News

Our most popular downloaded Urban Design report in 2022 was landscape architect Jacqueline Paul’s (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) Exploring Te Aranga design principles in Tāmaki.

Te Aranga Design Principles are a cultural landscape strategy/approach to design thinking and making which incorporates a series of Māori cultural values and principles. Jacqueline’s study strives towards a better understanding of the principles, and how they apply in developing policy and design for residential development in the Tāmaki Area.

The study also suggests how the principles can be embedded through procurement, and develops a framework to translate them into the design process and contracts for the Tāmaki Regeneration Company.

Te Aranga Māori Design Principles were developed by Māori design professionals as a response to the New Zealand Urban Design Protocol in 2005. Over time the principles have been developed and adopted by the Auckland Council with the support of Ngā Aho and are being promoted across all council built projects.

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The Office of the Prime Ministers Chief Science Advisor has two smaller evidence synthesis projects in progress exploring:

• Minimising harm from and within gangs in Aotearoa
• Building young people’s resilience through critical thinking and digital citizenship skills

Details of the project are available via the weblinks above. The PMCSA is looking to identify researchers that have both relevant expertise and would be interested in feeding back as a peer reviewer over the next 2-4 months for either project.

If you are an expert or stakeholder in this area, and would like to be involved, please reach out by emailing info@pmcsa.ac.nz with your name, contact details, and a short statement on your relevant expertise by 5pm, 24 February.

Access and susceptibility to false online information, including information that is misleading, harmful and hateful, is a rapidly growing global challenge. The increased use of the internet and social media by children and young people poses a significant risk for Aotearoa New Zealand. These threats from Polluted Information include the undermining of social cohesion, well-being, and a well-informed citizenry.

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At the end of January, an “atmospheric river” deluged Auckland, causing wide-spread flooding and a State of Emergency in the region.

Although the rain was an unprecedented record setter, how has the city performed? When the water recedes, are there lessons to be learned and changes to be made in how we create our urban environments? Do our stormwater systems need revising in the face of a changing climate? Do we need to radically change our thinking about non-porous hard surfaces that force water into surface run-off? Should councils be mandating Water Sensitive Urban Design on all new developments and actively retrofitting existing infrastructure to try and prevent the events that occurred in Auckland from happening again?

A team of researchers supported by BBHTC say we need to shift our thinking and start adopting Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) now, as extreme events such as that in Auckland are likely to become more frequent.

Dr Robyn Simcock says the large, tree-filled raingardens in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter show how to absorb excess run-off water from impermeable surfaces. There are a myriad of ways to help create ‘sponge’ cities such as dual use of low-lying parks to hold runoff, roadside raingardens to reduce flow into guttering, trees beside roads, greenroofs, and reducing impermeable surfaces. Photo: Robyn Simcock, Landcare Research.

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In this The Conversation article by BBHTC researchers Kelly Dombroski and Amanda Yates, the pair explore post-quake urban recovery in Ōtautahi Christchurch. In the aftermath of a series of earthquakes that devastated the city 12 years ago, impromptu and transitional organisations kickstarted the city’s recovery.

On the many vacant sites in the demolished city, they supported pop-up shops, installations and events to keep city life and urban wellbeing going during the slow post-quake rebuild.

Such transitional urban wellbeing efforts are just as relevant elsewhere as cities experience the impacts of climate chaos and wider ecological decline, and are subject to shocks, both acute and chronic.

Cities are under increasing pressure to shift to circular, zero-carbon and ecological living systems to support social, cultural and ecological wellbeing. Researchers studying urban system change have identified key areas of action for holistic wellbeing.

The Commons in Christchurch is now a regular space for markets and events. Photo: Gap Filler, CC BY-ND.

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Issue 23 of the Building Better newsletter is out now, packed full of research news and views from Building Better researchers.

Articles include:

• Māori researchers shed light on severity of youth homelessness;
• Reflections on kaumātua, pakeke and seniors’ housing: Building robust solutions with research;
• Wide-ranging new book revitalises understanding of home for Māori in the twenty-first century;
• Innovating housing futures: case studies from the Waikato and Nelson;
• Maintaining residential dwellings;
• Where do graduates go? It depends on their degree;
• New research publications;
• …and much more.

There have been several innovative responses to housing unaffordability in both the Waikato and Nelson. Researchers in the Affordable Housing for Generations (AHfG) research programme in the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities National Science Challenge (BBHTC), Bev James, Gauri Nandedkar, and Simon Opit have been exploring the potential of local innovation through land and financial investment strategies.

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There have been several innovative responses to housing unaffordability in both the Waikato and Nelson. Researchers in the Affordable Housing for Generations (AHfG) research programme in the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities National Science Challenge (BBHTC), Bev James, Gauri Nandedkar, and Simon Opit have been exploring the potential of local innovation through land and financial investment strategies.

Bev explains that in the Waikato region, they encountered two linked innovative responses, “These were strategic networking, as exemplified by the Waikato Housing Initiative (WHI), and the establishment of a community land trust, as exemplified by the Waikato Community Lands Trust (WCLT).”

The WHI is a multi-agency and cross-sectoral group with goals to improve the delivery of affordable housing that responds to local housing need. The WCLT is a charitable trust aiming to acquire land on which partners will build affordable housing.

“These responses have gradually developed over the past decade, in the context of a deepening awareness of critical regional housing issues, including lack of housing supply, declining affordability of homes to rent or buy, a growing intermediate housing market, an ageing housing stock and poor dwelling conditions, as well as rising homelessness,” says Bev.

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BBHTC researcher Dr Nigel Isaacs, a senior lecturer at the Wellington School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, has investigated the programmes or requirements in other countries for maintaining residential dwellings to see if these incentives and programmes are useful in a New Zealand context.

He writes that although designers, builders, purchasers, product suppliers, and politicians frequently focus on construction costs, the real cost of a dwelling over its life also includes its operating cost and cost of maintenance and refurbishment. Those latter costs are rarely taken into account when we consider housing affordability. And, unfortunately, the issue of maintenance, or more correctly a lack of maintenance, of New Zealand houses has a long history.

“The New Zealand Building Code (NZBC) is unique among international jurisdictions in including a durability requirement to ensure that consented dwellings have a limited maintenance requirement over a specified lifespan, that requirement is implemented through NZBC Clause B2-Durability, but whether that means that New Zealand has minimised maintenance and repair costs is debatable. What is clear is that dwelling maintenance continues to present challenges to many owner occupiers and property investors.”

Regular BRANZ House Condition Surveys have found that New Zealand dwellings are not well maintained, with households spending around one third of the amount required for maintenance. Low maintenance is a national problem. Photo: Nigel Isaacs.

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Maia Ratana, one of the three researchers who make up the rangatahi ahu for Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua – the flagship Māori housing research programme for the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities (BBHTC) National Science Challenge was recently interviewed by Dale Husband for Waatea News.

“If you think about state housing, and what Māori were living in as they moved into the cities during urban migration, those houses did not meet the way we live as Māori. At lot of the time, the lounge might be at one end of the house and the kitchen at the other, so how do you manaaki when you don’t have spaces that reflect the way we like to live. Jade [Kake], myself, and many others have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about and working towards creating spaces that reflect the way we want to live as Māori,” says Maia.

Maia Ratana. Photo: Desna Whaanga-Schollum.

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