Te Hono ki te Awa

A freeway, busy roads, a trainline, levees, and settlement patterns combine with this straightened and channelised river to largely separate 25km of river, and native forested hills from people in this valley. Walking along this river usually involves being constrained to homogenous linear paths between a levee or linear infrastructure and lines of willows on the banks and separated from the river. LAND412/2024 combined large scaled urban restructuring of the urban river corridor with fine grained reconfiguration of the river space itself to attempt to make the river part of everyday life and to intensify the experience of the river. It involved extensive fieldwork, including 50km of on-foot investigation to sensitise students to experience what this river gets you to do on the ground. Guided by the Māori whakataukī (Māori proverb) “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au” meaning “I am the river, and the river is me”, Zoe Mason’s design centres Indigenous perspectives on interconnection between land, water, and people. As a Māori student, Zoe drew on embodied experiences to identify three key moments of bodily interconnection with the river. These became the basis for a reconfiguration of river edges and adjacent urban fabric to support the presence of the river within everyday urban life. By shifting the river’s path across the valley, tunnelling freeways, reorienting housing, and restoring wetlands to filter runoff, the proposal reweaves ecological, social, and cultural relationships, making Te Awa Kairangi a place of daily life, regeneration, and reconnection.