Abstract
There has often been a mutually beneficial relationship between cities and their rural hinterlands. The Kapiti region outside the city of Wellington in New Zealand is a prime example: it once provided Wellington’s food, water and cultural diversity for both Māori and European settlers. However, productivity-driven agriculture and extensive dormitory-suburbanization have affected significant parts of this once-abundant hinterland. Food production is becoming more mono-cultural, water quality is degrading, ecosystems’ biodiversity is disappearing, provincial town centres are shrinking, emigrating youth are leaving unbalanced demographics, Māori are increasingly disassociating their culture from their traditional lands and natural disasters are causing more impact—all of which is making Kapiti less resilient, and severing the once-healthy city-hinterland relationship. Our work on future settlement opportunities in Kapiti proposes alternatives, using experimental design-led research methods to develop speculative architectural and landscape architectural schemes. The schemes are framed by some of the spatial attributes of resilience: diversity, complexity, redundancy, interconnectivity and adaptability. Collectively, the work reveals design strategies that have a potential to rebuild hinterlands’ culture, town centres, housing, agriculture, community and ecosystems and to recalibrate the broader relationship between hinterlands and metropolitan systems.
Highlights
High-density centralised well-designed urbanisation is often championed because it offers benefits such as macro-economical power [1], a source of cultural creativity [2], and a capacity for low-carbon emissions [3], and because it promises values such as fairness, safety, accessibility, prosperity, sustainability, and resilience [4].The flipside of high-density cities is a sparsely occupied hinterland
We offer a way of re-thinking future settlement in hinterlands through
The output of this research is a catalogue of designs that explore, through a range of scales, design strategies that defer to the specificity of place and culture, and show ways of calibrating the tensions between the specifics of the local and regional environmental, cultural and social systems
Summary
High-density centralised well-designed urbanisation is often championed because it offers benefits such as macro-economical power [1], a source of cultural creativity [2], and a capacity for low-carbon emissions [3], and because it promises values such as fairness, safety, accessibility, prosperity, sustainability, and resilience [4]. Hinterlands have room for ecosystem services to replenish clean water and fresh air, and for primary productivity to supply food, energy and materials for hungry cities Their sparseness promises a healthy diversity of natural ecosystems; their distances promote richly divergent cultures; and their vastness offers space for urban populations to seek adventure, renewal, refuge and reflection. These benefits and values are perhaps harder to measure than those of dense city centres, and harder to plan for objectively. The schemes suggest a method of designing for resilience, with both local and regional benefits The aim of this collection of design schemes is to gain a deeper understanding of the potential to re-establish a city-hinterland relationship. ‘A Settlers’ Guide’ might provide a way of knowing a place through a selection of settlement possibilities that make better sense when they are woven together through design
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