Urban Aotearoa
ed. David Batchelor and Bill McKay

Urban design is a subject most of us don’t think about very much, until we have to. In that sense, Christchurch is both an illustration and a cautionary tale. Before the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, urban design was a largely esoteric subject. Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl was flown in to show us how to increase ‘public space [and] public life’ in the city through measures his firm had proposed elsewhere, including finding ways to bring people into town after office hours, when the city was notoriously dead, improving cycleways and public transport, emphasising pedestrian lanes, parks and the river, and focusing on the human scale.

That all this appeared to be radical, academic or even utopian at the time shows how far we have come in 15 years, and not just in Christchurch where change was forced upon us. These ideas seem like no-brainers now. In the immediate wake of the 2011 quake, the Christchurch City Council put on a six-week-long public meeting called Share an Idea, in which ordinary people were asked to pitch their ideas about the future city they wanted to see emerge from the ruins. Around 106,000 such ideas were jotted down on coloured notepaper and themes gradually emerged, largely mirroring the kind of ideal city Gehl had already proposed. A city that would be greener, safer, more public, less car-oriented and that, crucially, would make a feature of the Avon River rather than ignore it.

What follows is a long story, but essentially Share an Idea fed into the council’s recovery plan, which was absorbed and replaced – those are polite ways to say it – by the central government’s Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, known colloquially as ‘the blueprint’, which was seen by some in the south as a top-down imposition of Wellington’s will onto a city that long felt it had an independent culture and its own way of doing things. There is a lot in that: the politicisation of urban design, including using funding arrangements to create political power, and battles between local and national authorities. The blueprint’s reduction of the space occupied by the central city, through the creation of green buffer zones, was an attempt to give Christchurch the denser, livelier urban feel of Wellington (or, if you were incredibly optimistic, Melbourne).

This is recent history, and we don’t really expect many people outside Christchurch to care this far along, but the blueprint remains a work in progress. Completion dates of projects were unrealistic, to generate confidence from investors and developers. Outside of the central city that was the subject of the blueprint, there are contradictory trends in domestic architecture. On one hand, city-fringe suburbs that were traditional working-class neighbourhoods (St Albans, Waltham, Sydenham etc) have seen an explosion in townhouse building that typically puts four new homes onto a site that was once occupied by a one-family bungalow or villa. On paper, this kind of medium-density living is a good thing, although trees and green space are lost. The second trend is the continued spread of suburban sprawl beyond the city itself, in the Selwyn and Waimakariri districts to the south and north respectively that are among the fastest growing districts in the country. This is a continuation of the older model of New Zealand life.

The blueprint comes in from some criticism in architect and urban designer Morten Gjerde’s chapter in Urban Aotearoa: The Future for Our Cities, a useful and highly relevant BWB Text edited by David Batchelor and Bill McKay. Gjerde contrasts the successful transformation of the Wellington waterfront, through grassroots activism that established the Waterfront Leadership Group, with the Christchurch plan:

The Christchurch Central Recovery Plan identified seventeen anchor projects that were meant to stimulate flow of private investment capital. More than a decade on, significant gaps along many streets in the city remain. These will only be filled as demand for accommodation, whether commercial, residential or hospitality-focused, arises in the city. In the meantime, the public will have to wait.

In fairness, the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent recession has dragged that wait out longer than anyone could have imagined when the blueprint was released with much fanfare in 2012. Equally, uncertainty around the Anglican cathedral rebuild has stalled the redevelopment of Cathedral Square. But his observation remains: there was an element of fantasy in the blueprint.

Christchurch also illustrates an essential point made in Batchelor and McKay’s afterword, about why we should avoid taking off-the-peg design solutions that risk turning every place into the same place.

Aotearoa urbanism should acknowledge local geographies. It should understand that Wellington’s winds are adversarial to exposed balconies, Auckland’s viaduct has a minimal impact on the well-being of residents in Papakura and Whangaparāoa, and the rebuilding of Christchurch challenges its Garden City self-image. It should also recognise the restful anchorage of Tauranga, the manaakitanga of the Hutt Valley and the sturdy inventiveness of Dunedin.

Similarly, they argue, ‘stadiums, convention centres and gentrified marketplaces are not “out of the box” fixes to revitalise downtown areas’.

Many Cantabrians will nod along with those sentiments, especially the bit about the stadium (the very opposite of ‘human scale’), and they will agree with another sentiment in the same chapter, about how we must move past ‘the abundance of greys and browns that colour today’s townhouses’. Entire streets in Christchurch are being transformed by the blandness of identical townhouses. The overtly London-inspired pastiches of the Brooksfield developers come as a relief in this context – at least the faux-Englishness feels like a local flavour. A point made about Wellington could also apply to Christchurch and other centres, which is that the Covid lockdowns demonstrated why we need accessible green spaces at times of stress, a tendency that has been called ‘urgent biophilia’.

It would be a complete misrepresentation to say this is a book about Christchurch. In fact, Christchurch appears in the text only 32 times, compared to 209 for Auckland and 118 for Wellington. But there are ways in which the accelerated process of the rebuilding of a city offers laboratory-like opportunities to see what works and what does not, such as in this observation in Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub’s chapter on housing affordability.

Even when some local authorities are responsive to housing demand, other issues can crop up. Their consequences are complex. The experience of Selwyn and Waimakariri districts after the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010–11 is a good example. There was widespread damage and destruction to homes, so there was an urgent need to build a large number of new homes. Most of the construction in Christchurch consisted of repair or replacement, while housing growth was concentrated in Selwyn and Waimakariri. This helped alleviate housing shortages, but also made it necessary for people to drive long distances to work. While the initiative met the demand for housing, it pushed up against climate change commitments. This has lasting implications for Canterbury, where public transport availability and use are very low.

Other chapters make fascinating observations that have less to do with the Garden City but reinforce Batchelor and McKay’s point about the need to find local solutions rather than importing design principles (despite the seemingly universal applicability of Jan Gehl). The differences are not merely geographical but cultural, as Anthony Hōete and Lama Tone show in their respective chapters on Māori and Pacific urbanism. Essentially, our cities have been colonial sites that Māori, Pacific people and others have had to find their place within. Tone notes that design guides were implemented in 2002 to create social and state housing that better served the ways that both Māori and Pacific communities live, which differ greatly from inherited Pākehā models.

As architects and designers, we can no longer rubber-stamp or cookie-cut housing. It is time we look towards new forms, spaces, materials, construction techniques, concepts and ideas. It’s time to hear what community needs are, as this will inform how we design throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. We must be a community to design for a community.

She moves from this to a larger vision, which really sits at the heart of the book itself.

The quarter-acre dream, once a birthright in Aotearoa New Zealand and a drawcard for Pacific people migrating to our shores, has vanished due to unaffordable house prices and the intensification of our cities. Continuing immigration to and population growth within our country means that the suburban ways of living have to be put aside and our cultures – including Māori, Pacific, Asian, African, Muslim and Pākehā – must adapt to urbanism down under.

The future for our cities will not come easily. There are the challenges of climate change and the costs of building. City centres continue to be hollowed out by changing work, shopping and hospitality patterns. Transport infrastructure is becoming increasingly political (why should a cycleway start a culture war?). But this small book, packed with valuable ideas and even the occasional trace of hope, suggests a way forward is not impossible.