Composting as a Repair Methodology for Cultural and Ecological Revitalisation: Scaling Deep with Te Pā o Rākaihautū

Abstract

This practice-oriented thesis explores composting as a repair methodology for cultural and ecological revitalisation. Centred in a research partnership with Te Pā o Rākaihautū, a Kura-a-Iwi in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, the project repositions composting beyond waste management to examine it as a relational, political, more-than-human, and ontological practice of rift-repair. The research asks how composting can support whānau-whenua reconnection, soil restoration, kai motuhake, and eco-cultural revitalisation while engaging the material, social, and institutional conditions shaping urban organic waste management.

The thesis is situated within practice-based design research, combining co-designed action research with a first-person, practice-embedded methodology. Knowledge is generated through sustained participation in composting across multiple sites, seasons, collectives, and governance interfaces, rather than through detached observation alone. Drawing on first-person and more-than-human design research, composting is treated as a living, time-based infrastructuring practice: an arrangement that convenes humans, nonhumans, materials, tools, whenua, regulations, and institutions within shared processes of maintenance, breakdown, negotiation, and transformation.

The study is grounded in field-based composting trials co-designed through 20:20 Compost Collective and developed in close relationship with Te Pā and Ko Mahi Ko Ora. These trials worked with food scraps, green waste, carbon materials, microbial processes, labour, odour, contamination, land access, and regulatory constraint. Across the research, composting operated across three inseparable scales: material practice, collective arrangement, and institutional interface. The Companion Flipbook supports the written thesis by visually documenting this praxis as it unfolded across sites and seasons.

Conceptually, the thesis brings more-than-human design scholarship into dialogue with Decolonising Methodologies, Metabolic Rift Theory, eco-feminist care ethics, and Te Ao Māori concepts including whakapapa, mauri, kaitiakitanga, and whanaungatanga. It argues that designing-with living systems in colonised landscapes cannot be reduced to interspecies attentiveness alone; it must also engage the institutional and colonial arrangements that shape how care is organised, whose responsibilities are recognised, and how relationships between people, place, and organic matter are sustained or disrupted.

The thesis contributes a situated account of composting as rift-repair: a methodology for reconnecting organic matter, soil, people, place, and responsibility. It also articulates intensifying attentiveness as a methodological capacity within first-person, more-than-human design research, where rigour emerges through prolonged care, documentation, responsiveness, and accountability. The conclusion frames composting as cultural infrastructure and as a way of scaling deep: not a finished model to replicate, but a living methodology for transforming values, relationships, and conditions so that discarded materials, damaged landscapes, and disrupted relations can become substrate for new forms of life, learning, and leadership.