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The increased focus on mental health and well-being in the past few decades has brought renewed attention to our urban environments, where more than half of the world’s population live. Happiness in cities, often measured by tourist dollars or a city’s ability to recruit and retain skilled professionals or estimates of general satisfaction and wellbeing, has fostered a competitive nature between cities. Helsinki (Finland), Aarhus (Denmark), and Wellington (New Zealand) are internationally recognised, ranking as the top three happiest cities in the world according to the World Happiness Report of 2020. However, a close examination of the Happiness Report, the manner in which data is captured and the congruencies between the top cities raises questions about the ability of a second-tier city to ever rank highly. This research investigates the section of the report that addresses the design of cities and compares it with the literature on those elements of the built form that can improve the happiness of city residents. After extracting the key elements of urban design for a happy city, it then uses these constructs to examine a second-tier city in New Zealand and uses the example of an unhappy city to illuminate improvements that might make it happier. The research finds some alignment with the Happy City predicates but also finds sufficient additional complexity in second-tier cities to warrant a set of independent measures.

In the island nation of Aotearoa New Zealand, the history of migration and increased globalization is exerting pressure on existing social and cultural frameworks and creating challenges and opportunities for how public open space can be created and used. This pressure is influencing Māori, the Indigenous people of New Zealand, through a combination of cultural beliefs and values, with a diverse set of contemporary cultural practices and through interactions with a non-Māori world. The challenges are from the progressively widespread nature of migrants who have multiple national backgrounds and also consider themselves as both members of their country of origin and New Zealand society. To accommodate this increasing cultural diversity, a psychological sense of community provides a tool for understanding community and community change, while participatory planning can provide opportunities to integrate public perspectives into these processes. Public open spaces have the potential to be socially sustainable and promote values of cultural diversity. This research aims to understand whether taking part in the community participation processes for public open space planning and design can encourage a sense of community amongst the major ethnic groups in New Zealand, including New Zealand European, Māori, Chinese and Pasifika. It does that by adopting the lens of the Sense of Community Index based on the theory presented by McMillan and Chavis. Results suggest that participatory planning allows the integration of public perspectives into the planning process, fostering the communities’ sense of place while creating places that promote cultural diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Many coastal areas suffer from severe ecological and environmental problems because of climate change. Worldwide land loss is one of the most severe issues for coastal ecosystems. Coastal land loss is caused by a variety of complex factors, including rising sea levels, erosion, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, and other human activities. When considering coastal protection, there are various design and engineering strategies available for dealing with the coastal land loss problem and adapting to the change. Regenerative landscape design for protection and prevention is the focus of the project. The literature review aids in the development of a regenerative design performance matrix based on the existing regenerative design framework in order to learn from previous situations. In total, 12 coastal protective methods are evaluated based on the coastal protection performance matrix and the impacts of the strategies themselves, such as feasibility and probable durability, local materials, cost, and energy consumption. After building the performance matrix for the existing regenerative design, quantitative and qualitative evaluation is conducted to compare each of the technologies and their performance on regenerative recovery for the local ecosystem. The evaluation also indicates the characteristics of each of the technologies. According to the results of the site analysis, the design for the coastal landscape design is always a process of trade-off and balancing between numerous effect elements. The design proposal aims to develop the local communities by recovering a balanced ecosystem regeneratively, protecting the inner land from the damage of disasters, and collaborating with the local social systems to work on the construction and selfsustaining. This is proposed to function as a possible guideline for the governors, designers, and policymakers for the future design and construction of the coastal landscape to a sustainable and harmonious future with the changes in the landscape and the social fabric.

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the link between women’s underrepresentation in London’s monuments and gender inequality and to create a digital campaign to raise awareness about this issue. My project uses mixed methodology to contribute to this discussion by reviewing scholarly work on gender inequality, the history of feminism, and the significance of monuments in the United Kingdom. Although many communities have begun to discuss the relationship between monuments and systemic racism, previous research about how monuments reinforce gender inequality is limited. However, a 2021 audit found that only 50 of London’s 1,500 monuments (4%) depict named women. This is significant because monuments communicate a society’s values, identity, and history. Therefore, the underrepresentation of women in London’s monuments reflects a consistent undervaluing of women’s contributions throughout the city’s nearly 2,000-year-old history which is reinforcing implicit attitudes and contributing to the endurance of gender inequalities. Because monuments are in the public sphere, raising awareness of how they perpetuate inequalities is of great importance. Therefore, this project also uses solution-oriented photojournalism and fourth-wave feminism to share my findings via a digital campaign titled “The Important Women Project" to expand the impact of my research, encourage broader discussions about how women are represented in public spaces, and to promote gender equality by calling for increased representation of women in monuments.

A research team at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics has developed a Smart Surfaces Guidebook for city policymakers to use as a decision-making guide. Rapid urbanization is replacing natural land with dark, impervious surfaces. This has led to dire urban consequences including rising temperatures and stormwater deluge, resulting in significantly higher energy costs, greater stormwater damage, and associated health and comfort impacts. These issues can be mitigated using smart surfaces, those with high reflectivity and permeability, which can achieve sustainable and regenerative cities. The current literature on the benefits of urban surfaces is very segmented, focusing on either one specific surface type or one property of surfaces. A smart surface taxonomy with correlated heat and water metrics has been developed to fill this gap. A range of city surfaces in three broad categories - roofs, streets and sidewalks, and parking lots - have been identified with various levels of reflectivity, and permeability. The development of a smart surface taxonomy with quantified benefits for mitigating or adapting to climate change will be critical for decision-makers to make informed decisions on city surface choices. The Guidebook includes real-world case studies that had applied Smart Surfaces strategies, an introduction to the Smart Surfaces Taxonomy with appealing graphics in surface details, and various Smart Surfaces investment scenarios for policymakers to consider.

Stewardship Stories for Watershed Justice by Jane WardaniB. A. (University of California, Berkeley) 2003A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the concurrent degrees of Master of City Planning and Master of Landscape Architecture in the Graduate Division of the University of California, BerkeleyCommittee in charge:Professor Judith Innes, ChairProfessor Timothy DuaneProfessor Jason CorburnSpring 2008

Contemporary societies risk inequality, disintegration and segregation due to a complex array of social, economic and political changes that have been occurring over the last few decades. These changes include the loss of shared values, changes in how individuals interact and get together, and new practices relating to participation and decision-making. In parallel to the evolution of contemporary societies, a complex array of changes are transforming the physical environment where these societies live and work. These changes are affecting especially the disciplines that plan, design and transform the physical environment. New processes of transformation, new ways of interaction, new types of projects and new professional roles are deeply transforming the working environment of architectural disciplines. While these changes offer new opportunities for innovation, they also threaten to generate division in diverse and complex societies. Within this context, universities have the opportunity to expand their social responsibility by affirming that teaching and research can contribute to redressing social inequality, disintegration and segregation. This can be achieved through action, exploring new ways of relating universities to their social context by working with real projects and real people, establishing links between academia and practice.

Temporary interventions in public space are becoming important tools for rethinking and changing urban environments. They prompt a more democratic approach to change because they facilitate knowledge around participation, appropriation and use of public space. From a case study approach, this paper will describe how temporary interventions can respond to new democratic needs while progressively generating new social life and a sense of place. This research will consider the Tory Street temporary project as a case study from which to extract applicable knowledge. The Tory Street project was the product of a partnership between Landscape Architecture/School of Architecture/Victoria University of Wellington (SoA/VUW) and Wellington City Council (WCC), New Zealand. Using participatory processes, the parties collectively designed and implemented a temporary intervention with local stakeholders. Research around new ways of decision-making and use of public space was developed from the case study. The analysis methodology of the use of a temporary public space innovates by using parametric data to highlight how time, environmental conditions and spatial components shape the type of users and activities. Through practice-based research, this paper showcases how the space was colonized and how a progressive sense of place was experienced. It presents how tensions arose between different types of users and how conflicts were minimized by introducing changes to the space. Finally, this research demonstrates the value of temporary interventions for developing more democratic approaches to urban change.

This item is part of: Boarin, P., Haarhoff, E., Manfredini, M., Mohammadzadeh, M., Premier, A., (2021). Rethinking Sustainable Pacific Rim Territories. Proceedings of the 2020 APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, Future Cities Research Hub, School of Architecture and Planning of the University of Auckland. ISBN: 978-0-473-53616-9ABSTRACTThe rapid expansion of COVID-19 is incurring the rethinking of human society's capacity for coping with major public health events. While "big data" have been widely used to analyze the impact of COVID-19, very limited study was found in rural areas where such kinds of "data" are lacking. This situation will inevitably lead to an incomplete understanding of the pandemic impacts and biased decisions due to the fragmentary information. In this study, I focused on the agrarian communities in rural areas of Chengdu city where linpan system (wooded lots) characterizes as a cultural landscape. Considering COVID-19 as a threat, this study hopes to understand the socio-ecological resilience of linpan system under the external pressures both qualitatively and quantitatively, combining ethnographic interviews with geospatial analysis, landscape ecology and graph theory. It was found that the spatial pattern of linpan system managed by local communities shows a dispersed distribution pattern, which naturally maintaining a "social distance" while keeping socio-economic connections tightly through periodical rural-market systems. This indigenous knowledge and traditional practices have not been well understood and integrated into development planning, which led to a decrease of socio-ecological resilience against external shocks such as the pandemic or climate change.

Temporary interventions in public space are becoming important tools for rethinking and changing urban environments. They prompt a more democratic approach to change because they facilitate knowledge around participation, appropriation and use of public space. From a case study approach, this paper will describe how temporary interventions can respond to new democratic needs while progressively generating new social life and a sense of place. This research will consider the Tory Street temporary project as a case study from which to extract applicable knowledge. The Tory Street project was the product of a partnership between Landscape Architecture/School of Architecture/Victoria University of Wellington (SoA/VUW) and Wellington City Council (WCC), New Zealand. Using participatory processes, the parties collectively designed and implemented a temporary intervention with local stakeholders. Research around new ways of decision-making and use of public space was developed from the case study. The analysis methodology of the use of a temporary public space innovates by using parametric data to highlight how time, environmental conditions and spatial components shape the type of users and activities. Through practice-based research, this paper showcases how the space was colonized and how a progressive sense of place was experienced. It presents how tensions arose between different types of users and how conflicts were minimized by introducing changes to the space. Finally, this research demonstrates the value of temporary interventions for developing more democratic approaches to urban change.

This item is part of: Boarin, P., Haarhoff, E., Manfredini, M., Mohammadzadeh, M., Premier, A., (2021). Rethinking Sustainable Pacific Rim Territories. Proceedings of the 2020 APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, Future Cities Research Hub, School of Architecture and Planning of the University of Auckland. ISBN: 978-0-473-53616-9ABSTRACTThis paper examines the presently under-developed potential for school grounds to form part of learning environments, especially in the pandemic situation, when the schools face difficulties accommodating students in indoor classrooms. The article attempts to provide a connection between Outdoor Learning Environments (OLE) and Innovative Learning Environments (ILE), proposing Outdoor Innovative Learning Environments (OILE[1]) on school grounds which can be used effectively by teachers and students. The paper includes a brief background of open-air schools as the first generation of OLE, a summary of the positive impacts of OLE, the definition of ILE, an ILE spatial typology, and evaluates some OILE examples in school grounds.[1] OILE is the term suggested by the author.

Submitted Abstracts for the 4th APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, University of Auckland, New Zealand, 14-18 December 2020

This item is part of: Boarin, P., Haarhoff, E., Manfredini, M., Mohammadzadeh, M., Premier, A., (2021). Rethinking Sustainable Pacific Rim Territories. Proceedings of the 2020 APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, Future Cities Research Hub, School of Architecture and Planning of the University of Auckland. ISBN: 978-0-473-53616-9ABSTRACTBackground: For most people, the natural environment is recommended as an affordable health promotion method.Goal: Develop an app to collect people's health information and return people's environmental health prediction scores. The data can also be used in landscape planning and design in the future to design healing fields for people to use.Discussion: Experiment with a preliminary developed application. The research results show that the altitude of Toucheng Farm is slightly higher than that of flat land; when the temperature is low, the heartbeat in the physiological response increases, and the weather and relative humidity of the day will affect the preferences of tourists.Conclusion: Climate and environmental factors affect personal physical and mental health and social distancing strategies caused by the global epidemic this year. The next step of the research is to consider the impact of climate and social distance factors on people's health and incorporate them into the health route system.

Contemporary societies risk inequality, disintegration and segregation due to a complex array of social, economic and political changes that have been occurring over the last few decades. These changes include the loss of shared values, changes in how individuals interact and get together, and new practices relating to participation and decision-making. In parallel to the evolution of contemporary societies, a complex array of changes are transforming the physical environment where these societies live and work. These changes are affecting especially the disciplines that plan, design and transform the physical environment. New processes of transformation, new ways of interaction, new types of projects and new professional roles are deeply transforming the working environment of architectural disciplines. While these changes offer new opportunities for innovation, they also threaten to generate division in diverse and complex societies. Within this context, universities have the opportunity to expand their social responsibility by affirming that teaching and research can contribute to redressing social inequality, disintegration and segregation. This can be achieved through action, exploring new ways of relating universities to their social context by working with real projects and real people, establishing links between academia and practice.

This item is part of: Boarin, P., Haarhoff, E., Manfredini, M., Mohammadzadeh, M., Premier, A., (2021). Rethinking Sustainable Pacific Rim Territories. Proceedings of the 2020 APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub PhD Symposium, Future Cities Research Hub, School of Architecture and Planning of the University of Auckland. ISBN: 978-0-473-53616-9ABSTRACTThis paper summarises legal and planning statutes as they relate to cultural heritage landscapes and indigenous heritage. Since the mid 1990’s government agencies and heritage groups have attempted to develop structures and drafted policies for better protection of Māori heritage and cultural heritage landscapes. They have covered a wide and complex range of needs and values but, to date, have failed to embed better protective laws and policies with more effective outcomes. Through a socio-political critique of heritage law, planning and policy development in Aotearoa over the last 40 years the power relationships between different heritage ontologies in Aotearoa is explored.Further, this paper offers insights into Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations, particularly principles of kāwanatanga (governance) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship). Expanding on the work of Huhana Smith (2013) shows how a cultural heritage landscape approach, if applied, would better address Te Tiriti obligations.Finally, the paper will highlight elements of the #protectihumātao campaign in Auckland that demonstrates the current weaknesses of heritage planning regimes and environmental regimes in Aotearoa.

Iconic architecture and landscape architecture are most often understood through photographic media that mediates between the idea and the reality for those learning to design. The drastic lockdown responses to COVID-19 and the limitations on local and international travel highlighted the importance of the visual and the potential of the virtual. However, visual media can also be understood as systems that go far beyond a strict representation of an object. In this climate where publicity, politics, and perception play ever more crucial roles, representations of iconic architecture and landscapes increasingly blur the boundaries between the imaginary and the tangible. This paper examines the experience of iconic architecture and landscape in four iconic European cities (Paris, Barcelona, Seville, and Lisbon) as seen through the eyes of fifty postgraduate architecture, interior architecture, and landscape architecture students from New Zealand. It compares their understanding of a building or landscape from its photographic image before engaging with the physical reality. Students were asked to first identify iconic architecture and landscape, then closely analyze and document the essential qualities which established its pre-eminence. A subsequent visit to each of the places provided the opportunity for comparison and the testing of the realities and fictions of the icons themselves. Our research finds that today’s architecture students are savvy and sophisticated consumers of technology. It also presents FABRIC (finding, assimilating, being, reflecting, introspecting, and concluding), a conceptual framework that offers additional scaffolding for educating design students through experiential learning in a time of travel restrictions.

This thesis develops and tests a new tree-scape design approach that is simultaneously visual and functional, responds to critical climatic challenges of heat and flood, as well as complex urban spatial conditions to inform crucial decisions about placement and species choice of trees in urban streets. The thesis findings demonstrate that emerging modelling technologies from gaming, animation and architectural sciences can be combined with techniques from geospatial analytics, algorithmic botany and urban forestry, to create a performance-based design-decision-support system, which can assist landscape architects to coalesce divergent criteria of visual, spatial and functional aspects of tree-scape design.

Presentation by Dr Robert Harland at the Urban Perspectives on Design Literacy Summer School at Loughborough University, 20–21 June 2019. Robert asked participants to explore how the communication of heritage impacts on the city. Imagine discovering a dead king under a car park, or the unlikely occasion that your local football team wins the football championship. As if! How might such events impact on the presentation of place? In this session delegates explored how we experience heritage through graphic objects. Using a framework tool for discussion, participants were encouraged to think about the role of design in constructing the heritage message.

This thesis aims to support future sustainability transitions by considering the role of urban design and urban development. The built environment is first conceptualised as the product of multiple different urban systems, and as such, any work to introduce new ideas needs to acknowledge this multiplicity. Three case studies are examined of WSUD within Melbourne in the mid 2000s, to assess the role of the designers in helping to get these innovative urban environments constructed. The results show that designers played a critical role in the delivery of WSUD by linking ideas across disciplines and sectors. A preliminary foray into thinking about how these insights can be used to inform urban development to support sustainability transitions concludes the thesis.

Conference papers from the 11th International on Urban Drainage Modelling, 23-26 Sep. - Palermo, ItalyAbstract: The combination of rapid urbanisation and anthropogenically induced climate change contributes towards urban cities facing increasing levels of flood risk. It is hypothesized that the visual presentation of various adaptation pathways given uncertain future scenarios will aid in identifying potential barriers towards the implementation of the proposed adaptation pathways...

This symposium proposal seeks to continue the Digital Cities series started in 1999, which is the longest running academic forum that has followed the intertwined development of cities, communities, and digital technologies. Digital Cities #11 aims to understand how to consider more-than-human stakeholders such as natural systems in designing cities. The symposium invites critiques of conventional approaches that tend to favour human comfort and convenience. Cities designed at the expense of nature are problematic as the health of the natural environment is linked to citizens’ wellbeing. Digital Cities #11 gathers contributions towards new design methods for the co-creation of digital technology and urban informatics that take into account how the sustenance and prosperity of humans and non-humans are interdependent with nature. It contributes fundamental and theoretically grounded research to achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 – Sustainable Cities & Communities.

Overview of events and exhibitions for Design for All (DfA) Week 2019. Design for All (DfA) Week is a week long conversation about design and its role in enabling social inclusion, equity and accessible everyday experiences for people living with disabilities. Across ten free events, researchers, artists, designers and thought leaders from Australia and around the world will share their insights on the creative and ethical challenge designers face in their critical responsibility to design for human diversity. This week was also a celebration of Australian and European collaborations, as QUT became the first non-European member of EIDD.

This book provides a bold vision and roadmap for creating great places. Imagining and designing urban environments where all people thrive is an extraordinary task, and in this compelling narrative, Cushing and Miller remind us that theory is a powerful starting point. Drawing on international research, illustrated case studies, personal experiences, as well as fascinating examples from history and pop culture, this practical book provides the reader with inspiration, guidance and tools. The first section outlines six critical theories for contemporary urban design – affordance, prospect-refuge, personal space, sense of place/genius loci, place attachment, and biophilic design. The second section, using their innovative ‘theory-storming’ process, demonstrates how designers can create great places that are inclusive, sustainable, and salutogenic. Creating Great Places is an insightful, compelling, and evidence-based resource for readers who want to design urban environments that inspire, excite, and positively transform people’s lives.

Event ReviewUrban Perspectives on Design Literacy Summer School Loughborough University and Leicester City Council, 20–21 June 2019

Applying the concept of perpetual beta to cities proposes a continual and never complete process of city making. Building on this notion, this chapter employs a conceptual framework of urban acupuncture for conducting and analysing localised small-scale community engagement activities through situated pop-up interventions. Pop-up interventions ‘hack’ public space by temporarily changing the feel of a place to promote awareness around civic issues. We argue that the use of situated pop-up interventions has the potential to provide more inclusive forms of community engagement by combining digital and physical media. The proposed framework employs pop-up activism to facilitate a middle-out approach that encourages citizens to actively identify topics for discussion. Two pop-up interventions in different locations in Australia are discussed in the chapter to assess in what way a systemic level of impact can arise from different processes of city hacking that are facilitated through a distributed, decentralised, yet concerted and regular local approach. We argue that a concerted process of implementing small urban interventions can contribute to an ongoing commitment to participatory city making. Further work will show how each local intervention can contribute to translating the notion of perpetual beta into systemic change beyond the boundaries of their individual locale and – taken together – across different urban environments of the city.

The study investigates highly modified lowlands - the intersection of water and land in coastal cities and their role as 'early warning territories' for the threat of rising water levels. They are concurrently and problematically, important zones for contemporary urban growth and re-development. The study develops alternative water sensitive design tactics, provoked by incremental modification of topographies and water infrastructure to adjust the lowlands to combined pressures of sea-level rise and urban growth in urbanised lowlands of coastal cities.

Free to read on publisher's website Providing access to a view out is fundamental for ensuring healthy living conditions in indoor spaces; however, there are no procedures for capturing luminous variations of a view over time. The study introduces a dynamic method for quantifying such variables through HDR time-lapse photography and digital image-processing techniques. Two series with analogous contextual features portrayed three consistent luminous variability conditions. Local luminous variation suggests the highest potential to influence visual response. Finally, the paper discusses design implications and future refinements to the methodology.

Australia is ageing. More than 15% of the population are older than 65 years. This ageing population will require more age-appropriate housing. In choosing a dwelling in later life, older people prefer an environment that has access to an outdoor landscape. This research aims to understand residents’ experience of Australian aged care facilities, focusing on the outdoor landscape environment. To gain residents’ landscape experience, it applied three different methods: informal interviews, go-along videorecording and digital storytelling. Participatory media, such as digital storytelling, have been adopted in this research to enable users, especially older people, to voice their opinions about the environment through digital means. Research fieldwork was conducted over three years across two aged care facilities in Brisbane, Australia. The purpose of this research is twofold: to develop a more complex understanding of individual user experience in an aged care facility setting by investigating elements that contribute to older people’s engagement in a landscape design; and to explore the role of digital media in understanding older people’s experience in an environmental design context. This research has discovered that outdoor landscapes in aged care facilities not only contribute to a therapeutic experience but can also actively construct a healthful landscape experience. Being healthy is one of the important purposes in aged care facilities. A healthful landscape experience is a holistic account of well-being. Healthful landscape is a more salutogenic perspective to understand environmental design. It focuses on elements that promote health and wellness as positive concepts rather than reducing illness. With the increasing research interests of older people and their living environment, a healthful landscape experience perceives the wholeness of people and place relationships, including sensory experiences, attachment to the environment, individual memories and social relationships, that respond to the physicality of a place. Research findings suggest that designing an aged care facility landscape should incorporate residents’ emotional, social and sensory landscape experiences to provide a holistic perspective that enables a healthful landscape experience.

Integrating renewable energy into public space is becoming more common as a climate change solution. However, this approach is often guided by the environmental pillar of sustainability, with less focus on the economic and social pillars. The purpose of this paper is to examine this issue in the speculative renewable energy propositions for Freshkills Park in New York City submitted for the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) competition. This paper first proposes an optimal electricity distribution (OED) framework in and around public spaces based on relevant ecology and energy theory (Odum’s fourth and fifth law of thermodynamics). This framework addresses social engagement related to public interaction, and economic engagement related to the estimated quantity of electricity produced, in conjunction with environmental engagement related to the embodied energy required to construct the renewable energy infrastructure. Next, the study uses the OED framework to analyse the top twenty-five projects submitted for the LAGI 2012 competition. The findings reveal an electricity distribution imbalance and suggest a lack of in-depth understanding about sustainable electricity distribution within public space design. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.