Adapting with nature | Architecture Now

Through our work across Aotearoa towns we are noticing that there are some common factors driving change — how we live with water, inhabit places, and use our town centres. With changing retail and lifestyle trends, town centres are evolving into social spaces. Some need to adapt more quickly than others with increased occurrence of flooding, and the demand for housing.

Working in diverse communities, it’s easy to overlook nuanced local needs. Although change is often urgent, it’s important to first take the time to find common ground, which is only possible at a slower pace — spending time in a place to learn its language and start a conversation that is both positive and familiar. Slowing down can genuinely make a huge difference to how well a vision can be collectively shaped and realised over time.

Northcote, Auckland

Northcote is a town centre nested within the city of Auckland. Regeneration planning started nine years ago led by Eke Panuku (Auckland Council’s development agency), and Kāinga Ora — a Crown-owned entity for complex housing development. This was the first location that modelled how tripling the density of Crown land in an existing neighbourhood could produce affordable, market and social housing.

From the first discussions about the pace of urban regeneration, it became clear this was not going to be a case of incremental change exposing the community to new housing densities in small parcels at a time, but rather a step change in density and scale along with acceleration to meet housing demand. This shift came with more opportunity for affordable and healthy homes, but also with more risk. Major urban renewal took place on a scale and timeframe not seen before in Aotearoa.

So, how to break this news to the community? A two-way dialogue started in 2017, with the birth of a magazine publication featuring local people and local stories. Everyday Northcote celebrated the small but meaningful interactions of daily life in an already vibrant community, with deprivation but high hopes for the future.

The landscape provided clues for a familiar and equitable way to engage community in the development process. Northcote sits within a volcanic landscape, perched on the edge of two tuff craters. A stream once flowed from a spring to an estuary in Shoal Bay providing rich soils for growing and gardening. When car-oriented development covered the land in the 1960s the stream disappeared underground.

But not all was lost. The memory of the stream had been carried through the generations, and was brought to life again with the help of Northcote youth and mana whenua who championed the daylighting of the Awataha stream. This green infrastructure was proposed to connect existing green pockets and streets, and become a shared backyard for the community.

Although gaining social license for growth was a major factor, the opportunity was really to create an anchor in a sea of change. Schools became the heart, with the wellbeing of children at the centre, and youth opened up a gateway for the whole community to participate in a backyard project that would have shared outcomes. Local schools and youth groups became involved in a hands-on design-lab spanning two years where we helped them to imagine, create and refine ideas. They interviewed adults and presented outcomes to the community stakeholder group and local board.

What emerged was an outdoor classroom, a playful pathway and a daylighted stream. Te Ara Awataha started coming to life, and the mana whenua kaitiaki group developed a mauri outcomes framework to guide the design process and the care and ownership of Awataha into the future.

With increasing housing density, green infrastructure was put to the test. Healthy Waters, a CCO of Council, and the Kaipatiki Trust and the Kaipatiki Project entered the multi-agency partnership with the community. All the while, the voice of Awataha started to bubble to the surface. The sportsfields were lowered for stormwater detention, and remnant bush pockets cared for. When the 2023 Auckland floods arrived — the voice of Te Awataha stream was amplified. Te mahi tahi me te taiao — working with nature. When stream levels returned to normal the community were amazed. Whether a throttled trickle or a raging torrent, they had experienced an urban environment designed to make room for nature and people.

With the threads of people and nature bound together, a story of place is evident. One which has retained the memory of the land and water, is familiar, safe and equitable for the community, and has evolved to create a healthy future for Northcote.

The Northcote example shows that adapting with nature is hugely dependent on the pace and scale of change, the impact on the community, and their capacity to take action. Change could be fast or slow, big or small. The degree of certainty about the change occurring also contributes to the level of fear or confidence — and the ability to look far enough ahead to avoid maladaptation. To deal with the complexities, we need scalable strategies and flexible tactics to grow, evolve and adapt. If they are not grounded in place they will not resonate with communities, now, or in the future.

Westport, West Coast

We have found ourselves questioning if community-led adaptation is real when the scale of change over time is huge, and the community lacks resources. There is much at risk. In our world we could fail to communicate — or over-communicate — and isolate those most affected. We could use words that have no direct relevance — words that alienate and squash hope, instead of opening up possibilities. This is perhaps the biggest risk in helping communities to adapt. If we have no social licence, we can’t have a conversation. The common thread for communities experiencing any kind of change is the ability to explore possibilities without the fear of pre-determination. And in this sense, a place-led spatial response is invariably nuanced by community voices. The key is using the language of place.

Nowhere could the importance of language be more critically observed than Westport. Here we have learnt that through the language of place we can talk about difficult things with a vulnerable community facing massive loss. Loss of homes, equity, insurance and hope.

Ki uta ki tai, from source to sea, the mighty Buller River is the protagonist shaping the story of Westport. Known to Māori as the Kawatiri Awa, it means swift and deep. Since the beginning, Westport has flooded and will continue to flood with increasing severity. The book Struggle for Survival paints the picture of one of the first pubs floating down the swollen river with its lights still on. It raises the question, can people live in harmony with a river as mighty as the Buller? And why have people persisted for more than 150 years?

The answer is partly the allure of gold, and later, coal. When viewed from above, Westport is a hook shape on the coastline, held in place by granite cliffs. The port serves an extractive economy; gold, then coal and cement, and now mineral sands. The port is Westport’s connection to the world. A rail line was built specifically to move granite from the cape to the tip-head at the mouth of the Buller River, and over time the coastline has shifted and compounded flooding issues.

In 2021, and again in 2022, Westport experienced a massive deluge, and the town flooded again — leaving people homeless, anxious and angry. But when we look back to 1926, there are boats in the street. People ask — surely this time something will change. But now the town faces one of the most alarming hazard stacks in the whole country — including a major earthquake along the alpine fault, liquefaction and sea level rise.

During times of flood, Westport is effectively an island, cut off not only by the Buller River but overflow into the Orowaiti which floods the town from behind. The Buller River is the largest river on the west coast and in flood carries a greater torrent than any other river in Aotearoa. Its large catchment effectively exits through a pinhole right where Westport is located.

Some excellent hazard mapping has been done. But this is not a story of despair — it is one of hope and choice. It is easy to see on the elevation map the comparison between the low-lying blue stuff and the green high-ground. It is an easier way to understand the problem and the potential together in one picture.

Resilient Westport is a programme of work under the PARA framework — a multi-tool approach to hazards and adaptation in Westport. All four components are underway all at once — Protect, Avoid, Retreat and Accommodate. The flood walls might buy time (and insurance) but only in tandem with a multi-generational plan — which is where the masterplan comes in.

If not now, then when? If not us, then who? While this sounds like a Tracy Chapman song, it is the words of the Mayor of Buller District. Offering hope and choice means a range of timescales and spatial scales happening all at the same time. How do we have a conversation with the community about that?

We started with a vision connected to place — past, present and future. The vision framework is not a 200 page document, it is three huge posters. The first is The Westport Way, exploring the rise and fall of settlements over time, the changing dynamic of the landscape over time, and the layers of the landscape from hydrology and geology to lush coastal forest and lagoons. This sparked a discussion about connection to place — what landscapes, which settlements, and why?

Why have settlements appeared and reappeared? What is their capacity to grow or endure based on the landscapes that support them? We started a conversation about connection, growth and relocation — something more familiar to the West Coast than we realised at first (large towns at the height of the gold rush have all but disappeared).

The second poster in the vision framework, Imagine Our Future, is the compass that projects forward 50 years to ask what being a good ancestor looks like now. The compass bakes-in wellbeing with sprinkles of donut economics. It can be used as a navigational tool for decision-making and a holistic picture that balances the environment, prosperity and affordability of the district, with people in the centre.

A healthy living landscape incorporates nature-based solutions, connected ecologies and healthy water amongst other measures. The inner wheel explores the dynamic of people being part of nature: its life giving qualities, and nature near home. But also being hazard ready and out of harms way.

We asked questions like: does the language resonate? And as a result we changed language like ‘pioneering town’ which seemed like inertia to some, innovative to others. We asked what might change the fortunes of Westport, and how the immediacy and proximity of nature is highly desirable and a reason to be there.

The third poster, How We Get There, introduces the Dynamic Adaptive Pathways with four key moves to enable growth and relocation. This presents the idea of a fixed spatial scaffold for flexible scenarios. One of the foundational concepts is the importance of a continuous lowland coastal landscape, and the idea of living within a dynamic web of connected habitats.

There are push and pull factors for relocation from old Westport to a new town centre location. There are things we can control and things we can’t, but always a pathway for generational decisions in the face of uncertainty.

This coast is often described as untamed wilderness, yet with the desire to remain in Westport comes an attempt to tame the coastal environment. The notion of re-settlement introduces ways to retain a lifestyle that is familiar, in a landscape that is vast and unyielding. Settlement principles link back to the essence of place and the patterns of the landscape, working with the natural systems and connecting up the fragments.

Working with nature offers multiple benefits for a community that has extremely high deprivation, low income and a lack of growth to support relocation efforts. Celebrating the experiences that bring locals and visitors into contact with nature and each other provides mutual benefit and a desire to live there. While the headlines scream that extractive mining is the key to economic prosperity on the West Coast, let’s not lose sight of the balance needed for growth and a sustainable future — one that taps into experiences, renewable energy and green innovation.

The town will not move tomorrow, and it won’t move all in one go. It must continue to adapt in order to retain vibrancy and vitality as long as it can. One of the toughest things is to figure out how to move pieces without compromising this. Workshops looked at relocatable and temporary ideas, as well as travel time between activities, and changing land use to retain its value for other purposes.

Stories are passed from one generation to another, and stories are made up of words that matter. We’ve learned that ‘resilience’ means grit and determination to some people but hanging on in the face of disaster to others. ‘Climate’ and ‘retreat’ are also trigger words, but ‘relocation’, ‘re-settlement’ and ‘adaptation’ are OK. Words also help us figure out strategies for working with nature. West Coast people like to be remote but connected, and immediacy and proximity to nature are important.

At the start of the process the community is somewhere between acceptance and depression, but over the course of multiple workshops we have seen a shift. By the end, we hope to have a plan that champions willingly take to the wider community.

The readiness to adapt varies from one town to another, and depends on what change has already been experienced and how recently. Covid taught us that we are all ready to change our habits in a crisis, until we no longer have to and then life goes back to normal. That is maladaptation not transformative adaptation. The immediacy and constant reminder of vulnerability can play a large part in galvanising communities to embrace change and adapt. But it is a reluctant push that takes huge effort.

We have found that exploring hope and potential has an even greater pulling power, when something loved is connected with something that is desired. It is scalable, and can provide the context and licence for accelerating change when needed. These are regenerative strategies that can help heal and repair the mauri and the mana of the land and water — and also the people.

Timaru, Canterbury

And finally to Timaru. Three years ago on the mainstreet of Timaru, in a vacant shop, a conversation about Te Hokinga ki te Ngākau began. It means ‘return to the heart’. Branded CityTown, the regeneration programme creates room for conversation — and some humour; Timaru could not decide if it was a city or a town, so chose a compound word instead. The brand holds together the project space, website and a series of projects investigating how to bring back the town’s vitality.

Timaru is struggling. The challenges include ageing infrastructure, earthquake-prone buildings, competing big-box retail and major severance issues. It is cut off from its natural assets by topography, roads, port and rail. Yet it has untapped potential. Our brief was a tactical masterplan, both unique and ambitious. This was a special opportunity to meaningfully evolve public space in Timaru, to catalyse investment and draw people in.

Ti-maru, means a ‘place of shelter’. A hook in an otherwise long smooth coastline was formed by a big lava flow from Mt Horrible, creating the unique topography and bluestone character of the town. This also created a rich lagoon environment that sustained Māori communities and their guests on seasonal journeys into the southern Alps.

First landings occurred where stream valleys touched the shingly shore. A breakwater accelerated development in the town, but also accretion of sediment in Caroline Bay, making the waterline increasingly distant. And so, the underlying landscape offers a way to connect the town back to the coastline via greenways. This sketch plan shows the original cliff, shoreline and stream valleys overlaid with the present-day port and shifting sands of Caroline Bay. Key moves underpin the 30-year strategic vision and the 10-year tactical masterplan; each support the others to bring life back to the heart and invite urban living by introducing green infrastructure that traces the original stream valleys and shoreline.

To allow the community to experience this journey, we devised a set of exploratory and targeted trials that extended the experience of the user groups. During a one-day street trial we learned that we could not make the shoreline road one-way to make room for green infrastructure. There was an incompatibility with land use, and no mood for change.

Wrapped around the shoreline experience were other tactical interventions designed to broaden the experience and gain feedback, some in playful ways. But individual trials required a lot of communication and comparative data, acquired through multiple methods and channels designed as part of the trials programme. The evidence base included quantitative data for travel modes and desire lines, while qualitative feedback was nuanced.

By far the biggest challenge with green infrastructure in urban environments is parking, especially when people remember the hey-days when the town was pumping and full of cars. What could be wrong with that in a rural district? The key lies in green infrastructure and an environment that attracts new urban pioneers. The streets are connectors that weave together city and coast, people and nature. In this case adaptation will be nudged along by enabling private development and infrastructure renewals, with more residents eventually requiring a higher level of amenity and connection to nature.

You need a viable vision to tackle harder conversations and nudge change where there is not the same opportunity or desire for a step change. You also need champions to continue their involvement or be intentional about succession over a long period of time, allowing them to reach their networks and expand the potential of a place exponentially.

About the author Helen Kerr

Since joining the studio in 1999 Helen has helped to shape Isthmus’ kaupapa of regenerating Aotearoa. As a landscape architect and urban designer Helen takes a collaborative approach to her work, exploring and creating with communities—knowing when to listen, when to observe and when to lead. Across multiple award winning and complex projects, Helen always strives to weave together the narrative of land, people and culture.

This article was first published by Isthmus Group, in October 2024. It has been republished here with their permission. See the original article here.