Uncovering a Lost Littoral: Reconnecting Greenhithe with the Upper Waitemata

This project focuses on bringing the past and an undiscovered existing condition to the forefront of the suburb's identity. Spaces have been created where the particularity of the site; its history and various topographical conditions, where land meets the sea, can start to be uncovered, celebrated and understood. Through the amalgamation of this history with the identity of the neighbourhood, this series of project interventions will invite and draw visitors to the suburb and provide recreational amenity for the local community. 

This project is realised as a cohesive ‘necklace’ of intervention: a pedestrian pathway network which is sensitive to the context, links the existing informal access ways, and extracts the natural spatial conditions that exist at the littoral edge. Building upon these found conditions along the foreshore, designed intervention is used to create six events and various linkages that complete connective pedestrian access between each site. 

The project works to identify sites along the littoral interface, reclaiming these spaces as public in the vein of the egalitarian ideals of the Queen’s Chain. Each intervention engages a site-specific typology informed though an understanding of site history, prior occupation, and a physical experience of place derived from in-depth site exploration.

Along the necklace are six interventions: an amphitheatre, a lookout, a wharf, a pavilion, a reformed boat-building yard and a campground. Each site mediates the threshold between land and the harbour, to reinvigorate the occupation and recreational usage of the coastline and harbour. This will bring the harbour back into the everyday experience of the community of this coastal suburb, and ultimately uncover the lost littoral of Greenhithe.