Indigenous Peoples and the urban environment...

Now working on a chapter for a book to be coming out soon on Indigenous resilience. Edited by Amohia Boulton, some of the contributors, including yours truly, will be on a panel discussing Indigenous resilience and health at the upcoming 'Indigenous Health Knowledge and Development (INIHKD)' conference on the St. Lucia campus of the University of Queensland, September 24-28.


Anyways, the literature and found this ...Urbanizing frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th Century Pacific Rim cities by Penelope Edmonds. The PAcific Rim angle is particularly enticing as I argue that we have new and emerging risks through our occuppance of urban areas around the Pacific Ring of Fire...

Science of Cities: the future for urban Indigenous communities...

Will Allen (who has an excellent website, 'Learning for Sustainability') flicks on dozens of great snippets including this on a blog by Michale Batty on 'The Science of Cities'. Love the graphics...



I always do a quick search for 'indigenous' on new sites and, shame but no surprises ...

This lack does open up considerable challenges and opportunities for Indigenous research in the area of urbanising indigenous communities. 84% of Maori now live in urban areas - it was only 26% at the end of WW2...

Source: Te Ara

How are we to live? An age old question perhaps, but in Christchurch we are faced with framing a future urban existence not from a blank slate exactly, more like a rubble-state. I'm now a convert to Michael Gunder's thesis in seeing the whole concept and practice of 'planning' as an empty signifier. Let's admit that for all the planners we've produced, fat lot of good it did for the citizens of Otautahi/Christchurch.

I'm only up to chapter four of his and Hillier's 'Planning in Ten Words or Less' but it gives some meaty material for my courses this year as I work in the implications for Maori planning and development.

There is some good stuff coming out of my old workplace, Manaaki Whenua, and Kepa Morgan has published on the Mauri model...

Source: A Tangata Whenua Perspective on Sustainability using the Mauri Model


Readings:  
Urban Maori as ‘New Citizens’: The Quest for Recognition and Resources by Paul Meredith 

The role of Māori values in Low-impact Urban Design and Development (LIUDD) by Garth Harmsworth

 

Urbanising Indigenous communities...

Just found this text by Fabiana Del Popolo, Ana Maria Oyarce, Bruno Ribotta, and Rodriguez Jorge (2007). I'm interested in how urban Indigenous communities are subject to new and emerging hazards. Most obviously this interest has come from the recent (and ongoing!) earthquakes in Christchurch but there are ever increasing and interacting forces that subject our communities to ongoing risk, exacerbated by racism and economic marginalisation. While Indigenous ecological knowledge is increasingly acknowledged and accepted in environmental management ( see e.g., Allen, Will, Jamie M. Ataria, J. Marina Apgar, G. Harmsworth, and Louis A. Tremblay. 2009. Kia pono te mahi putaiao - doing science in the right spirit. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 39 (4):239-242). Māori are now largely an urban people, drawn from rural New Zealand in the 1960s primarily as a low-skilled manufacturing and industrial workforce but now diversifying individually and collectively both in Aotearoa/New Zealand and overseas. Cityscapes expose all their citizens to new and emerging hazards to which marginalised groups are more exposed.