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 was born on Bundjalung Country, and received her training in architecture at the University of Queensland and UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland. Of Māori and Dutch descent, her tribal affiliations are Ngāpuhi, Te Whakatōhea and Te Arawa. She leads a small team at Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism, a Whangārei-based design studio which she founded in mid-2018. Matakohe works with Māori organisations to progress their multi-residential, community and commercial projects, and with mana whenua (local tribal) groups to express their values, aspirations and narratives in the design of civic, commercial and education projects within their rohe (tribal area). In 2018, she hosted and produced Indigenous Urbanism, a podcast about the spaces we inhabit, and the community drivers and practitioners who are shaping these environments and decolonising through design. She has written for a variety of housing and architecture magazines and contributed chapters to several books on architecture and urbanism. She is a part-time lecturer at Huri Te Ao School of Future Environments at AUT, and a student of te reo Māori (the Māori language.)