April workshop ABSTRACTS

Andrea Murray
The Christchurch Residential Red Zone -A Memorial Landscape Honouring Displaced People
The Red Zone, known as the RRZ, feels like a very sad place.  Even a brief drive through the vacant land disturbs the viewer.  It has a dark cloud of loss hanging over it.  The viewer shakes their head; how can that vast space (1000 acres) be used in a way that is honest and meaningful to the people?  10,000 people lost their sense of place on the land (Turangawaewae- Place to Stand) after the earthquakes, in addition to 185 families losing a loved one. It was the ‘Land’ and its extraordinary power that caused the deaths and the displacement of so many.  Maybe it can be the ‘Land’ that helps the people of Christchurch heal and gain a sense of closure?   The Red Zone as a Memorial Landscape is not about making everyone forget about earthquakes and the pain of loss, in fact the opposite.  A Memorial Landscape should honour the disaster and all the displaced people who lost more than their homes, a Memorial Landscape to honour a sense of  place on the land,  Turangawaewae.
This loss of place on the land is a huge global problem, (as are earthquakes and tsunamis), the enormity of such problems can make us feel out of balance.  A Memorial Landscape in Christchurch should honour both disasters and displacement and aim to restore a response of balance to the visitor. Creating a Memorial Landscape should not try to make us forget, rather it should make us remember displaced people and that we are grateful to have a place on the land (Turangawaewae).

Jie Zhang
The Bioregional Park: an approach to protect the environment and make sustainable public space and commemorate the visit of Captain Cook
In today's society, people are not very concerned about the relationship between human actions and human impact on the environment. This phenomenon has led to a society which attitude consequently results in overconsumption of natural resources and environmental degradation. As more and more people live in cities restoration, preservation and enhancement of biodiversity in urban areas has become important. This paper will present a concept of bioregional ideal. Using this concept, it does will help to change people's ideas about human relationship to the environment and natural resources from the current condition.
This research will use a bioregional park design project to show how to improve the environment, protect the natural resources, connect people to nature and make a habitat for ecosystems of plants and animals.

Qian Wang
Developing the greenery: Investigating School Ground Greening in Auckland
Rationales for the recent (ten plus years) resurgence in interest in school gardens focus on perceptions adults have about modern childhood and schooling, e.g. lacking in physical activity, facing an obesity epidemic, battling inflexible educational systems, raising concerns about children’s diminishing contact with nature and natural systems.
Research on school ground greening projects (which is a overarching term including school gardens) has established benefits due to increasing children’s connections with nature on a number of levels, such as developing earth guardianship responsibilities, learning where food comes from, science and ecology learning, encouraging physical exercise and imaginative play.
This project will investigate the claim that many school gardens are limited both in their scope and children’s participation, especially in their planning and design. Instead they are frequently designed and constructed in an ad hoc manner by
teachers and volunteers, missing the opportunity both to engage children in a process of learning about design (co-design) and to create ecologically richer school grounds that are creatively designed to encourage indoor-outdoor connections, sensibly planned for maintenance and sensitively planned to increase biodiversity and provide ecosystem services within communities.
Base-line data about numbers and range of school ground greening projects in the Auckland area will be sought, as well as the involvement of landscape architects. From this a methodology for encouraging greater collaboration between landscape architects and school students in school ground greening projects will be developed, with the aim of improving school grounds and student learning, as well as increasing the educational contribution, stewardship responsibility and discipline awareness of landscape architects.

Kael
Reclamation Park
My research question is how to make coastal areas more accessible to public, especially that are severed by motorway. Actually, there are already many limitation for public to close the coastline, including rough condition of geography, natural limitation, have to cross private possessions and construction of motorway. My research will focus on the last topic. Many countries meet similar issues and some of them are solved but different methods fortunately. My research aims to find out some possible solutions for this issue and I chose Shoal Bay as my research site. In the site, the current coastal area is very limited and also severed by the Motorway. In my design, I want to use land reclamation technique and some other methods to make the coastal area more available and reconnect it to the community.

Jane Park
THE PAST, THE PRESENT, THE POSSIBLE.
 This research project will explore how high levels of anthrophony is distorting Auckland’s biophonic landscape, and how this muffled topic of discussion may be a cry of warning falling onto deaf ears.
 “Although the epidemics and infectious diseases targeted by public health agencies during the last 130 years have largely been eradicated in the Western, industrial world, preventable lifestyle diseases have replaced them.” (Robin C. Moore, 2008)
 There are opportunities to help mitigate and bring attention to this muted problem by concentrating on present sites with pre-existing sound barriers.
 “The fact is that there is no other choice but to fully engage the urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture professions in creating new, nature-based urban development policies to help ameliorate the new lifestyle health issues.” (Robin C. Moore, 2008)
 Despite through explanation of the requirements in the NZTA guidelines, multiple case studies reviewed by NZTA themselves discover the current design standard of sound barriers are only meeting the bare minimum of what is categorized as ‘appropriate’ sound alleviations in effected zones. And astoundingly, all of the case studies concluded with a ‘Lessons learnt’ section where complications at each particular project were left unresolved but assured to be resolved in following projects.
 “Since the opening of the new bypass, residents at five properties have complained of noise effects including increased truck noise, reflected railway noise, as well as a general increase in road-traffic noise.” (Hannaby, 2013b)
 “The NZTA should set clear performance specifications (acoustic and non-acoustic) for noise barriers and if new products are to be trialed on site, contingency plans should be prepared in case the product does not meet the specifications.” (Hannaby, 2013a)
 The goal of this project will be in two parts. Firstly, to address the need of re-tuning the design language. As the current language used to communicate the objective of public acoustic design reflects the biased value structure within the manner Auckland is approaching noise barriers. Dually addressed will be the deeper issue on the importance of Auckland’s acoustic heritage that is becoming rapidly diminished through poor design considerations and failing to adopt contemporary solutions. Referencing Te Aranga Principals, mainly Mauri Yu & Taiaio sections referring to the wellbeing of the land and its native inhabitants I predict to be engaging with design solutions that integrate habitat protection, visual amenity, climate protection, storm water management and environmental education.

Yuan Zhang

The Critical Role of Urban Ecology in Designing a Green Space Infrastructure Network for Auckland, New Zealand.

The pressures of global population growth, migration, and increasing urban densities present significant issues to the health of cities. These pressures are more evident in growing mid-size cities that often show proximate, contrasting patterns of human infrastructure systems and natural ecosystems. Urban studies tend of describe such patterns negatively, and often as critical ecological problems such as landscape fragmentation (Forman, 2014), degrading water quality (van Room, 2004), flooding and increasing water-borne pollution (Pickett et al., 2013; Pickett & Cadenasso, 2008), reduction of green space and biodiversity (Wu, 2014). However, many of these authors also reflect on the values that arise of urbanization and the opportunities to link the logic of urbanism with that ecology to frame a new and valuable development paradigm. This project explores design opportunities, specifically in creating an urban green space network as described by Borrett (2014), Derbyshire & Wright (2014), Li (2015), Niemelä (2014) in Auckland, as a model mid-size global city. This research and design project aims to show how to design a urban spatial model that adds value of the integrated stormwater management, low-impact design and other similar model solutions being used by Auckland City.

Leah Alexander
A Code of Practice for Landscape Assessment Under the RMA?

Recently MFE and NZILA abandoned a workstream that would have seen a Landscape Assessment Code of Practice developed.  This research looks at the drivers behind the original CoP proposal and the reasons for its withdrawal,  then considers whether a CoP is a necessary or desirable tool to apply to Landscape Assessment.  Depending on the findings, a CoP or alternative design response will be developed and tested.

Qun Sun
Food Bowl Futures
Landscapes of Production in the Goulburn Valley after High Speed Rail
The context for the project is the City of Greater Shepparton (pop. 66,222), which is situated 190km north‐ northeast of Melbourne. As one of ten designated ‘regional cities’ in Victoria. While Shepparton is the center of a relatively vibrant and prosperous region, it is nonetheless grappling with social and environmental challenges that climate change and ongoing socioeconomic restructuring will exacerbate. The construction of a high-speed rail link along the east coast has been the target of several investigations since the early 1980s. Air travel dominates the inter-capital travel market, and intra-rural travel is almost exclusively car-based. Rail has a significant presence in the rural / city fringe commuter market, but inter-capital rail currently has very low market share due to low speeds and infrequent service.  A mature high-speed rail system would be economically competitive with air and automobile travel, provide mass transit without dependence on imported oil, have a duration of travel that would compare with air travel or be quicker, and would reduce national carbon dioxide emissions.
Agenda
Food Bowl Futures will explore how large‐scale infrastructure projects rescale territories and mediate our relationship to the environment. The project will unpack the complexity of one large infrastructure proposal – the East Coast High Speed Rail (HSR) project – to identify the relationships it will disrupt across an entire urban landscape. Instead of fixing our gaze upon HSR directly, the projet will explore the interstitial spaces of the region – the margins and interior peripheries – for landscape design opportunities.

Vandita Ahlawat
Beyond Net Zero Neighborhoods:
How can the inherent pressures of urban sprawl be used as an opportunity to design communities as net-positive resources for our natural environments?
This research explores the impact of the expanding city through a lens of long-term urban resilience. Despite the apparent negativity associated with urban sprawl, case-studies show that net-zero neighborhoods are economically feasible, and can provide some ecological significance to community design. The critical problem of community development actually rests in the assumption that development is necessarily damaging to natural systems. From this, the designer’s role must then be to mitigate the level of expected damage. Yet, the pressures of development may offer opportunities to enhance our natural environments. Whereas projects that seek a net-zero energy communities are increasingly able to meet greenhouse gas and carbon targets, what is needed is an urbanism that understands community design as net-positive value to ecological and social environments. The goal of this project is to design a model community that achieves this goal by exploring the relationships between net-zero neighborhoods and resilience theory.

Irawan Chandra Arief
The Pier Connection
Can an environmental risk from a new reclamation land be minimized?
A future motorway is planned to be built in Onehunga connecting SH 1 and SH 20, improving travel times between Onehunga - Penrose industrial area and provide more reliable bus journey times. Meanwhile, this future motorway might cut a connection between people and sea, which is contradictive with one of the Auckland waterfront vision 2014 principles.
Land reclamation is a common technique to expand land surface on water, giving access for people to have easy access to get to open space on water's edge. But this technique is well known for its bad issue, ruin coral habitat under the sea and swipe existing mangrove forest at the coastline. However, there is another option such as pier structure that still able to provide space above the sea, where people can use to walk or even build something on top.

Using a site at Onehunga between Taumanu reserve and Onehunga port, this project trying to answer those issues and trying to find an alternative way on how a new space built on top of water can be an environmental friendly with studies from some existing project, literature, and discussion with professional.

Nguyen Thien Ngan
Vertical Village in the heart of Auckland CBD
This thesis project is an architectural response to the Auckland Central Business District (CBD)’s revitalization. Due to high migration net flows and blooming of business activities in Auckland CBD, the commercial and residential building projects rapidly appear to be essential in order not only to capture the development of business and economy but also to adapt to the population’s growth. At present, the Auckland transportation is undergoing a great redevelopment to have new City Rail Link (CRL) stations to support the future growth in Auckland. One of the key hubs is the Aotea station which is promising the busiest station for students, employees and residents who are working and living in CBD.
Auckland CBD is a prominent education and business area but where also lacks high density architecture. The apartment and office buildings are standing alone which is the main cause of the urban sprawl. The “shoebox” is mostly used to describe these apartments due to the lack of space and affordability for those who want to live and work proximately and centrally. It is maybe a time to think about the appropriate way of living and working to engage the community rather than focusing on the single use design or creating the individual space.
The research is based on the urban development strategies to create a small community in a mixed-use building which offers people many opportunities to live sustainably, to work productively and to play enjoyably while still is able to grow with the urban development.
The question for this project is:  What are the desirable characteristic of an architectural design that provides a more resilient and sustainable way of living and working in Auckland CBD towards the future growth?  This project will focus on the design of the building which is shaped by the impact of the movement circulation and flows from the station’s passenger. It will also determine the important functional strategies that are suitable and interactive with the Aotea station as well as the location’s features. The brief chosen is to design a mixed-use community that blends the residential, commercial use and other amenities. The purpose of the project is not only to encourage communication between neighbors and local people, strengthen the benefits of future business but also to connect Auckland residents with employment and opportunities."

Janki Sharma
Transitional space is the intermediate area acting as an in-between space. Traditionally spaces were defined as indoor or outdoor spaces. The presence of transitional space was not experienced. So this research will be focusing on these transitional spaces and the journey of spaces from one place to another.
This research will be an implementation of design by intertwining the publications and case studies that are related to the topic. It will also attempt to identify what defines a transitional space that enhances the pedestrian experience in urban environment. Also, inserting architectural intervention with multi-functional public usage that intensify the sense of transitional space and connects it with urban fabric.