No ordinary commute for Boffa Miskell’s Yvonne Pflüger
Yvonne Pflüger begins her working day by checking the weather forecast. Always one to combine her daily commute with some kind of adventure, she needs to know how smooth her 7km kayak journey on Lake Wakatipu will be as she heads from home near Frankton to the office in downtown Queenstown.
“Generally in the mornings it’s calm,” she laughs. “But sometimes the wind picks up in the afternoon so the trip home is more interesting.”
Yvonne Pflüger never has to contend with traffic jams on her way to work.
The landscape planner at Boffa Miskell used to bike to work when she was based in the Christchurch office. But a move two years ago to the adventure playground of Queenstown offered the opportunity to embrace a different mode of transport.
“I’d describe myself as an outdoor enthusiast,” Pflüger says. “Yes I am often the one organising the office, rallying the team to do different events.
“I moved here for the lifestyle. I already had a lot of work here so actually moving to Queenstown reduced my travel.”
Yvonne moved to Queenstown for the lifestyle, and is often organising team events for the office. This is the Peak to Peak team.
Born in Austria Pflüger came to New Zealand to study at Lincoln University when studying for her Master in Natural Resource Management and Ecological Engineering following her Landscape Architecture degree. Unlike many other landscape architecture students she knew from the beginning that landscape planning was her thing.
“I really enjoy the bigger picture and long-term strategic planning aspects of landscape architecture.”
In Austria she worked on protected area management plans. “The big difference between Austria and New Zealand in terms of landscape is the level of modification through greater presence of humans and their historical land uses” she says.
“A lot of the work in Austria is in the restoration space now, including its often channelised riverscapes. “In Austria there is very little public conservation land, whereas in New Zealand about a third of the country is managed by the Department of Conservation.”
Mountain biking is popular around the office.
After completing her second masters degree at Lincoln Pflüger decided that she wanted to make New Zealand her home and grabbed a job opportunity as a landscape planner at Boffa Miskell’s Christchurch office in 2004. .
Part of her work involves the preparation of territorial landscape studies for identification of outstanding natural landscapes and coastal natural character assessments for councils, and assisting them with their plan reviews. She also works for private developers and utilities companies on mostly larger scale projects - many of them tourism or infrastructure related. After the Canterbury earthquakes she worked on the Lyttelton Port recovery and on the Kaikoura highway and rail recovery projects.
Winning an NZILA award for Riverscape and Flow Assessment Guidelins.
Pflüger sees spatial planning as a growth area of the profession over the next five years, as it responds to RMA reforms and global issues like climate change. “It is an interesting interface between urban design and landscape planning because it covers natural landscapes as well as rural and urban land uses. Many of these processes involve community engagement which I see as an essential part of my work.”
She says she’s also really interested in the tourism and visitor management space, as authorities look at how to manage growing visitor numbers while also protecting resources from degradation.
“I’m passionate about the outdoors and the impressive landscapes that you find in New Zealand. I would like to look back at the end of my career and think that I’ve had a chance to influence landscape outcomes in a positive way within the country. Landscape planning should balance the need of people to live here and use the land, while ensuring that this can happen in a sustainable way without degrading the landscape as one of our valuable resources for us and future generations.”