Did you know that UN-Habitat’s URBAN OCTOBER has started? It began this week with World Habitat Day – when a global observance took place in Querétaro, Mexico under the theme of “Engaging youth to create a better urban future”.
For further information see:
But wait, there’s more….
The URBAN OCTOBER month will close with an observance of World Cities Day. You can read more about this at urbanoctober.unhabitat.org/ along with a range of background information and a tab offering access to a range of merch and resources. Get your mug now 🙂
It’s not too late to organise something in your workplace or community.
URBAN AOTEAROA BOOK WINNERS at UDF
As a tangential way of marking URBAN OCTOBER we can announce the winners of our UDF book giveaway were:
- Adam Vincent – Alexandra
- Saera Chun – Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
- Nicola Williams – Ōtautahi Christchurch
Each of the winners also contributed snippets of their thoughts on receiving and reading URBAN AOTEAROA Thank you Adam, Saera and Nicola!
From Saera Chun
The book presents a broad range of perspectives on the past, present, and future of urbanism in Aotearoa. It is accessible yet leaves readers with much to consider and explore further. In particular, Lama Tone’s contribution captures and articulates Aotearoa’s identity as a Pacific Island nation, which resonates closely with my experiences growing up in Auckland as a young person from an Asian migrant family. Highly recommend.
From Nicola Williams
Anthony Hōete, who wrote ‘From the Māori to the Transcolonised City’ in this book, really grabbed me when he stated that “From an indigenous perspective, it is the agglomeration of marae and their ability to propagate whakawhanaungatanga that makes a Māori City. Or a city, Māori”. Hōete references the term whakawhanaungatanga (the process of establishing relationships and relating well to others) on numerous occasions throughout his essay. Language matters. This is especially relevant not only on important occasions such as Te Wiki o te Reo Maori, but also throughout New Zealand and the world, given that in many dimensions we seem to be drifting too far apart. The term whakawhanaungatanga calls on us all to bring back the collective, the community and the shared experiences that come through building relationships. Whether it’s a space to share warm kai and a wide smile, the structure and meaning of Marae in our cities and towns offers an enlightened vision for reconnecting many aspects of life in Aotearoa.
From Adam Vincent, whose interest was most piqued by chapters Chapters 2, 6, 7 and 8, is this thoughtful, in-depth and excellently written response:
It was refreshing to read Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub in Chapter 2 discuss the role that policy and financial markets have played in the housing market, and the current concerns over the cost of housing. All too often, the question of house prices can be boiled down to simply demand from buyers and supply from developers in both political and public discourse. However, this distinction can miss the nuances inherent in the forces that guide both supply and demand in different segments of the housing market. To give one of Eaqub’s examples, if your financial system is geared (Intentionally or not) to prefer existing dwellings over new buildings, it makes it more difficult to finance both building and buying new buildings, reducing demand and supply for new buildings and limiting their development. This can then result in a self-fulfilling prophecy as the price of existing buildings rises, locking in existing as the preference, especially when coupled with the idea of housing as an investment asset. In my opinion, when housing is viewed as an investment, it disincentivises many players in the market from taking steps to increase supply or reduce demand. I think this chapter adds some well needed nuance into the current dominant discourse that, if we just build more houses, everything will sort itself out. That is an important goal, but it risks ignoring some of the other reasons housing has become so expensive, in the first place and may hamper our ability to improve the situation.
Once a road or bridge is constructed, it is rarely removed in its entirety, and future infrastructure decisions are made based on it still being there. This, and John Tookey’s point in Chapter 6 that Māori tracks and portage routes foreshadowed the contemporary State Highway system, demonstrate the longevity and adaptation of infrastructure in New Zealand. This example indicates how existing infrastructure is re-used, re-purposed and re-developed over time, and supports the idea that change is a constant. Here, Tookey argues that people shouldn’t fix their ideas of what infrastructure, such as the transport network, is or does. Instead, we should be willing to adapt it over time, and use it in different ways. As Tookey argues, developing infrastructure at a large scale in New Zealand can be fraught, socially, politically and financially. New Zealand as a country desires top tier infrastructure, but has not had the same time and resource the countries it compares itself to have had to develop theirs. It has also seen several cycles where a boom in infrastructure development has been followed by busts, for various reasons. I see this need to adapt play out in the current “war” over streets. Lots of our existing streets were originally designed for pedestrians, carts or streetcars as the normal modes of transport in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were then adapted to increasingly favour use by automobiles, which became the new normal. Now, various actors are attempting to reallocate more space to other uses. At the time, people resisted the switch to automobile normalcy, and now people are resisting attempts to shift that normalcy away again. Taking Tookey’s view, current efforts to reallocate space back towards pedestrians, cyclists and public transport reducing the relative dominance of the automobile in design decisions are simply a continuation of that story of ongoing adaptation and re-use to fit changing societal needs and wants.
The benefits that can come from adapting existing infrastructure in the New Zealand context means that, when developing new infrastructure, Tookey would argue that considerable thought should be given to the future, and allowing scope for upgrades or changes so we can make the most of the often significant sunk costs associated with that infrastructure over its lifetime. They use the example of the decision to use narrow gauge railway lines by the Vogel government in the late 19th century. This was done to reduce costs and make traversing mountainous terrain easier, but hampered future efforts to introduce higher speed inter-regional rail, without needing to realign and replace thousands of kilometres of track, and all the rolling stock currently in use, to a wider gauge that could safely accommodate higher speeds. In chapter 8, David Batchelor gives another pertinent example of how hard adaptation can be in practice, describing how the intensification of existing neighbourhoods puts additional pressure and expectations on public parks that were never designed with these increased densities in mind. Yet, providing new parks in these areas comes at ever increasing costs to the communities that need them, both in terms of acquiring new land from (Often multiple) private owners and maintaining the new park, but also the opportunity cost from reduced rates revenue compared to if the land was developed. To go back to the example of our streets, New Zealand could theoretically shift to a fully separated model of transport, where each mode occupied its own space vertically layered over each other, like what some modernist thinkers envisaged as the future of urban transportation. In this model, each mode could have the space it needs to be able to operate at higher efficiency, without conflict between modes seen when they share the same space. However, particularly with New Zealand’s history of boom-and-bust infrastructure development and resulting scepticism of large-scale interventions, this would likely be incredibly difficult to achieve in practice. Instead, we might often be better off making different use of what we currently have to satisfy our current needs and wants, even if that results in some inefficiencies and trade-offs, and take steps to provide for adaptability when we do get to design new infrastructure, accepting that a level of change will be inevitable over its lifetime.
I think this idea from Tookey links in quite nicely with Morten Gjerde’s comments in Chapter 7 that 85 percent of the buildings we will be using in 2050 already exist. While the exact number should be taken with a grain of salt as Tookey did not substantiate why they used it, this speaks to the longevity of our buildings and how design decisions made today will have effects, both good and bad, potentially well after the person who made the decision is gone and the reason they gave, forgotten. Every day we see these impacts, even if they are not immediately obvious. It may be an apartment that’s laid out a bit weirdly, so your furniture never quite fits right, or a tree that roots too shallowly, pushing up the pavement and causing you to stumble, or a whole suburb that doesn’t link very well with its neighbours, making it harder for you to interact with the residents that live there. Given this, I consider that design professionals, and others working in the development space, have an obligation to society to carefully consider the implications of the choices and trade-offs they make for the society their building, or street, or park will become part of. All development in our cities touches the public and the public realm in one way or another. The least we can do is make sure we are taking the public, who are the ones who have to use our designs long after the developer is gone, into account, and try to maximise public benefits against all the other factors that influence a development.
Heritage can be a polarising topic because, as Bill McKay points out in Chapter 8, it is a highly emotive, but also abstract, topic, bedded in people’s individual or shared experiences and values. This is well illustrated by their description of a house that may look normal and unimportant to a passerby, but which is filled with stories and value by a person who grew up in it. One does not make the other untrue just by its existence, but it is where stories and values are shared that a communal idea of what forms heritage is formed. This reinforces the idea that heritage is not a fixed concept in time, but is instead in a constant state of flux as society changes around it. We can see this in changing appreciation of different architectural styles. For example, early commentators on art deco decried it for lacking originality and diversity, being disconnected from social issues, being reliant on industrialisation and their focus on aesthetics. Now they are highly valued for their aesthetic characteristics and storytelling ability in cities like Napier. In my experience, the same shift is currently happening for modernist buildings. Who knows what value will be placed on the buildings currently labelled with many of the same criticisms of both art deco and modernist buildings in the future? Conversely, items that were once valued can find themselves devalued. McKay uses the example of settler homes in central Wellington. These are prized for their design cohesion and representativeness of the city’s colonial history, but which are slowly becoming more associated with being cold, damp and unaffordable. This has then facilitated arguments that the land they are on should be able to be redeveloped to provide housing for new generations of residents and allow new stories to be told. Instead of imposing such a dominant narrative over larger areas, McKay advocates for smaller, more subtle nods and references to heritage, be it a site, building, item or installation. They argue that this provides for more recognition of different sets of societal values that exist alongside each other without competing for authority and, ultimately, improve the vibrancy of an area and its capacity for cultural evolution. I consider that this approach allows for a much fuller and more legitimate picture of what our shared heritage is. It also minimises the risk of the heritage narrative being overtaken by one or two dominant forces, or being locked in and not allowed to change and adapt with the society that writes it.
