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    Placemaking for tenant wellbeing: Exploring the decision-making of public and community housing providers in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2025-06) Witten K; Olin CV; Logan A; Chisholm E; Randal E; Howden-Chapman P; Leigh L
    In addition to housing tenants, many public and community housing providers engage in placemaking to foster tenants’ connections to people and place. This paper reports on the placemaking practices of four community housing providers and two urban regeneration programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with provider staff – including those leading strategy, community development, tenancy management, planning and design efforts – to investigate the placemaking strategies adopted by providers and the values, priorities and investment tensions that underpin their decision-making. Common placemaking strategies included site selection to secure tenants’ locational access to community services and amenities, and designing shared ‘bump spaces’ into housing complexes to encourage neighbourly encounters between tenants. Efforts to foster a sense of community through increased stability and diversity of households were hindered by a predominance of single-person units in older housing developments, and by funding and regulatory constraints. Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, comprise approximately half of all public housing tenants and many have deep intergenerational connections to place. Where providers were engaging with Māori, early steps had been taken to incorporate cultural landscapes and values into placemaking initiatives; such practices were more evident in urban regeneration than community housing provider developments, enabled by longer-term planning horizons, broader development mandates and partnerships with iwi (Māori tribes) and local government. Nonetheless, placemaking aspirations of all providers were tethered to resource constraints and investment trade-offs, with any social infrastructure provision weighed up against the value of providing one more home instead.
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    Bringing the market 'back into' supermarket : creating a social hub for local communities : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2010) Walters, Amie
    This design project addresses the contemporary supermarket chain, seeking to bring back to this typology the traditional sociality and dynamic qualities of the urban marketplace. In this sense to ‘bring back’ does not mean to restore time, but rather to provide the means for public engagement by establishing the supermarket as an active civic space. By negotiating between the micro-levels of everyday life and the macro-levels of culture and civic society, I propose to transform the supermarket into a communal ‘event-space’ by formulating a ‘kit of parts’ that is applied to the national supermarket chain New World – “the only local supermarket nationwide” – thereby establishing it as a viable, productive social hub. Encouraging health and wellbeing benefits through the rituals of cooking, dining, learning, communing and consuming, this sociocultural connection to the commercial environment also reinforces health research studies, which advocate a community-based approach toward producing the best outcome for upward mobility and community revitalization. The concept is developed through research into historical and contemporary models to a final proposal of a range of Communal Elements. These elements are adapted and applied to three site-specific locations around New Zealand within an urban, suburban and rural context. This new approach to land use, innovative partnerships, health planning and sensory-based design strategies instigates a radical revision of the role of the supermarket. The thesis proposes that this is not only fiscally viable but that it provides positive assets to communities and neighbourhoods as a global entity within a local reality. The project investigates ways in which spatial design can reconstruct quotidian consumption and public space, revising amenity infrastructure through site-specific interventions that draw on commensality, ix ABSTRACT “the exchange of sensory memories and emotions, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling” (Seremetakis, 1994, p.225).
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    An infrastructure of interaction : complexity theory and the space of movement in the urban street : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2008) Reynolds, Helen
    This study uses complexity theory to examine the space of the street. In a morpho-ecological city, process creates form just as form creates process. The process of movement is a critical form generator within the urban system. In this thesis, the urban system comprising streets/ car/pedestrian is examined. If this collection of urban modes of mobility is a complex system capable of selforganising behaviour, what effect does the ordering imposed by traffic engineering have on this system? I look at the driving body and the walking body as co-creating the city by their movement through urban space. I suggest that, through attention to the fragments of interactions enacted during these movements, we can, through design, allow for the emergence of selforganising behaviour. Urban shared streets, descendants of the ‘woonerf’, appear to function more efficiently than engineered streets, without the usual traffic ordering. The counterintuitive success of these streets implies a self-organising behaviour that is generated by the density of interaction between the inhabitants of the street. These designs potentially work as a change agent, a catalyst, operating within a complex system. This has the potential to move systems from one attractor state to another. A city built with these spaces becomes a city of enfilades; an open system of spaces that are adaptable to uses that fluctuate with time and avoid thickening the palimpsest of traffic engineering. I look at siting shared streets in Wellington, based on jaywalking, a transgressive use of the streetspace that prefigures a shared space, and changes to urban networks associated with such designs. Interaction within the city is a creative force with a structure. City design needs to consider and address this infrastructure and design for it. The infrastructure of interaction has been subsumed by the infrastructure of movement. Shared streets indicate there may not be a need for this – they can be integrated. The process of movement creates instances of interaction; therefore designing spaces of/for movement must be designed to enhance the infrastructure of interaction. The result of such interaction is not just somewhat better; it may be a phase change - catalytically better .