Mick Abbott

• Lincoln University

This research summary explores how maps and mapping can help with collaborative planning for climate change adaptation. It has a particular focus on Participatory Community Mapping – a method that encourages communities to show how they value different aspects of their physical spaces. It was commissioned to inform the South Dunedin Future programm...

This book on visitor experiences in nature-based tourism destinations demonstrates current knowledge using empirical evidence covering six continents. It provides insights into conceptual issues as well as case studies. Content is presented in three main parts: 'Nature-based Experiences in Tourism', 'Managing the Nature-based Tourism Experience' an...

This book on visitor experiences in nature-based tourism destinations demonstrates current knowledge using empirical evidence covering six continents. It provides insights into conceptual issues as well as case studies. Content is presented in three main parts: 'Nature-based Experiences in Tourism', 'Managing the Nature-based Tourism Experience' an...

Geographer John Wylie critiques problematic claims of belonging to place that would suggest a natural connection between people and topos. Such ontopological beliefs in a homeland rely on environmental determinism or historicization to assert an inextricable link between blood and soil formed over centuries of human occupation and use. In this arti...

The distinctive form of New Zealand’s protected areas developed out of rapid environmental changes during nineteenth-century colonization practices, and is based on valuing endemic nature as something separate from human culture. This binary division has resulted in a ‘fortress conservation’ approach, which separates protected areas from productive...

KEY WORDS Landscape morphology Scenarios Design methods Landscape architecture Conjectural 'Landscape Cities' and the Gap of Imagination mick abbott, paul roncken 1 , woody lee 2 and tenille pickett 3 REPORT This report discusses the results and layout of a design research studio focused on applying methods related to speculation and imagination. T...

This article presents ways to rethink current approaches to protected areas in New Zealand, which have been dominated by problematic colonial ideas that uniformly construct such places as separate from people and as reminiscent of a pre-human past. This has resulted in the strict separation of productive landscapes from protected landscapes in Aote...

Elizabeth Meyer influentially argues that aesthetic dimensions, in particular beauty, are a vital component of landscape architecture's capacity to create sustainable environments. In her presentation of a successful exemplar of ‘Sustaining Beauty’, Orongo Station, an Aotearoa New Zealand farm designed by North American landscape architect Thomas W...

Over the last 50 years, the area of New Zealand has been expanded to include territorial seas, an Exclusive Economic Zone, marine protected areas, an extended continental shelf, the Ross Sea, and a wedge of the Antarctic continent. While New Zealand’s territory is now significantly more marine rather than terrestrial, the country is often imagined...

This report discusses the results and layout of a design research studio focused on applying methods related to speculation and imagination. Three main findings are presented: a review of six methods that can direct designerly speculations; development of 11 'landscape city' scenarios; and a discussion of the role design 'challenges' can play in st...

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...

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...

In this paper, agri-food systems are discussed in the context of a set of socio-technical transitions principles, with a focus on energy, materials and practice elements that have the potential to promote sustainable outcomes across the system. This paper aims to develop an integrated approach for regime analysis, informed by emerging knowledge on...

This study asserts that contemporary cultural perceptions of wilderness have been heavily influenced by topographic cartography. It compares different historical conceptualizations of wilderness in the cartographies of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Southern Fiordland, and finds that certain tropes have shaped how the region is now characterized and manage...

People experience time in the outdoors in a multiplicity of ways. Adventurers engage in natural environments of cyclical, embedded and synchronic rhythms like tides, solar movements and river flow. They bring social constructs strongly influenced by linear, industrialised time epitomised by the electronic clock. At the same time their embodied rhyt...

We investigate smart-phone based augmented reality architecture as a tool for aiding public participation in urban planning. A smart-phone prototype system was developed which showed 3D virtual representations of proposed architectural designs visualised on top of existing real-world architecture, with an appropriate interface to accommodate user a...

Fascination with the interplay of people and place inspired the editors to bring together New Zealanders from differing backgrounds and disciplines to explore come of the stories and sites of conflict and change to be found amongst our sacred, historic, rural, urban and coastal landscapes. http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/MakingOurPlace.html

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...

This research operates at both the meeting of wilderness and landscape, and also landscape architecture and design-directed research. It applies a phenomenological understanding of landscape to the New Zealand conservation estate as a means to reconsider wilderness’ prevalent framing as an untouched ‘other’. It does this through enlisting the desig...

There is a shift in emphasis in the management of the conservation estate towards fostering people's participation in the conservation estate. This paper investigates how 'being involved' in natural landscapes might be prompted through the use of alternate designs for tracks, boardwalks, bridges and track markers. The theoretical underpinning for t...