Heritage-making in Aotearoa planning: Unsettling norms in contested urban space

Heritage is currently a high-profile and often contentious topic in urban environments. As cities face growing challenges of climate change, intensification needs and cultural contestation, state-mandated heritage continues to have a significant influence on how cities are perceived, whose pasts are remembered, and what future change can be. However, this is being increasingly tested as urban pressures bring questions of who has a right to the city to the fore. Situated within the field of critical heritage studies, this thesis critically examines how heritage is officially “made” in the cities of Aotearoa New Zealand, and how emerging views and values may reshape these established norms for more spatially and culturally just futures. Focused on urban locations within the so-called “CANZUS” states (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America (USA)), the thesis centres on statutory heritage – the objects and places that are identified and managed within state-mandated planning systems that create dominant assumptions about what is worthy of protection. As such, its contribution is at the intersection of heritage and planning as it critically queries heritage’s future legacy claims and considers what other legacies may be imagined. The thesis includes four key enquiries. First, it explores the history of state-led heritage-making in Aotearoa, focusing on the city of Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. It examines the tension between contemporary urban intensification priorities and heritage / special character regulation, critiquing the narrative of heritage as a “public good” given its entanglement with spatial and cultural inequity. Second, it studies three cases of urban heritage protest across Australia, Aotearoa and the USA. These cases expose the continued inadequacy of statutory heritage-making for Indigenous and emerging aspirations, as normative approaches are embedded not only by the heritage sector itself but by the planning and legislation systems that structure its mandate. Third, the thesis explores the current thinking of those shaping and working within heritage’s statutory framing across Aotearoa. It finds that heritage policy leaders are cognisant of, and concerned to change, heritage’s entrenched Eurocentricity, expert dominance and material orientation, but that shifting established practice remains a multi-dimensional challenge. Finally, it investigates the perspectives of young emerging planners in the city of Kirikiriroa / Hamilton, which again foregrounds the obstacles to displacing systemic norms but also highlights planning policy’s significant potential to shape different heritage futures. This thesis has important implications both for Aotearoa’s urban environments and for CANZUS cities more broadly. Grounded in contemporary real-world examples, it not only exposes heritage’s imbrication with issues of urban inequity but its deeper role in maintaining settler state security, making “home” on Indigenous land. It finds that unpicking this legacy will involve more than adding the heritages of “others” into the existing canon. Rather, deeper reconsideration of heritage’s societal purpose as part of Indigenous, multi-storied and dynamic cities is required. Finally, it highlights the central role for planning in transforming the heritage field, both through statutory policy reform and through integration with broader urban objectives. However, planners will need to be better equipped for critical engagement with heritage if they are to creatively support more inclusive, democratic and malleable alternatives.

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