This design research, A Local Place for Hauora, explores health and wellbeing through the lens of “enmeshed architecture”. The design proposal responds to the intensification of Avondale—a suburb in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland—including the uncertain future of a racecourse that, in this proposal, is partially reimagined as an urban ngahere (forest). Two outcomes are proposed, occupying both the permanent and temporal. The first proposition is a building in the town centre; edged by the ngahere it brings together a diverse programme of community garden and plant nursery, spaces for kai (cooking and sharing) and raranga (weaving) alongside a barbershop, health clinics and bike workshop. Developing ‘pocket’ and ‘edge’ spaces and blurring the thresholds between different types of health, the building provides opportunity for community wellbeing and social exchanges alongside medical health treatment. To further the tactic of slipping healthcare into the everyday, the second proposition is of three mobile interventions; the bike, boat and bus. These travelling waka are intended to distribute social, ecological, clinical and civic health outwards into other local spaces in wider West Auckland through various modes and scales.

This architectural proposition was landed in the thesis through the investigation of the question, “How can we enhance the opportunities that lie in an ‘enmeshed spatiality’ of health through connecting with the ecologies of the local environment?” The project is uniquely Avondale, intentionally seeking out the neighbourhood’s own ‘ways of health’. Borrowing a method from muf architecture/ art to understand place by first ‘valuing what is there’, the principles of regenerating the local are carried out through the tools of mapping and photomontage. These methods are used to seek out the existing initiatives in Avondale and nurture them as possibilities for what health and wellbeing can look like as part of daily life. Together, these methodologies work to reveal the tightly woven interlocks of practices that reach out to social, cultural and biophysical ecologies.

Encompassing the research, the term “enmeshed architecture” is attended through the concept of mauritanga, the co-creation of knowledge as hybrid research collectives and agency in the social-local. By navigating the ways in which we exist in and action the world, this term is explored in a relational sense, critiquing the divisive western binaries of animate/inanimate planetary entities, local/professional expertise and patient/doctor relationships in the urban environment. This describes an expanded grasp on enmeshment developed through the course of this thesis, ranging from the ontological, epistemological and spatial.