Hannah Hopewell is a Pākehā of English and Scottish ancestry born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Trained in landscape architecture and urban design, Hannah is an experienced educator and value-based practitioner of landscape-led urbanism. Her teaching and research experiments with ways to identify and reckon with the complex legacy of landscape in current human-ecological-geological relationships in settler colonial contexts. Concerned with material ways power codifies, and shapes landscapes, Hannah’s teaching and research entangles landscape architecture with responsibility-based relational ontologies to critically cut across EuroAmerican-centric taxonomies and the aesthetic preferences upon which landscape is founded. Her inquiries intersect landscape practice with environmental justice and the lawful obligation of landscape architectural design in relation to Indigenous sovereignties and their familial bonds with non-human lifeworld's.
Hannah recognizes scholarship as operating in an expanded field, where plural positionalities and the many ways into spatial, ecological, graphic and written expression can coexist. She promotes the diversification of knowledge production through her own varied work and teaching towards greater inclusivity and the unsettling of entrenched and hegemonic western design epistemes. Hannah completed a creative practice doctorate in 2019 surfacing a site-writing practice, parafictioning, whilst at the same time gaining competency in transdisciplinarity, knowledge democratization, and agility in working across difference. Hannah is the founder of TikaLAB, an interdisciplinary practice-based research and advocacy collective, and has contributed reviews, prose, and experimental text to Architecture New Zealand, Freerange, Kerb Journal, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, Medium, and has exhibited in the 5th Auckland Triennial, Te Kura Waihanga Window Gallery, and Pōnēke Wellington City Light Boxes.
Currently Hannah’s research engages the invisibility whiteness within the ongoing naturalization of persisting settler imaginaries and landscape aesthetics. Forthcoming publications include “Landscapes without names”, in UNSAID Kerb Journal, 32, Dec 2024, “Landscapes to come”, in Collective Landscape Futures, edited by Ed Wall, Anushka Athique Winterbottom, Routledge, 2025. Hannah is also currently serving as editor for the Summer 2024 edition of Landscape Review –– “Landscapes and Seascapes of Connectivity in Moana Oceania” and editing a Special Issue of Settler Colonial Studies –– ”Reckoning with Settler Colonial Cities”. Hannah undertakes advising of PhD and Master of Architecture and Landscape Architecture practice-led research students as a Research Associate with Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.
Prior to joining Cornell University in 2024, Hannah served as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design Innovation at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa NZ. Hannah has over 20 years of practice experience in Aotearoa-based offices working on a varied project types and scales including public infrastructure, schools, collective housing, public urban space, and as advisor on strategic landscape led planning, green infrastructure, and policy initiatives for Te Kaunihera o Tāmaki Makaurau- Auckland Council. Most recently Hannah led Kaihoahoa Whenua-Landscape architecture and urban design for kaupapa Māori TOA Architects.
Selected Publications and Exhibitions
- “Undoing Settlerness: Reckoning with Landscape History in a Settler-Colonial Context”. In Future History: Teaching Landscape History. Edited by J. Woudstra, D. Jacques. Routledge, 2023. ISB9781032398501
- “Beyond Landscape” In The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa. Edited by F.Freschi, F. Nazier & J. Venis. Dunedin:Otago Polytechnic Press, 2021
- “Non-landscape and (general) Ecology as agents of Creativity” Kerb Journal of Landscape Architecture, Uro Publications, 28, 124-127. ISBN: 9780648685869
- Ko Wai Au? Who am I? Ko Wai Hoki koe? Who the hell are you? Te Kura Waihanga Window Gallery, Pōnēke Wellington City Light Boxes 20 Aug – 20 Nov, https://architecturenow.co.nz/articles/ko-wai-au/
