Jacky Bowring

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lincoln University

The narratives of two colonial figures, represented in the landscape as memorial statues in Aotearoa New Zealand and Colombia, reveal the role context plays in the representation of, and response to, colonial power within the landscape. In both countries, tensions relating to indigeneity have intensified in recent decades, and violent actions again...

This study examines landscape performance evaluation practices in New Zealand by analysing a representative set of evaluation cases using a “sequential” case study approach. The aim is to map the methodological terrain and understand how “success” is defined and assessed in these evaluations. This study identifies different evaluation models, inclu...

While the concept of Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is widely applied in landscape architecture and other relevant fields, the term POE is not well-defined. By reviewing and analysing a representative set of POE definitions collected from existing academic and grey literature using content analysis methods, this study aims to enhance understanding...

The impact of the landscape developments in Te Whāriki Subdivision Phases 1 and 2 was assessed and documented through LAF’s innovative Case Study Investigation (CSI) program, a unique research collaboration among faculty researchers, designers, and students. Detailed performance information and a comprehensive description of the evaluation methods...

Completed in 2019, Te Whāriki (Phase 1&2) is a 144-acre residential subdivision adjacent to Lincoln University in Canterbury, New Zealand. The project transformed a dairy farm into a high-performance residential landscape featuring a series of constructed wetlands. According to its design goals, Te Whāriki is expected to help support local biodiver...

Performance evaluation is crucial for environmental design and sustainable development, especially so for architecture and landscape architecture. However, such performance evaluations remain rare in practice. It is argued that the concerns over potential negative evaluations and a lack of funding are the two main barriers preventing the undertakin...

Places of traumatic memories provide particular design challenges. Conflict landscapes are complex terrains that challenge ideas about identity, sense of place and commemoration and feelings of belonging. How can memorials provide opportunities for the development of social practices, meaningful materiality, individual experience and collective mem...

Survivor trees are those which have survived disasters. They are often the only things left following the destruction of buildings by earthquakes, tsunamis, atomic blasts, and bombings. Survivor trees are located within the discourses of architecture and landscape architecture. This paper focuses particularly on the affectiveness of trees, their ge...

Prior to the devastating 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, parts of the CBD of Christchurch, New Zealand were undergoing revitalisation incorporating aspects of adaptive reuse and gentrification. Such areas were often characterised by a variety of bars, restaurants, and retail outlets of an “alternative” or “bohemian” style. These early 20th century build...

The place of historic gardens within contemporary cities is a challenge for landscape architecture, particularly in relation to the experiential potential of heritage interpretation. How can the stories of the past be revealed in places which are often fragmented, abridged and largely erased? Within the palimpsest of the city of Beijing, China, the...

p>Designing is an experimental practice. Eschewing traditional concepts of designing as simply solving problems, and ideas of research as a positivist pursuit of truth, Landscope DesignLab embraces an expansive perspective of design-directed research. Using the tools of questioning, collaborating, designing, grounding and communicating, the DesignL...

Writing from the perspective of landscape architecture, Jacky Bowring concentrates on the redesign of urban environments in the aftermath of the destructive 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, leading to 185 deaths and the devastation of 80 per cent of the urban fabric in the central business district. Describing how sites of trauma were...

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aest...

Disasters are an engine for innovation; creativity becomes vital in responding to a disaster and leveraging it. For Christchurch, New Zealand, the earth-quakes of 2010 and 2011 have driven many ideas about how to rebuild the city and have inspired an explosion of temporary landscapes, events, and buildings. While the earthquakes themselves have inv...

The Christchurch earthquakes brought to an abrupt halt a process of adaptive reuse and gentrification that was underway in the south eastern corner of the central business district. The retail uses that were a key to the success of this area pre-earthquake could be characterised as small, owner operated, quirky, bohemian, chaotic and relatively low...

The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was until very recently a “Junior England”—a small city that still bore the strong imprint of nineteenth-century British colonization, alongside a growing interest in the underlying biophysical setting and the indigenous pre-European landscape. All of this has changed as the city has been subjected to a devast...

‘Urban sustainability’ currently receives widespread and generally enthusiastic endorsement, yet concerns are emerging that recent expressions of the concept may actually be working against the city and its residents. Based on research in Christchurch, New Zealand (one of the most urbanised countries in the world), it is argued that the assimilatio...

At 255 feet (78 metres) the Arts Tower of the University of Sheffield, one of the few tower buildings in the city, provided an amazing panoptic vista across the rolling landscape in which the city nestles. For landscape architects this sense of prospect was in itself one of the features of the conference, offering the possibility of reading the lan...

This paper proposes that photographs have the potential to generate new thinking about the experience of Antarctic exploration, suggesting particularly that the diversified photographies of the early twentieth century provide a means of harnessing the reactions of individuals marginalized by conventional text-based discourse. It considers the Antar...

: Shuttling between two different worlds—two artworks that are in part fiction and in part fact—this essay gathers up a series of thematic commonalities which represent particular conceptions of landscape. Adopting the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, the investigation proceeds via juxtaposed pieces of evidence, following his...

The Gisborne District Council (‘the Council’) wishes to enhance the sense of place at the Cook Landing Site (‘the site’). To help achieve this goal, the Council commissioned this study. Fifteen options are evaluated with respect to their merit in promoting a sense of place, and a series of site strategies is generated to marry together the best opt...

What contribution does landscape make to our sense of identity? Images of spectacular natural features pervade the media – between the pages of glossy coffee-table books, in tourism promotions and on screen as the setting for blockbuster movies – but are these scenes that define its people? For Beyond the Scene the editors asked eleven writers to...

Sustainability is a ubiquitous concept that has ‘buzzed rapidly into the popular consciousness emitting clouds of positive affect’ (Netting, in Stone, 2003, p. 94). Its broad appeal stems from an apparent ability to reconcile many different social, cultural, economic and bio-physical environmental elements and provide the basis for effective policy...

One of the challenges of contemporary landscape architecture is the globalisation of place. Nowhere is the threat of homogenisation more apparent than in places vulnerable to change, where the potential loss of heritage fabric rings alarm bells. St. Petersburg is one such place, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a city which had existed outside of t...

Photography Jacky Bowring / Christian Richters. A tour of three significant memorial sites in Europe and an investigation of the potency of place and space in memorial design.

One of the challenges of contemporary landscape architecture is the globalisation of place. Nowhere is the threat of homogenisation more apparent than in places vulnerable to change, where the potential loss of heritage fabric rings alarm bells. St. Petersburg is one such place, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a city which had existed outside of t...

2009 marks the achievement of two major milestones for the landscape architecture programme at Lincoln University. The first of these significant events is the celebration of 40 years of landscape architecture education at Lincoln University. The second of the landmark events will be the opening of the new landscape architecture building. Festiviti...

Report on the theme of the conference Globalisation and Landscape Architecture, held at St. Petersburg State Forest Technical Academy, Russia, 3-6 June 2007. Globalisation has both positive and negative effects on education and practice in landscape architecture, and was the central theme of a recent conference held at the St Petersburg State Fores...

Paper presented at the conference Globalisation and Landscape Architecture, held at St. Petersburg State Forest Technical Academy, Russia, 3-6 June 2007. One of the most insidious influences of globalisation on landscape architecture is the hegemony of the visual. The dominance of visuality is nothing new, having been spawned during the Enlightenme...

Urban sustainability is an increasingly ubiquitous term littering all manner of policy documents and promotional material. As an ambitious attempt to address social, economic and bio-physical environmental issues it appears to balance philanthropic ideals, such as improving urban residents' quality of life, with environmental concern. It is often u...

During the 1990s, within the context of “corporate greening,” New Zealand experienced exponential growth in organic farming and the institutionalising of a former fringe farming subculture. Organic farming practices, however, often result in landscapes that differ from those produced by the application of long-standing conventional land management...

Time, landscape and memory represent a potent triumvirate. Each is embedded within the other, and the landscape architect has a critical role to play in orchestrating connections. In this paper I explore the hegemony of the visual over the other senses, and contrast this with the potency which the sense of smell has in the context of evoking time a...

Landscape design is an expression and repository of cultural values and beliefs, and in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the designed landscape faces particular challenges. Globalization is seen as a potential threat to landscape identity, which is even more significant for a country which has built its economy and self-image from its unique natural landscap...

Representations provide an accessible and challenging means of investigating the cultural landscape. While on the one hand images can be read as simple depictions or denotations of landscape, on the other they are rich in meaning, encapsulating a community's idealized vision of itself. The way in which a particular body of popular art—New Zealand's...

A critique of the Auckland Regional Council Natural Masterpiece Project, where the ARC is attempting to ' brand ' its parks with huge gilt frames. The frames are significant in the way they express a particular perspective on landscape in contemporary New Zealand.

Landscapes are representations of a range of possible ways of life and people may interpret them in a variety of often conflicting ways. One expression of such tension occurs with respect to landscape tastes is illustrated in the paradox of New Zealand’s organic farming landscapes. While organic practices are environmentally friendly, they do not h...

Critique is an indispensable part of the design process, providing a crucial feedback loop to reflect and improve on the quality of design. While critique is a well-established practice in some design disciplines, for landscape architecture a critical culture is yet to develop. As a relatively recent profession, which some have argued is more pract...

This article explores landscapes which commemorate the death of ordinary individuals, rather than monumental tributes to heroes or historic events. The expression of the individual in death varies enormously, and reflects cultural beliefs about death. Cemeteries reflect both the time and place of their establishment. Even within Aotearoa New Zealan...

Despite its origins in England two hundred years ago, the picturesque continues to influence landscape architectural practice in late twentieth-century New Zealand. The evidence for this is derived from a close reading of the published discourse of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects, particularly the now defunct professional journal,...

A report on the study of the role of the picturesque in the professional journal, The Landscape, for evidence of the picturesque. The conventions of the picturesque are naturalised and taken for granted, reflecting Roland Barthes' concept of myth. Barthes' identification of denotation and connotation as the basis of myth were the foundation for the...

The picturesque has been compared to a language. This paper extends the metaphor to pidgins and creoles to make observations about the intermixing of design languages, namely between the conventions of the picturesque and the indigenous environment of New Zealand. Within the context of landscape architecture, pidgin variations are evident in relati...

Dissertation (Dip.L.A.)--University of Canterbury, 1989.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lincoln University, 1997.