SAANZ Conference 2021

Chair: Helen Fitt

11:00am - 11:20am 
PLANNING, GOVERNANCE AND A CITY FOR THE FUTURE?
Eric Pawson

It has been argued that New Zealand’s existing governance structures are insufficiently anticipatory in the face of change. This paper explores whether this has been so in the context of post-earthquake urban recovery. It traces links between new governance entities created for the rebuild and antecedent planning processes, and discusses the extent to which these entities, in focusing on specific outcomes, have delivered a coherent or a fragmentary post-earthquake vision. Three aspects of post earthquake urban governance are discussed: the genesis of the Crown’s blueprint for the downtown district, the enabling of rapid expansion of subdivision in greenfield districts in and around the metropolitan area, and the debate over the future of the city’s red zone, those eastern suburbs abandoned in the face of damage from liquefaction. The use of these simple colour-coded metaphors suggests a clarity that is at odds with the complexity of the context, as well as the fragmentary nature of post-earthquake governance when considered as a whole.


11:20am - 11:40am
PRACTISING URBANISM; DE-COLONISATION AND RE-OCCUPATION OF PUBLIC SPACE
Suzanne Vallance

In this paper, I argue for both the de-colonisation and re-occupation of the urban commons that have been occupied, initially the modern state’s penchant for administrative ordering and, subsequently, by the neo-liberal state’s deference to ‘the market’. Neither project has been particularly humane; both have left our public places poorly placed to promote civil society or strong environmental ethics. Before state consolidation, expansion and colonialism, people’s relationships with each other and the ‘natural’ world were of critical importance. Decolonisation, here, speaks to the need to find places in which these relationships can, again, feature prominently in people’s everyday lives. This resonates with our increased appreciation of ideas like manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga and whanaunatanga here in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This de-colonisation, I argue, can be supported by the re-occupation of ‘public’ space, space literally made public through more widespread practices of co-management of urban commons such as streets and parks. The co-management draws on Ostrom’s principles but also involves street science and collective experimentation that upholds the value of shared experiences, hospitality, stewardship, self-determination and subsidiarity.


11:40am - 12:00pm
THE HOUSING CRISIS AND CITIZEN OPPOSITION TO LAND-USE PROPOSALS
Morgan Hamlin

This presentation discusses how citizens effectively politicise proposed housing developments as public issues when they are justified as a solution to the housing crisis. It is based on my recent research on how Justifications Analysis can be utilised to understand the politicisation of land-use proposals in the public sphere (Hamlin, 2021). I focus on a proposal to develop part of the Point England Reserve for housing and the moral orders of worth that underpinned the claims made by supporters and citizen opponents. I explore how citizens effectively critiqued the market-based justifications for the proposal with an anti-privatisation argument. Citizens invoked civic and green justifications to claim that that reserve should be protected for environmental reasons and its recreational significance. Rather than being a form NIMBYism, I discuss how public responses are culturally informed political acts that transform housing proposals, which appear as well-meaning interventions in the housing crisis, into contestable public issues.

 
12:00pm - 12:20pm
MESS OR MASH-UP? ARE PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE, MOBILITY BIOGRAPHY, AND SHARED MOBILITY PIECES OF THE SAME PUZZLE?
Helen Fitt, Angela Curl & Simon Kingham

Shared mobility has potential to improve access and increase wellbeing for low-income populations and older people. Shared mobility involves short term rental or loan of vehicles, and can include cars, bikes, and scooters. Lowering the per-trip costs of transport, increasing the range of transport options to which people have access, and increasing the use of active transport modes should (in theory) reduce the number of people who struggle to access important amenities and social opportunities. There is, however, little international evidence of this happening and minimal discussion of the social processes involved in the emergence of outcomes from shared mobility schemes. The ACTIVATION research project is working with social housing tenants and retirement village residents who have recently gained access to shared mobility. This presentation proposes a novel combination of a practice architecture perspective and a mobility biography method to try to understand how mobility practices are influenced by access to shared mobility. It asks whether assembling these different theoretical, methodological, and empirical elements results in a difficult to disentangle mess, or a productive mash-up that will help us to devise better approaches to shared mobility schemes.