On one of the first nights that my son and I went to sleep in our house in Earthsong, a co-housing community in West Auckland, I experienced a shift in my spatial connection with my surroundings. Instead of feeling as though I was asleep inside my house and the threshold to the outside world was through those walls, I felt distinctly as though I was going to sleep inside the boundaries of Earthsong. My concept of home had expanded. It included not only our four walls but also those of the three-acre site and the 70 or so people within it. Later, the juxtaposition of this middle-class, eco, co-housing situation, in contrast with the banal and poverty-stricken landscape of Ranui, would be the beginnings of my Master’s research, leading me to question: “How and why are these invisible social boundaries put in place? What is the role of architecture in their formation and the subsequent effect on social interaction, connection and well-being?”

Ranui, itself, is a West Auckland suburb suffering from poor self-image and a segregated Mãori and Pacific Island population bearing the brunt of New Zealand’s quiet racism and subtle, yet significant, class divisions. Domestic violence and heart disease have little visual impact. The depth of our social malaise is easy to contain within a pretty, benign landscape. There are trees and grass and open space. There is no war, starvation or lack of clean water. Few would argue against the fact that we live in a beautiful country and even the most dismal of suburbs would be considered idyllic for many people around the world. But, by most indexes of social well-being, we score poorly. “Since the 1980s, the number of people who are poor in New Zealand has doubled, with many families living in severe hardship.”1 We have one of the highest rates of child poverty in the OECD2 and the highest rate of teen suicide,3 and one in three women will bear the brunt of domestic abuse in her lifetime4. Our health is measurable by our social well-being, as much as it is by our physical state, and the built environment plays an important role in social sustainability.

There is a malignant kind of undergrowth in suburban New Zealand and it originates in the way we place ourselves in the world, in relation to other people. We are an island nation with a post-colonial identity crisis. Seduced by the promise of property ownership, the early settlers acquired space to possess and this relationship of laying claim on some portion of the earth remains deeply embedded in our national psyche. In a short space of time, the country was parcelled and sold. We imported the concept of suburbia and, coupled with our island mentality and nationalistic sentiment, we are quick to isolate and self-protect. Fear generates an attachment to our quarter-acre sections and our adequate fences.

The landscape holds a very tight grip on our concept of home; the ferocity of the natural beauty that is visually abundant takes full precedence in receiving our attention. Our urban fabric is generally a very loose weave – low-rise buildings, huge amounts of open space and a sprinkling of people in between. This is not just an incidental aspect of our built environment; it is a heavily engrained part of our identity. We are constantly on the lookout for ways to ‘get away’ from other people – to escape to the bach, go away to the beach, camp in the middle of nowhere, take the boat out – just far enough so as not to see any other people. Within the suburb, we prioritise private views and ‘peace and quiet’; a kind of ‘rural’ isolation is highly prized. And this is all fine, until we begin to make ourselves sick. Just as, less than 200 years ago, our architectural fabric began to change dramatically to accommodate a desire for sanitation, so now it will change again, this time with social sustainability in mind.5 On the premise that spatiality influences our social well-being in the suburb, this Master’s project begins to challenge the performativity of Ranui.

The suburb itself contains around 10,000 people and is growing quickly. You may have heard its name on the news – probably associated with murder, gang-related violence or domestic abuse. The quality of housing stock is generally poor, the health statistics – particularly for preventable infectious diseases – is worse. I moved there to live in Earthsong. As a solo mum – working, studying and managing full-time care of my son on a very tight budget – the idea of living in a community was very attractive. It was a good move; two years on and we are still living there happily. The difference between living in normal suburbia and living in an intentional community became apparent very quickly. Not only did we get to know our neighbours but, with some, we have formed very close friendships and bonds. The level of support I receive from my neighbours and the amount of positive social interaction and connection we experience has meant that we enjoy a much better quality of physical and mental health.

American neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has worked extensively to measure the impact of social well-being, or lack thereof, on our physical health. He says, “We have evolved enough to be capable of making ourselves sick. Something like a gazelle does not have a very complex emotional life. It is only when we get to primates, that we see things like depression.”6 He argues that we are ultimately social beings and this is the greatest factor in determining how healthy we are. Whether it is by cause, effect or perpetuation, our built environment has a direct relationship with the quality of our social interaction and our social sustainability.

The relationship between this social set-up and architecture in a New Zealand context starts to become interesting. From the original woven whare, our post-colonial housing became solid, strong and impermeable, in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease and to dictate social conduct. “The house is conceived as a strong container of property: a place for the maintenance of the father’s law. It needs solid walls, strong doors and latches to guard against inadmissible openings. The permeable structure of the woven home, with openings omnipresent, had the potential to lead to dissipation, the loss of life, and the loss of property and name.”

Our house contains every threshold between the world and ourselves: doorways within and throughout, dictating social interaction beyond. What happens if we then begin to conceptualise suburbia, not as a collection of private dwellings that serve to guard against inadmissible openings and the loss of life – sentiments that are largely based in fear of the unknown and of the other – but as a blueprint of possible social connection and landmarks of collective identity? And what kind of an impact would that have then on the health of the population?

Recent studies provide sound evidence that the negative impact of both income and wealth inequality not only affects the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, but manifests right across the spectrum.8 This is significant as it challenges our isolation and self-protection; we are no longer able to turn a blind eye to what is happening in our communities because it can affect us directly as individuals and is made quantifiable by our ability to measure health and well-being. A focus on individual health – the ‘body as a temple’ idea – is of no use if our suburbs are treated like crack houses – unfortunate places to pass through, piss on and escape from as quickly as possible.

Ranui shows itself as a more concentrated example of a wider condition in New Zealand suburbs.

So what do we do? We can’t wipe the slate clean. And I would argue that we don’t need to. The problem with Auckland’s housing crisis isn’t really about the quantity available, or the quality of the existing. While still acknowledging the housing crisis and the high percentage of people who are homeless in Auckland, I believe the solution lies in retrofitting the suburb to accommodate a growing desire for more social connectivity – a desire to know one’s neighbours and provide possibility for alleviating poverty with community. We also need to concretise the identity of Ranui itself. Our neighbourhoods are the spaces between the wider collective and ‘us’ as individuals; we have to nourish and propagate this space as an extension of ourselves. The result is a kind of individual collectivism.

Following Henri Lefebvre’s proposition, we can begin to engage with ‘utopia’ as a way to experiment with real possibility, while keeping in mind that the very definition of utopia prescribes a result that is the ‘epitome of human folly and the ultimate in human hope.’9 But what could Ranui look like as a picture of a completely fantastical wonderland? In seeing our suburbs as fertile grounds of performativity, we can dream up what we wish to manifest. Here, examples like Earthsong are useful in exploring possibilities and testing out the efficacy of alternative methods: consensus decision-making and a different political construct. But we need to be creating more and, as architects, we should be useful in coming up with the goods in terms of solutions. Maybe part of the solution involves architects playing the roles of developers – there are countless examples of this being successful. However it happens, we need to move forward ensuring that we create built environments that facilitate health and well-being.

Health in itself is a fluid subject: the crossovers between our physical, mental and social health are not yet fully understood. Our bodies are the receptacles of our individual identity and the point of departure for our interaction with the world. Foucault’s exploration into ‘medicine and the body’ provides reference for connecting self-identity with wider social relationships. His belief was that “individuality is not simply an idea but its concrete realisation in the facticity of the body.”10 If the epidermis of each of our bodies provides such a firm threshold for our individuality, what borders are we creating for our streets, neighbourhoods and communities? Perhaps the definition of boundaries and disconnections with outside entities is what promotes connectivity within. How do we delineate and spatially define the way we relate
to one another in a way that broadens the depth of interaction and increases social sustainability?

According to Angelique Edmonds, ‘social sustainability’ is about “ensuring the sustenance of the diverse social relations that exist in healthy communities”. Evidence would suggest that this is something that people care about and want to improve: “97 per cent of the population believes that the quality of buildings and public space has an impact on their health and well-being.”11 A number of pragmatic options are proposed for architects and designers, and design for social sustainability includes: providing aspects of “amenities and social infrastructure, social and cultural life, voice and influence and space to grow”.12

The change that is happening involves a restructuring of how we turn inwards and face outwards: redefining the role of the individual within the collective, placing suburbia within this, and acknowledging the ways in which we are evolving into new ways of social interaction. The peripheries of home widen to include markings of a neighbourhood that cater for all manner of social interactions, improving health and facilitating the depth of connection with our boundaries – within ourselves and with the wider world. The possibility of wildness emerges as the temple and the crack house intertwine.