Earlier this year, Wellington played host to an unusually focused group of tourists. Eschewing the usual sights of the capital, this tour party instead strolled suburban streets, viewed humble garages and took stock, literally, of our housing stock.
The dozen travellers were graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
The week-long Wellington tour was led by lecturer Yun Fu. “This field trip was hotly contested for places,” says Fu. A trained architect who earned a doctorate with his thesis “Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground”, Christchurch-raised Fu has been teaching at Harvard for six years.
All were part of a studio course taught by Fu that is focused on considering real world problems. Entitled “New New Zealand Housing: Recasting the Good Life at Mid-Density”, the studio course outline noted that although single-family homes with backyards and garages were considered part of the Kiwi way of living, “the challenge of transforming existing low-density neighbourhoods to meet pressing environmental and demographic challenges has urgent international resonances”.
After their site visit, the students worked in pairs to produce a response, elements of which are shown here. Their work was reviewed by critics including the former dean of Harvard’s design school, Wellington-born Peter Rowe, Kiwi Fullbright scholar and Harvard graduate Elyjana Roach and experts from across the faculty.
As well as insights into the Kiwi way of living, the students took away “how it’s possible to be rooted in geography”, says Fu. “They see new possibilities in returning to their own villages, so to speak, and do globally influential work.” Reflective of the makeup of the cohort, those villages are far flung: the students were from mainland US, Hawaii, Canada, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Russia, China and Taiwan.
Their trip was sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, a Harvard-based research and policy think tank that produces the influential “State of the Nation’s Housing” report annually.
In Wellington, they met design academics and local built environment experts, including former NZ Institute of Architects president David Sheppard, Victoria University of Wellington senior lecturer Sam Kebbell, the Pasefika Housing Trust’s Fa’amatuainu Tino Pereira, Ministry of Housing and Urban Development chief science adviser Kay Saville-Smith, and Kainga Ora’s national design quality adviser, Anthony Flannery.
Here are a selection of their ideas and images.
The usefulness of spare space: The garages of today are the street suites of tomorrow
Mark Philip and Yanpeng Leng looked at the large amount of space given over to garages. In their vision, garages are organised cohesively, offering accessible “street suites” that are an efficient use of urban space and used for multiple purposes, including, far left, a home bakery. “Street life thrives on options and chance encounters,” they wrote. “By consolidating garages and other accessory buildings to the street edge, we increase the potential interactions between residents and passers-by ... A well-formed street edge also allows different types of traffic to be more precisely organised.”
Grill to see you: The backyard BBQ elevated
Even more that the stereotypical 3 B’s of success (batch, boat and beemer), it is the backyard BBQ that seems to capture the essence of “the good life” for Kiwis. The familiar and attainable freedom to cook and eat outside with friends and family confirms what we already know - that the best things in life are not just free but uniquely abundant in New Zealand. As neighbourhoods negotiate densification, many fear the backyard BBQ and the ideas it stands for will be compromised. Our proposal rethinks the private outdoor space in mid-density neigbourhoods - imagining a lively streetscape with generous balconies where residents can cook and eat outside, individually and together.
Buy a house, build a house: DIY the Kiwi way
New Zealand is a nation of home renovators. Among international peers, Kiwis are among the most willing to take on DIY projects and to stay and improve their existing homes. Some observers link the hands-on relationship with our homes to the spirits of early Oceanic pioneers and subsequent waves of settlers. But the culture of doing things ourselves with what we have been is more likely a pragmatic reaction to the expense of labour and imported materials on our remote island. For generations of Kiwis, renovating and expanding our homes has also been a way to build wealth and express who we are. This proposal reflects on this spirit, contemplating what DIY means today and how we can retain the agency to shape our homes as we move from single-family houses into more complex and compact buildings in mid-density neighbourhoods.
Our side of the mountain: Re-Imagining urban green space at mid-density
The freedom to access the bush is an enduring Kiwi ideal. Even as New Zealand’s cities grow, city dwellers continue to expect and enjoy nearby access to a larger scale of green open space beyond the yard and garden - expansive enough to be lost in nature just a short walk from home. But despite popular imaginations of Aotearoa’s landscape as beautiful, ever-present and boundless, our urban green spaces are in poor ecological health. As our cities necessarily densify to accommodate an ever-growing population while remaining affordable and sustainable over the long term, we need to recognise the difference between simply having green space and the need to maintain the health of the ecologies we live in. A growing neighbourhood’s social and economic resources can be intelligently deployed to protect and enjoy the precious pockets of nature in our cities - fostering stewardship in the community for “our side of the mountain.”
A stroll to the dairy: Encountering serendipity at a familiar corner
When feeling uninspired, the American goes for a drive, the British make a pot of tea, but Kiwis still take a stroll to the corner dairy. Armed the with alibi of needing some milk, once at the dairy we grab an ice cream, strike up a conversation and inevitably encounter that elusive moment of serendipity. The corner shop with familiar faces is an integral part of neighbourhood life in New Zealand - a place to pick up necessities, catch up on gossip, and leave a spare key when traveling. The dairy’s small scale and proximity are a natural function of the low-rise, suburban context it serves. As neighbourhoods densify and competition intensifies, we explore how these special third spaces, describing places outside of the home and office that are critical for informal encounters and community life, can remain and thrive.
My backyard, our garden: Bridging the scale of privacy and natural systems
Gardening is New Zealand’s national pastime. From the hands-on connection to nature to the possibility of growing food and living independently off the land - the idea of owning and cultivating a garden of one’s own is deeply rooted in the Kiwi dream. As our cities densify, concerns about compromising the garden and the broader idea of the good life it represents are top of mind. Kiwi gardeners find themselves caught between the practical shift to smaller yards and outsized expectations inherited from decades of suburban-living. To bridge the divide, this proposal revives the once-familiar block=scale communal garden for the contemporary mid-density neighbourhood, where residents can contribute to and share in a larger scale landscape that has the critical scale to meet pressing ecological challenges while also fulfilling our gardening dreams.
