Speculating an Indigenous urban forest

Abstract

While the Anthropocene may signify a new event in Western disciplinary practices, for many Indigenous peoples, including Māori , it presents a familiar return to their more-than-human traditional worlds. According to Māori mythology, the enlightenment came upon the world as Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatuānuku (the earth mother) were separated by the forest created by Tāne (god of the forest). Enlightenment Western thought brings about a separation between culture and nature that essentialises the forest and the city as an oppositional duality. Centring local Indigenous worlds provides an opportunity to decentre western disciplinary practice and localize the Anthropocene. However, utilizing the abstracted products of localized Indigenous knowledge as a perturbation to authorized Western discourse has the potential to make concepts, such as more-than-human worlds, part of the ongoing violence of neocolonial practices. Collaborative research between architecture and critical heritage at the University of Auckland and University College London seeks to address this in a speculative investigation of the city's future as an Indigenous Urban Forest. Understanding what living in te ao Māori (the Māori world) means and how to inhabit te ao ngahere (the Māori forest world) helps to shift understandings of living in contemporary urban forests. This amplifies a consideration of the more-than-human city as a response to the implications of the climate crisis and the development of the city in the Anthropocene.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Frontiers in Climate, 2026 · DOI ↗