Planning for Higher Density: Concepts of privacy in Auckland’s culture of housing

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the theory and practice of urban housing. Houses are a socially located “collection of rights, opportunities, assets, and attributes” (Donnison and Ungerson, 1982, 11); at the same time, housing describes and expresses an urban culture and its values. The activities of New Zealand’s commercial housing supply system are governed by planning and building legislation enacted in a political climate ideologically aligned with the social customs of an electorate that has historically expressed a preference for political conservatism, non-intervention, and de-regulation. Harsher aspects of social policy have been modified in a long period of Labour-led coalition government since 1999; but environmental legislation has remained largely unchanged since reforms of 1991 re-oriented planning legislation to suit a market economy. In this environment, objectives of sustainability in ordinary private housing developments are inscribed as a market responsibility, with a limited set of mandatory technical standards. The planning and architecture of housing are political acts that represent and interpret the substance of a social vernacular in a process that is decisively influenced by political priorities in a liberal democracy. This position is reconcilable with argument supporting the notion of sustainable urban housing as an artefact connected functionally and theoretically to collective habits of vernacular-based social systems (Alexander, 1979, 1987; Habraken, 1998). In such arguments, sustainability is a subsidiary but dependent condition of housing supply. For sustainable urban development to be achieved the inherited paradigms of “house” need to be constructed in the managed provision of new housing forms. Political ideologies of the planning framework thus become relevant to a housing study. Auckland is a regional city with a relatively high population growth rate, and with strategic planning policies intended to achieve sustainable urban environments through a medium density housing typology. Housing at medium density has not previously been tested in the private sector in New Zealand. Planning policies, in this situation, become the political instruments through which a new housing model is to be developed. From an analysis of New Zealand’s housing history, affective density and interpretations of privacy are argued to be critical dimensions of a socially and economically sustainable housing form. Contemporary interpretations of privacy correspond to economic habits that underpin New Zealand society. It is argued that both New Zealand’s construct of social privacy and its political economy can be traced to origins in John Locke’s protestant liberal philosophy. An epistemology of density and privacy in New Zealand’s urban and suburban housing traditions is considered in relation to Locke, and to Polanyi’s theory of tacit and explicit forms of knowledge, used in his thesis to re-conceptualise understandings of privacy as a social fact. These ideas constitute a basis for the planning of higher density housing in forms that could be shaped to suit the social habits and environmental conditions of Auckland. This thesis examines the question: what higher density forms of housing will meet the needs of ordinary house-holders in Auckland in the twenty-first century?