Abstract

New Zealand is a nation with legal, ecological, and social perspectives composed of combined Pākehā (NZ European) and Māori identities, values, perspectives, and traditions. Its landscape, therefore, reflects the interactions, dialogues, and conflicts of the convergences of these two very different cultural perspectives as well as more recent migrations from other cultures. South Wairarapa, in New Zealand’s lower North Island, presents an interesting collision between the Māori and Pākehā identities. The landscapes forms and features evidence a separation between traditional Māori values and more recent European developments creating a region that lacks place and a sense of place within the wider New Zealand context. This paper explores how landscape architecture can overlay past cultural languages and conversations to restructure confused regional and cultural identities and therefore promote a re-emergence of placed identity. These cross-cultural signatures are written onto the landscape to be read, interpreted, rewritten, corrected and modified so to further reflect the Māori connectedness with one’s landscape and therefore inform both regional and individual identity and a sense of placed being. The apparent disconnect most modern populations have with their landscape is palpable internationally. New signatures should be written, the absent reworked, and the old rewritten, to re-“place” regional identities to create an inter-relatedness and interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems, and therefore protect past places and placements, and enhance new ones.