End of the road

Abstract

Our natural landscapes are enormously precious to our national identity, our environment, and our economy. In order to protect those landscapes, successive governments have designated approximately one-third of the New Zealand landscape to public conservation estate and restricted the activities that can take place on that land. Existing privately owned buildings such as private huts and baches on Crown Land are being incrementally handed over to the government or being removed. More and more, New Zealanders are becoming visitors to this land, and less and less, guardians of it.

This research aims to investigate how architecture can facilitate a genuinely public and inclusive guardianship of New Zealand’s Conservation Estate.

As a result of decreasing DOC resources, it is becoming more difficult for the department to manage the conservation estate. Therefore there is a need for DOC to engender public participation in all aspects of conservation. This will necessitate building infrastructure to support how the public can engage and help manage the estate. In doing so I will propose an architectural solution using prefabricated methods to facilitate public guardianship within New Zealand’s conservation estate.