I’m overstating when I say it’s very hard to find – is a map which locates sites of significance for Māori, all of which appear to have been taken from Wellington’s District Plan developed in 2000.

One might ask why the same amount of effort wasn’t expended by the council to catalogue and propose character areas that have been there many more years than these Mt Victoria or Thorndon colonial villas.

I think one of the problems is that it’s much easier to celebrate things we can see. Because colonisation fundamentally erased Māori identities from our landscapes, we don’t currently see many symbols of this rich heritage. In parallel, colonial norms privilege buildings as symbols of human endeavour and identity, subjugating elements such as the whenua, mountains and water bodies which give Māori identity.

The way in which Māori introduce themselves through putting to the fore a connection to natural elements demonstrates the inextricable link for them between the health of these natural elements and the health of we humans.

The broad-brush term ‘’sites of significance’’ belies the rich variation and nature of these places as they remain as dots on maps. We need better tools and more investment in how better to fundamentally and structurally celebrate Māori heritage in the same way we do colonial heritage.

There is, however, work afoot in the council to better acknowledge the imbalance in how colonial and Māori heritage is recognised in its planning documents.

Many submitters on the draft spatial plan have raised concerns about the lack of acknowledgement of mana whenua and their values in the plan.

Council staff have also been working over the last 6-12 months to engage with mana whenua as part of the Planning for Growth programme. Their aim is to build relationships and get a better understanding of mana whenua values so these can be given the profile they deserve in the final spatial plan, and in the district plan review. A review of the existing list of Sites of Significance is also under way.

I should add by way of disclaimer that the council also recently engaged Māori planning and design experts, including me, to support the revision of the district plan and associated design guides. So there seems to be some movement in this regard but ongoing in-house expertise is needed in the longer term.

But back to the spatial plan. Despite all this villa cataloguing and the identification of key colonial sites to be protected from the proposed plan’s goal of increasing density, local ‘‘heritage’’ groups came out in force against the plan, saying this wasn’t enough.

Now if their argument had been “the council hasn’t considered the breadth and the richness of Wellington’s heritage, and why don’t we reinstate its original name while we’re at it” then I would have had much more sympathy for them.

Nothing that I have read from these groups seeks to rebalance the obvious imbalance in heritage protection being asked for. Their vehement opposition to the plan is, in my view, ultimately racist.

Their view also irks when thinking about the ways in which such protectionism, if taken to its full conclusion, results in further inequity for those in our communities who struggle to find safe, warm and dry housing. Unfortunately, Māori whānau are over-represented in this group, as are our Pacific cousins.

The spatial plan, stimulated by a desire to house more and house better, in places that are close to employment opportunities, in places that might encourage active transport, in the midst of a housing and climate crisis necessarily focuses on housing more people in the city centre and close surrounds.

Protecting these areas from development fortifies a society where if you’re rich you can choose to live close to town in stand-alone homes adjacent to vibrant amenity within walking distance, but if you’re poor your choices are limited and may be limited to places that have less amenity close by and require longer and more expensive journeys to take up employment opportunities.

I’m not suggesting that the outer suburbs aren’t good places to be, rather that equitable cities open up as many choices as possible, whether you’re rich or poor.

It is important to celebrate urban heritage, including our colonial heritage, but our celebration of it needs to be balanced with reinstating and celebrating our much longer-standing Māori heritage and responding meaningfully to the interplay between heritage and equality.

* Dr Rebecca Kiddle (Ngāti Porou and Ngā Puhi) is a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington.