Gentrification driving ‘huge cultural loss’ in pushing communities to the fringe of cities
New Zealand’s universities need to encourage more Māori and Pacific Islands students to enrol in architecture, engineering and other built environment research, a leading Auckland academic has said.
Karamia Muller, a lecturer in Indigenous design at the University of Auckland, has also questioned urban gentrification and housing policies that drive displacement of Māori and Pacific Islands communities.
She said displacement resulted in “huge cultural and communal loss”.
Muller recently spoke to E-Tangata, a weekly Māori and Pacific Islands online current affairs magazine, about her Samoan heritage and the difficulties in finding her culture reflected in NZ tertiary architecture courses.
“I didn’t really know other architects, or what they did, so couldn’t quite visualise myself in the profession,” she told E-Tangata.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Even during the degree, I wasn’t sure. Doing postgrad study, I was a very normal, average student, and I didn’t see much work or research around Pacific space, Indigenous space, or Māori architecture.”
Muller said that NZ academia “isn’t necessarily the most welcoming space” for Pacific Islands students and that she would not have gone on to complete a PhD “if I didn’t have people championing me”.
She said her doctoral supervisor, art historian Deidre Brown, “made it clear that Indigenous architecture by Indigenous practitioners was, and still is, a legitimate part of New Zealand architecture, and the canon across the world.”
A research project on a government housing estate in Glenn Innes, a suburb of Auckland, led to her interest in urban gentrification and displaced communities.
“That displacement has had ongoing ramifications for Pasifika people. To move people further away from city centres where tertiary institutes and the central business district are changes people’s lives,” she said.
“I was struck by the idea that, in removing the state houses in Glen Innes, there was a huge cultural and communal loss — and that this conversation was not known by, or visible to, students of architecture.”
Muller has created a teaching studio where students are encouraged to think about urban design and community values.
“I encourage my students to think critically about the policies that shape the ‘built realm’, which is everything that’s built by people in the world around us, and about the narratives that shape what the built realm means to people and their communities,” she said.