breaking the map

“We contest that a move away from the word ‘placemaking’ itself is overdue. We instead propose a practice of ‘making place’, and further, of ‘making space’ (i) that allows overlooked spatial (hi)stories to reclaim the sites that they have always occupied, and (ii) for the very occupants and stories that are ordinarily overlooked in urban and spatial design practice. To do so is to accept that we must look to those marginal occupants, practices and writings that challenge the gendered, heteronormative, white, neuro-typical and colonising discourses that dominate architecture. Placemaking practices employ community consultation, privileging local stories and quotidian ways-of-being in response. It is our position, that even these ‘community-engaged’ processes perpetuate erasure and marginalisation precisely through their conceptualisations of ‘Site’ and what constitutes community.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“Colonial processes of city building in Australia in the past century deployed the neutralising tabula rasa of international modernism, but also prior to that the eradicating colonial practice of terra nullius. The anthropocentric concept of a utopian blank site continues to pervade city planning and design in Australia. It is upon this empty slate that the ideal of universal design is enacted. It is an ongoing legacy of modernism that built environment disciplines typically presume site is a discrete space, marked out by ‘boundaries’ that connect it to other similar sites and infrastructural nodes.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“Spatial disciplines start by researching site through drawings, writings and data, through which site analysis is performed. This process tends to produce a fixed understanding of site that is inherently bound up in the biases of the information used, translating them again into new design outcomes. Documents of little interest to the dominant narrative have been routinely overlooked, concealed or destroyed, meaning they are repeatedly neglected in our design methodologies.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“Country is often misunderstood as being synonymous with land, but it goes far beyond that. It comprises ecologies of plants, animals, water, sky, air and every aspect of the ‘natural’ environment. Country is a spiritual entity: she is Mother. She is not separate to you: All things are connected, everything is interrelated. Everything you do will affect her and ultimately, come back to you.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“Walking up Country is a meditation. You are walking to bring the stories and knowledges of Country up out of the voids of colonisation and back into the sun. Country feels you and responds. This is more than just engaging with Country it is enacting Country, embodying Country, being with, and in, and of, Country, to acknowledge her and energise you both. This is an act of rematriation—returning to mother Country and understanding Country as mother (Muthien, 2018). You are feeling Country and experiencing her Naway (in the now). You are feeling and hearing what she has to say back to you.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“We have articulated our position that when we design, we manifest the future, and that our disciplinary methods and the kinds of information we access have an impact on the futures we can imagine. We particularly critique both the disciplinary conventions and the sources we typically consult for their role in overlooking and marginalisation of any stories that do not fit the mould of neoliberal productive consumer who is white, heteronormative, male, neuro-typical, able-bodied and young. When designing public space, seldom is anything else designed for unless it is an explicit part of a brief.”
There’s No Place Like (Without) Country, Shannon Foster, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh and Wann Country

“There have been several “turns,” including the ontological turn, the material turn, the spatial turn, each of which is actually a turn to where Indigenous people have always been (see also Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). I recently became totally exasperated when I saw a social media post by a white settler colleague asking for recommendations of “more practical” readings by Indigenous scholars, which would provide more detail about what decolonization looks like “in reality.” To watch settler scholars sift through our work as they effectively ask, “Isn’t there more for me to get from this?” is so insulting. It seems like the tacit (and sometimes arrogantly explicit) request for more (details, explanation, assurance) is actually a form of dismissal. It is a rejection of the opportunity to engage with Indigenous texts on their own terms. It is a deferral of responsibility through asking, “Isn’t there something less theoretical? Isn’t there something more theoretical? Something more practical? Something less radical? Can’t you describe something that seems more likely or possible?” These insistences upon Indigenous writings contradict themselves while also putting all the onus of responsibility on Indigenous people to make the future more coherent and palatable to white settler readers. In reading Indigenous work, they ask for more work, even if they have done little to fully consider what has already been carefully and attentively offered.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou), Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), and K. Wayne Yang, Introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies

“Water is life. Land is our first teacher.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou), Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), and K. Wayne Yang, Introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies

“Imperialism still hurts, still destroys and is reforming itself constantly.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou), Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), and K. Wayne Yang, Introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Audre Lorde

“Our bodies are archives where memories, ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State.”
The Poetics of (Re)mapping Archives: Memory in the blood, Natalie Harkin

“Bringing the situation of ourselves as 'knowers' into the frame does not make ourselves the focus of study but will involve investigating the social relations within which we as 'knowers' know.”
An Indigenous Standpoint Theory, Martin Nakata

“The continuing colonial nature of the archives, enacted through their systems, structures and resourcing of priorities, continue to privilege mainstream narratives and positions.”
Returning love to Ancestors captured in the archives: Indigenous wellbeing, sovereignty and archival sovereignty, Kirsten Thorpe

“Fragments of memory are not simply represented as flat documentary but constructed to give a 'new take' on the old, constructed to move us into a different mode of articulation.”
Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, bell hooks

“The dehumanizing impulses of colonization are successfully acted upon because racisms in these countries are predicated on the logic of possession.”
The White Possessive, Aileen Moreton-Robinson