The movement of protests on US and UK campuses against the genocide of Palestinians has foregrounded that space, and the ways in which it is regulated, testing the constituent parts and, by extension, the whole of those democratic institutions.

These protests illustrate that space can be created in the imagination, inhabited with a different mandate and policed with opposing politics, and can produce a set of circumstances that are tense, unpredictable and violent. The architects of those campuses likely imagined those buildings and their green spaces alight with intellectual endeavour, thrusting humanity forward. By contrast, the protesting students and staff now inhabiting those halls and lawns feel the precarity as policing measures grow in violence. The outcomes have become more dire as the protestors call for their universities to divest from all investments that enable the occupation of Palestine, and the genocide.

I am struck by this image of architects toiling away at desks, a lamp turned on overhead as night falls, creating designs made for a world they imagine to be. And then the world changes and that past imagination shows up as perhaps naïve in its inability to conceive of a world that is divisive, conflictual and unable to use human progress to alleviate suffering. It is not the imagination of the architect that I think is responsible for this but, rather, the imagination of society. How do we collectively imagine the world? How do we collectively imagine the future of the built realm? These are not questions I expect or even look to answer here but they do represent my current state of thinking and frame this column’s discussion.

Here, in New Zealand, the new government’s policies and resultant settings are beginning to touch our lives in ways that are more lasting than they were when those policies were campaign promises. As part of the process, the government, firstly, has had to repeal or remove acts, legislation and authorities installed by its predecessors. Of those directly related to the architectural profession and the building industry are the Nature and Built Environment Act 2023 and the Spatial Planning Act 2023, and then, less directly but likely to feature in shaping the sector, are the Fair Pay Agreements and, for those in Auckland and Wellington, light rail and transport infrastructure.

One thing to which I have been introduced that has made me think about the resetting of and farewells to such investments, is that policy-impact observations will be enabled. For every new policy, we will be able to understand clearly the correlations between their formulations (and, for me, the ways in which they are imagined) and their downstream effects. Regardless of your political agenda, this, I think, can be productive, in that we can gain insights from this new policy landscape and, particularly so, in a destabilised time following a pandemic.

I find myself debating where my energies should lie, between critique, action and observation. Should I be critiquing the shifting political landscape that will, and already is, creating strife in my communities or should I, with the skills I have, be observing, impartial and, therefore, uncompromised.

The feminism scholars would likely shake their heads and remind me that politics is personal and to strive for impartiality hinders more than it helps. I raise this not to segue but, rather, to say that it is not that I propose treating the new policy landscape (and, by extension, the undoing of other policy measures) as overall a positive thing, as it enables us to treat the next three years as a kind of social experiment. Rather, I suspect we will see, in ways we have not before, how ideologies produce very specific outcomes and, as the world’s resources become more — more than they are even now — finite, those outcomes will be key to understanding how best to serve the future. And how we imagine it.

There have been some interesting developments in the regulation of the built realm that have brought me to these more-recent reflections. A little over a year ago, Yale University’s Sterling Emeritus Professor of Economics, and Professor of Economics at the School of Business at the University of Auckland, Peter Phillips and Associate Professor of Economics, at the University of Auckland, Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy published their findings on the impacts of upzoning in Auckland.¹ Upzoning, in this context, means the changes in code required to allow for more development. It is, from a built realm, research and living local standpoint, interesting for several quite different reasons.

Firstly, the paper asserts that the extensive upzoning that occurred in 2016 does stimulate housing supply and construction. From a research perspective, it is an education to observe the debate from the disciplinary standpoint of architecture, particularly a more humanities-focused position; so, you are telling me that beauty alone will not reform housing inequity? What do I do with all this watercolour paper?

And then, locally, it has been curious to observe that higher-income suburbs were not upzoned, causing most of the new housing supply to be built in lower-income suburbs.² Character areas, with leafy streets and maintained playground areas, were protected, whilst lower-income areas with fewer amenities were seemingly sacrificed for a crisis that is collectively shared. To each of these points there exists a debate, and a quandary, which continues in real time and which is international in reach and, in the land economics world, sort of, well, I guess, spicy.

Critiques of the paper’s findings include the methodology, which uses consents to measure housing supply and construction.³ To the point of the humanities silo sitting outside where the real action occurs when it comes to construction, the future of higher education is also being debated. And, lastly, when I think about this city, the city I call home, I am not convinced that saving some character streets at the cost of further city sprawl is the future. But, then, what is? I get the sense it may well be a communal imagining that takes the observing, the critiquing to imagine, how I can place myself in a future that I can step towards today as a citizen, practitioner and member of the community.

I keep thinking that it is so important that, as overwhelming as it can be to take up a stance and engage in the debates that shape the quality of our lives, it is worth doing, because what the heck else can one do? Despite criticising urban sprawl, I have unleashed a sort of thinking sprawl. But, if you, reader, would indulge one last idea, I think it is OK that we think messily — what we cannot afford to do is to avoid thinking at all.

References

^{1 Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy and Peter C B Phillips, ‘The Impact of Upzoning on Housing Construction in Auckland’, IDEAS, Working Paper series from RePEc, 2022.
2 Eleanor West & Marko Garlick, ‘Upzoning New Zealand’, Works in Progress, issue 13, 2023. worksinprogress.co/issue/upzoning-new-zealand/
3 Cameron Murray & Tim Helm, ‘The Auckland Upzoning Myth: Response to comments’, Fresh Economic Thinking, 2023. fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-upzoning-myth-response}