Social Suburban Fields

Abstract

The ongoing housing development of Greenfield sites in New Zealand is an unsustainable model of population expansion. It has continued to be driven by developers holding on to the “idea that New Zealanders want to live in a quarter acre block with a standalone home”. These new suburbs are considered to be well planned through a top down approach of master planning. However this approach leads to a social disconnection of the ground and streetscape for neighbours living in these new suburbs, even though these suburbs claim to be setting the contemporary standard of development. Running concurrently to this is the adoption of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). New Zealand councils are beginning to adopt and implement WSUD principles, requiring new subdivisions to treat their stormwater runoff on site. Large excavated grassed spaces consequentially function as water retention basins for the stormwater runoff (of the suburban development). The reality of these large retention basins is that local residents tend to be less engaged with them as they are only designed to perform technically and are continually wet.

Therein lies this thesis’s argument; that there is an unexplored social potential of distributing Stormwater Infrastructure within suburban developments. This thesis proposes that architecture has a role in re-engineering the distribution of stormwater infrastructure within a suburban development. In doing so it will test the reconfiguration of the architectural typology of suburban houses as a viable, contemporary approach for rethinking greenfield sites. The site of this research investigation is an undeveloped area called Hendersons Basin in South-West Christchurch, New Zealand. It is a site surrounded by established suburbs however due to its frequent exposure to inundation, the topography and Christchurch’s high water table it is yet to be developed. This thesis argues for a denser suburban development model that can create social fields of architecture, as the current low density suburban subdivision is no longer sustainable. The idea of social fields is tested against three scales the suburb, the neighbourhood node, and the cluster.