Muddy Urbanism: an LA dialogue

Abstract

MUDDY URBANISM www.muddyurbanismlab.wordpress.com Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, has a unique geography, with an extensive coastline abutting urban areas. While architects, planners and politicians often discuss the importance of ‛the waterfront’, the view of this watery edge is frequently restricted to the inner city and the exclusive beach suburbs. However Auckland ‛fronts’ the water in many different ways and spaces, most of which are ignored in an urban sense. One such space is the Whau River estuary. The Whau River bisects the inner west of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Its path creates a portage, connecting two harbours, permitting the movement with waka (canoe) between the east and west coasts. This portage has seen over one thousand years of occupation and use. Pre-colonisation, the Whau was one of the main active frameworks of social connection and economic production and in the colonial economy it played a crucial role in the settlement and urbanisation of Auckland’s west, as both a transport route for food and as a source of clay. In latter decades however, the Whau has lost its importance. No longer a transport route, and for much of the recent past a boundary between municipalities, it has increasingly become the site of multiple conflicts across jurisdictional, economic, land use and natural systems. Muddy Urbanism is a special urban-research workshop at The School of Architecture and Planning (The University of Auckland) that engages in the critical mapping of the Whau in order to visualise the many conflicts that have been hidden from institutional thinking and to propose new interfaces between urban policy, ecological systems and community participation for the regeneration of this catchment. This research project amplifies the local as a critical site of intervention for rethinking existing land use, public and environmental infrastructure, and neighbourhood-based socio-economic development, in order to re-imagine a productive coastline for the many different waterfronts of Auckland.