Permanence as a resilience strategy: Coastal settlement design Otaki

Abstract

The imminent threat of natural disaster globally underpins a situation of rapid and unpredictable environmental change. Heightened by the explicit demand for development in environments characterised by flux, the natural environment defines a temporal and vulnerable way of inhabiting the earth. This thesis recognises that such vulnerability has resulted in an increase in the magnitude and significance of loss and disruption associated with hazard activity, which has a detrimental impact on the resilience of communities. The fundamental question posed is: how can physical form, society and temporality be correlated to establish resilience within an environment of flux? Focusing on the future, it is the contention that engaging architectural permanence as a resilience strategy is pertinent to facilitating the resilient habitation of transforming natural systems. Renegotiating our approaches beyond loss and reconstruction, architectural permanence is framed as being interchangeable with the term continuity. Thus implicating permanence defines a context where systems and processes have the internal capacity to mitigate, absorb, and creatively adapt to the impacts of environmental flux. The capacity to adapt is summarised as comprising of two mutually dependent elements; physical continuity and social continuity. This suggests that the process of physical development should no longer be viewed as the preserve of physical form, but also as a generator of social relationships. Exploratory design parameters empower threats manifested in the natural environment as assets and opportunities. These develop through experimental dwelling, the projects that instigate permanent, alternative and inspiring sensibilities for our spatial and social interactions with the environment. The articulation of permanence as a resilience strategy develops design principles that offer insights toward the opportunities for permanent habitation. These principles do not focus on future predictions, but rather on the qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take. As a result the design output explores creatively beyond the orthodox to demonstrate how multiple levels of adaptability and redundancy can be manifested within the built environment. Transgressing pragmatic necessities, design focuses on the liberating design potentials afforded by the crisis of environmental flux, while demonstrating the positive spinoffs for; emotional wellbeing and resource and economic sustainability. This suggests that permanence does not have to contradict the realities of time, in fact it can be the exact opposite, accepting and being attuned to time’s passing, recognising and celebrating its effects. Implicating architectural permanence as an emergency management approach provides a valuable strategy for defining the habitation of temporal natural environments, “celebrating change and the energies driving it as the essence of [our resilient] existence.”