Land/seascapes of exclusion: social order on the coastal margins

Abstract

The hegemonic discourse of coastal planning and development has an impact on the social ordering of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s coastal communities in a number of ways. One way in which social order is controlled and maintained is through the (ab)use of boundaries. Boundaries constructed and maintained under the authority of government and/or funded by development dictate where people may or may not live. In many cases these boundaries are used as instruments of exclusion. Boundaries constructed by hegemonic groups exclude those who define the coast according to other criteria. The hegemonic deployment of boundaries and the domination of coastal people and place generally is explored through an analysis of discourse. This analysis is structured according to differences in social order, coded as places of Otherness (heterotopia), Euclidean coasts, and places in transition reflecting images of both the former and the latter. Drawing on a number of coastal communities, including the Northland community of Otia (otherwise known as the Seaweed Pickers), Taylor’s Mistake, Whitianga and the wealth enclave of Pauanui, it is shown that the land/seascape of coastal Aotearoa/New Zealand is gradually being disciplined through the design of coasts that are accommodating of a particular patronage. These ‘exclusive’ coasts appear in stark contrast to those places where an alternative social ordering takes place. Here, in the absence of a Euclidean spatiality, uncertainty and liminality feature in the social construction of the coast. Residents of these places mark out and define the coast in a way that is quite different from the accepted norm, a fact that determines a particular ‘cartographic anxiety’ on the part of the dominant. This anxiety is instrumental in the construction of Otherness and the (re)production of exclusion.