Auto-construction in Aotearoa

Auto-construction in Aotearoa discusses the motivations, methods, intentions and experiences of a loose network of people building and dwelling in alternative housing on rural, peri-urban and Māori ancestral lands. Self-builders aspire to live good lives, using their houses to respond to and mitigate economic and environmental crises. Their ways of building and dwelling reveal how people build alternative homes and lives in a moment of crises and change. By attending to these practices, this dissertation invites us to contemplate how we think about and make home today. Building alongside people as they make home, I consider their views as they relate to material enactments in the house, but also the limitations and potentials of homes as means of making social and political transformation in the world. I demonstrate how narrative and material assemblage co-construct – each speaking to ecological, economic and moral crises while enunciating alternatives. As self-builders regulate their socio-spatial living conditions, I show them engaging in complex processes of reckoning, utilising earth, stone, round and greenwood, trash, salvaged and non-standard materials. Through moral building, they contemplate and enact contesting ideas about good, adequate and appropriate ways of making home during challenging times. Furthermore, whether building Pākehā homesteads, or Māori papakāinga – multi-dwelling villages on ancestral lands – they engage with important questions about Māori sovereignty, colonial settlement, and state power. In exploring these practices and experiences, this dissertation raises questions about what it means to make and be at home in the contemporary world. I argue that relationality provides the basis through which buildings and related narratives assemble as moral, material and political entities. Throughout, I consider whether and how auto-constructor’s arrangements of materials and perspectives might demonstrate new spatialised politics at play in Aotearoa New Zealand. These themes – common to auto-construction in the urban south, but less often considered in anthropologies of self-building in the global north – have global relevance, especially as we seek to find new ways to dwell in a moment of real estate capitalism, environmental degradation, and housing crisis.