The University of Auckland runs an interesting leadership scholarship programme founded and funded, with local support, by Canadians John and Marcy McCall MacBain. The Kupe Leadership Scholarship, as it is called, is one of many the McCall MacBains have established around Commonwealth countries. In New Zealand, it is offered to about 18 postgraduate students from all faculties within the university. It provides a scholarship payment, a mentor for the year the scholarship is held, and a programme of leadership training based around live-in workshops and seminars that include leaders from many fields of political, social and academic endeavour. Though the students, who are awarded the scholarship after a rigorous selection process, are, without a doubt, extremely able academically, it is their potential to be leaders for which they are selected.

The programme has a formal launch every year and, though this year’s was, by necessity, undertaken ‘virtually’, it was no less inspiring than those in previous years, when the students, their families, sponsors and mentors have been brought together to celebrate the programme and the success of those who have been selected. If you are ever feeling a little depressed by the inexorable parade of miseries of an aggrieved planet and the witless, venal and murderous behaviour of many of its occupants, I urge you to wangle an invitation to the evening. There you will find a coterie of young people with outstanding abilities and an overwhelming commitment to the betterment of Aotearoa.

I talked with one of this year’s cohort recently: a student of architecture. In response to my invitation to pose a question to one who is, in almost every way, her opposite, she raised the question of how an architect might engage in the issue of the housing shortage. She referred to having seen thesis titles of the work of previous years’ students, each of which suggested the author was setting out to solve complex social issues, including those of inequality of access to housing. She noted that, for all the utopian possibilities hinted at in its title, each of the theses inevitably dealt with the condition of the single building. No matter how worthy the contribution to the body of architectural discourse the work was, the big issues of social equity and universal access to housing remained unaltered. We agreed that, while architects might engage in and, indeed, had an ethical responsibility to act to ensure, if nothing else, the responsible use of scarce resources, the more intractable problems around housing supply and distribution were unlikely to be resolved on the drawing board or its digital equivalent.

I hope that I did not appear too much like an old buffer just awaiting an opening to roll out my favourite hobby horse once again: to wit, the awful consequences of neo-liberal economics, the politics of avarice and the false assumption of the trickle-down economy. Despite my better judgement, I launched in and rolled out the culprits: Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their south seas acolytes, Douglas, Prebble and their running dogs in a party that should have known better.

These proponents of the so-called ‘trickle down’ benefits of tax breaks as a mechanism for pumping up the economy have left the political stage and seem to appear only in the op-ed columns of The Herald. The failure of that ideology is measured in the dreadful yardstick of inadequate housing and the consequent injury to the health, welfare, rights and reasonable expectations of our fellow citizens who inhabit what housing is available. So pervasive and unchallenged is the belief that the market delivers an irrefutably correct distribution of wealth that any alternative system seems a fantasy and the idea that one might consciously manipulate the mechanisms of state to ameliorate the malign effects of social inequality seems hopelessly naïve.

The legacy of those local politicians who so enthusiastically embraced Thatcherite economic policies is escalating social inequality, measured in indices that come close to circumscribing the political context within which we architects operate. Lest these seem abstract issues of little import, they are critical issues for the many graduates and young architects motivated by a desire to use their skills for the betterment of the world, yet faced with an industry needing them to spend their days embedded in the manipulation of client-owned surplus.

This is, of course, a binary reading; we work in a spectrum along which we place ourselves. At one end, are the spectacular assemblages of material and space that we are so good at, especially in the residential realm. At the other end are those who work at making more with less, not in some reductive Miesian way, but in ensuring the very best use is made of a finite public purse in the provision of affordable housing.

I once had a fellow director who was of the view that there was no such thing as altruistic behaviour and that though the payback to an individual’s action might not be immediately apparent, all action was irrevocably driven by self-interest. I thought it was an absurd argument at the time and even more so now as I enjoyed the optimistic idealism of the Kupe scholar and her fellow scholarship recipients.

The dismantling of the machinery of the welfare state that I spoke of was an awfully long time ago and the assumptions of a market-driven economy so pervasive now as to seem the natural order of things. Yet the legacy of a state active in the hands-on provision of the necessities of society is apparent still in, for example, the wonderful string of powerhouses that generate hydro power along the Waikato and many other of the country’s rivers.

The Ministry of Works that undertook the construction of so much of our infrastructure in the first two-thirds of the 20th century was criticised for its inefficiencies, the feather-bedding of jobs and lack of financial accountability. It and many other state agencies like it were seen as the worst excesses of what is now disparagingly called ‘the nanny state’ and were broken up, the subsidies and state monopolies that allowed them to operate dismantled in favour of the ruthless logic of the open market.

It’s probably unfair to compare the construction efficiencies of those elegant structures housing turbines and transformers dotting the nation’s rivers with the long-awaited Transmission Gully highway into Wellington. If nothing else, the difficulties of the highway’s construction suggest that the market, much manipulated as it was in the motorway’s case, has not delivered the promised efficiencies. One cannot help but think the cobbling together of private construction companies to shift construction cost from the public purse might not be the best procurement strategy for such complex projects.

It might be a ‘long bow’ to equate the complexities of dam and road building with housing the nation’s populace yet there is a similar reliance on a private sector manipulated, ‘fine tuned’, by a plethora of controls each aimed at constraining the open market to achieve complex social goals. The cost of such a strategy is that incremental action damns us to fiddling with iterations of the familiar rather than developing housing and settlement models better suited to the reconfigured urban conditions that are evolving under the duress of climate change, pandemic and war.

There is no better time to cast off the failures and shortcomings of trying to fit an earlier age’s suburban values into increasingly dense communities. It’s time to dismantle the assumptions of land ownership, capital financing and the patchwork of controls shaping our cities. Time to dream no small dreams and act, if we are to move the hearts of our fellow citizens and realise a bold future for Aotearoa. I know just the group of young people to do it.

Pip Cheshire is an architect and writer, recipient of the NZIA Gold Medal and Past President of the New Zealand Institute of Architects.