Resilience by design: Ecological footprinting for resilient regional planning

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to ascertain the ecological footprint of those living in Wellington, New Zealand in relation to available resources in 2006, determine what changes to urban form and behaviour interested citizens would be willing to accept to reduce their footprint, and to identify what methods were helpful in the learning and decision-making process. According to this study, the land area appropriated by each Wellingtonian for essential services such as food, housing, energy, and transportation was about 10 hectares. If land were also set aside for catching and cleaning water and providing habitat for non-human creatures, it would total 11.76 hectares per person. This exceeds the findings of other studies many times over, a result of the strict criteria for resilience used in this methodology. At this current standard of living, the Wellington Region could only support ~13,000 people, just over 400,000 would fit in the country, and about 1.3 billion could live sustainably using available renewable resources on the planet. To achieve the second and third objectives, this study engaged 58 citizens from Greater Wellington, New Zealand to in a participatory planning session to envision what it would take for the citizens of Wellington to live within the biophysical limits of the region. Participants included journalists, university and high school students, planners, architects and other interested members of the Wellington community. They were either enrolled in an 18-hour participatory planning process or participated in a 2-hour outreach project. With the assistance of analogue and digital methods, student facilitators recorded their ideas to draw a picture of what changes to urban and regional form and personal lifestyle habits they would be willing to accept. These methods included ESRI ArcGIS and CityEngine, an MS Excel Footprint model used within planning sessions, and facilitated brainstorming and sketching to draw out ideas from individuals and help group members agree upon a course of action. Participants ranked the effectiveness of these tools in surveys at the end of the workshops noting that simple analogue tools were more effective than digital tools. A two-tailed t-test was also used to evaluate the differences between the short and long workshop format. The analyses indicated there was more conflict in the longer workshop, an indicator for social learning, however there was no statistically significant difference between workshop formats in the degree to which conflict was resolved.