“Learning Sustainability” is a six-year programme of research being undertaken to identify how getting the right forms for our settlements will enable them to deliver the best mix of environmental, economic, and social performance.

Background

New Zealanders, in common with many communities across the world, are increasingly aware that their settlements are having serious impacts on the environment. These impacts are many, and include, for example, impacts on natural ecosystems, and the loss, through settlement, of productive land or areas of quiet natural beauty that are of importance to us. Yet while we have these environmental concerns, we need our settlements to provide employment and we want to lead lives with a good standard of living, rich in social, cultural, and recreational opportunities.

“Settlement form” is a technical term, not often used by most New Zealanders, but they may quite often discuss some of the parts that go to make up settlement form. For example:

-              The shape of a settlement as seen from the air or on a map, and the street pattern.

-              The density of housing, such as the quarter acre section, the inner city apartment block, or the small lifestyle block. 

-              The amount of open space within each settlement, such as town belts, parks and reserves, coastal esplanades or reserves.

-              The extent that a settlement is single-centred, for example, with one large central business district, or multi-centred with more than one activity hub.

Councils have always had a number of policies and rules in place that ultimately influence form. However in recent years there has been a move to manage the form of the settlement, with the aim to improve sustainability and especially to limit environmental impacts. There is however considerable debate around this issue, both as to which forms should be adopted, and their effectiveness in promoting sustainability.

One move has been to more compact forms (also described as densification or intensification) particularly in the context of lessening transport’s large environmental impact, by making public transport more effective and making walking and cycling more viable. The benefits of compaction are, however, disputed by those taking a wider perspective. Intensification may provide residential styles at odds with how the majority expect to live, and social conditions are not necessarily improved by intensification. In other situations, a council’s policies and rules are targeted to ensure dispersion. This occurs particularly in areas where the natural ability of the land to absorb impacts is very limited.

The research programme aims

This research programme “Learning Sustainability” recognises that for each settlement there may be a number of pathways for sustainability. The research will enable communities to recognise those different pathways and will be relevant to both settlements as they currently exist and to new future forms that may be developed. The research programme will provide the evidence of the extent that settlement form determines settlement performance, and develop tools by which communities can first, modify their settlement towards more sustainable forms, and second, monitor the settlement performance.

The research work

There are three main strands to the research work. The first strand will identify the extent that the environmental performance of New Zealand settlements is determined by the form of the settlement. The main research work of this strand is:

-              To develop methods by which the form of a settlement can be described and quantified. A combination of measures will be needed and these need to be applicable to both rural and urban settlements.

-              To develop improved tools to describe the total environmental performance of settlements. There are some existing tools such as “environmental footprint analysis” and “environmental capacity analysis” but they are limited and improved tools are needed.

-              Applying these new measures of form and environmental performance to several New Zealand settlements to identify the relationship between settlement form and environmental performance.

The second strand of the research work addresses settlement liveability. In the context of this programme, settlement liveability includes abstract concepts that are part of amenity, such as pleasant, safe, healthy, but also includes more concrete concepts such as how well the settlement allows us to achieve the economic and social interactions that we wish to accomplish as part of our daily lives. The scale at which we are considering settlement liveability is at neighbourhood, suburb and whole settlement. The main elements of this second strand of the research are:

-              To establish the style of life New Zealanders expect from their settlements, their differing views of settlement liveability, and the extent that they relate these to ideas about settlement form and sustainability, with these views being gathered from communities, developers, local government and professional advisors.

-              To develop a “New Zealand settlement liveability index”.

-              To identify whether the same forms that give us the best liveability also give the best environmental performance.  

The third strand of the research will look beyond existing forms and will conceptualise new more sustainable forms. This strand will also develop tools to establish how far and how fast existing settlements can change. The research work of this strand is:

-              To identify innovative designs for future settlement form through a series of professional and community workshops, from 2005 to 2007, to scope potential for sustainable development of existing New Zealand settlements.

-              To identify the social capacity of communities to adapt to new settlement forms, (that is how much change and what pace of change is acceptable) including the need for greater inclusion of heritage and cultural values and other influences on the social acceptance of future settlement form.

-              To develop new governance mechanisms and practices, in particular tools which help the community participate in the strategic planning of their settlements and tools which improve the management of intensified areas having shared ownership

-              To develop tools that can be easily used by the communities to monitor settlement form, liveability, and environmental performance.

Specific outcomes for Maori

Part of the research programme is directed at Maori-specific settlement issues. This research is included within each of the three strands. The intended outcome is to provide Maori involved in settlement subdivision and land development with tools to support them to make decisions on settlement form, and to establish and articulate Maori meanings of liveability in both urban and rural contexts.