Decolonising through Design

Timmah Ball is a nonfiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage. Her work is often informed by studying urban planning and offers a critique of conventional city-making systems. In 2021 she was an Arts House Makeshift Publics artist and created the zine Do Planners Dream of Electric Trees? In 2016 she won the Westerly Magazine Patricia Hackett Prize, and her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary journals. More recently she has created audio work for ACCA and Liquid Architecture which contemplates the past, present and future of both physical and online spaces in the COVID era. 

Jade Kake is director and founder of Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism and a part-time lecturer at Huri te Ao School of Future Environments at AUT. She is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Jade is the author of Rebuilding the Kāinga – Lessons from Te Ao Hurihuri, Rewi: Āta haere kia tere, co-authored with Jeremy Hansen. She has contributed chapters in collections about architecture and design and has also written for Stuff, The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, ArchitectureNOW and Metro. She has won awards for architectural writing, received the Emerging Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2019, and received the Copyright Licensing New Zealand and New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa Writers’ Award in 2021. In 2020, she was a participant on Te Papa Tupu writers’ mentoring programme. Checkerboard Hill is her first novel.