Towards relational timber life-cycle practices

Abstract

This thesis examines how contemporary forestry and timber life-cycle practices in Aotearoa (New Zealand) can be critically reinterpreted from an architectural perspective. It situates timber not merely as a construction material, but as a product of land governance, ecological relationships, and cultural responsibility informed by tikanga and mātauranga. While timber is increasingly promoted within architectural and policy discourse as a sustainable and low-carbon material, its upstream conditions of production - forestry systems, governance arrangements, and land relationships - are rarely interrogated as part of architectural responsibility. This research positions forestry as an integral component of architecture’s material culture and ethical domain, where decisions made at the forest edge shape environmental, cultural, and material outcomes across the built environment. Contemporary forestry in Aotearoa primarily operates within institutional structures shaped by colonisation, western scientific management, and market-oriented logics that prioritise efficiency, yield, and short-term economic returns. These conditions have contributed to persistent challenges, including soil degradation, ecological simplification, unmanaged forestry waste, and the ongoing marginalisation of Māori authority in land and forest governance. Understanding timber at its point of origin reveals that architectural sustainability is inseparable from these upstream systems and the values that govern them. The aim of this thesis is not to resolve the deep contradictions of extractive economies or to claim authority over indigenous knowledge systems. Instead, it seeks to question taken-for-granted assumptions about timber, forestry, waste, and value, and to re-situate architectural responsibility within the material, ecological, and governance relationships that make construction possible. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Māori knowledge holders, forestry practitioners, policymakers, scientists, designers, and waste specialists, this research investigates how tikanga-based concepts - such as whakapapa, genealogy, kaitiakitanga rangatiratanga, manaakitanga, tapu, and wairuatanga - could inform alternative understandings of whenua, ngahere, and rākau as relational and ethical entities rather than extractive resources. A hybrid inductive-deductive content analysis was employed to examine how participants articulated the ontological and epistemological foundations of both Māori and western forestry systems, and how these foundations shape practice across the timber life-cycle. Literature is treated not as a neutral backdrop but as an active site of interpretation, analysed alongside empirical material through a critically reflexive lens. The findings reveal enduring tensions between dominant western forestry models - characterised by monocultural production, regulatory fragmentation, and compressed economic timeframes - and Māori perspectives that emphasise long-term ecological processes, intergenerational responsibility, and place-based governance. While mātauranga is increasingly acknowledged within policy and industry discourse, participants consistently identify structural, institutional, and economic constraints that limit its meaningful application in practice. For architecture, these tensions expose how material sustainability claims often rely on technocratic measures that obscure governance responsibility and relational obligations to land, with timber waste emerging as a visible indicator of these systemic contradictions. Rather than proposing a unified approach or synthesis of knowledge systems, the thesis demonstrates how epistemological criticality is essential for understanding where and how tikanga-based responsibilities can influence forestry and timber decision-making without being subsumed by western paradigms. Using he awa whiria as an analytical method, the research holds Māori and western knowledge systems in parallel, allowing points of convergence and divergence to be examined without erasing difference. In doing so, it reframes architectural responsibility as extending beyond design and construction to include upstream questions of extraction, stewardship, and value. At a time when timber is increasingly promoted within architectural, regulatory, and climate policy discourse as a sustainable material of choice, this research demonstrates that such claims cannot be evaluated solely at the point of specification or carbon accounting. Instead, the thesis identifies small but significant points of intervention - “thin slices” of possibility - where tikanga-informed approaches can reshape material governance and contribute to more relational, context-sensitive, and ecologically grounded timber practices in Aotearoa, without claiming to resolve the historical or structural conditions from which these challenges emerge.