This article in the Press yesterday wrote about the fact that after the earthquakes we got things right around here. Mostly because there was Government intervention in the market and assistance with infrastructure.
Previous Tuesday Club events on 20 Minute Cities
Also, Waimakariri and Selwyn Councils got their act together as they had a 30-year plan which enabled them to absorb massive new developments. Here’s the article which covers housing changes in our area.
In the article below Lord Norman Foster, a famous UK architect, wrote:
Neighbourhoods have seen a resurgence in appeal with the tag of “the 15-minute city”. The ideal of being able to live, work, sleep, shop, dine, be educated, entertain and be entertained – with all the venues for as many of those activities as possible to be within walking distance of each other.
The attraction of neighbourhood living is not new, but it has been given a timely and welcome boost by the pandemic. It is now opportune to build on that through a combination of design interventions and the politics of zoning.
These dense communities have not seen higher infection rates, rather the problem is dense cramped households, whether within cities or suburbs – an issue before the pandemic. Affordable accommodation remains a challenge and is inseparable from the plight of homeless people.
Issues of agriculture could also help transform our cities into even more green enclaves. Urban farming of vegetables, using hydroponics, could deliver fresh food, cheaper and more flavourful, with higher yields and a fraction of the use of precious water – all delivered on the urban doorstep, a new version of the farmers’ market. An obsolete multi-storey car park is the ideal urban farm. In the quest for the self-sustaining city, holistic thinking that cuts across traditional bureaucracies is needed (the conversion of waste to energy is a good example). In the move to greater autonomy we need to question the traditional power grid, which, for example, saw 2.5 million Californians without electricity last summer.
In the bigger picture, globalisation has lifted huge segments of humanity out of poverty, but it is not without the dire consequences of localised rust belts. Will the economic challenges of a pandemic lead to fewer and bigger, in the art of survival? The hope is a better balance – shared global action on the big environmental and health issues, and local action in the making, growing and powering of our connected societies.
Here’s the article:
If we combine the article about the growing housing solution in greater Christchurch, and the ideas above from Norman Foster, is it not time to re-think the way things are planned around here? If we are to accept what is written above “It is now opportune to build on that through a combination of design interventions and the politics of zoning”. It’s time to return to the old ways which was to plan very differently.
As I look at the way the roads around my suburb are being transformed by new roading structures, it seems that this represents last century thinking, and is being built too late. We have accommodated the growth of houses needed in Greater Christchurch but based our planning on the continuation of a car structure. How does this fit in with the prophetic thinking of people like our speaker, , and Norman Foster, or our Jim Lunday?
How do we speed up our engagement processes and get our planners and engineers to build according to the future, instead of the past?
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