This is a guest post from Brendon Harre

In a previous series on the rebuild of Christchurch CBD I have suggested a fundamental issue for urban design is how to increase amenity value without increasing property prices? How to return the amenity value created by the presence and enterprise of the community back to that community? I wasn’t able to give a general solution but I did propose at the time a specific option that might help –greater use of Euro-bloc urban form.

Two urban design theorists hint that the general solution may involve finding the right balance between top down state control and bottom up community initiative. Writer Charles Montgomery whose work generally focuses on increasing amenity values and former World Bank Chief Planner Alain Bertaud whose work usually focuses on improving affordability and mobility have both written on the importance of finding this balance.

Brasilia

Charles Montgomery in his book “Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design” has a section titled: Errors from above (P.93-95) using the process that led to –Brasilia-Itis to explain this problem.

Unfortunately, when choosing how to live or move, most of us are not as free as we think. Our options are strikingly limited, and they are defined by the planners, engineers, politicians, architects, marketers and land speculators who imprint their values on the urban landscape…….

Take the most fully realized modernist city. Architect Oscar Niemeyer’s plan for a new capital city of Brazil on a wilderness tabula rasa in the 1950s was meant to embody the country’s orderly, healthy and egalitarian future. Early sketches of Brasilia resembled an airplane or a great bird with its wings outstretched. From above, the plan was exhilarating. Niemeyer segregated functions across the dual axes of his great bird’s body. At its head, the Plaza of the Three Powers, a gargantuan square lined with blocks of government ministries and crowned with the national congress complex. Monumental avenues were paved along the bird’s spine. Identical residential super-blocks were stacked in orderly rows along its wings. The intention was to use simple geometry to free Brasilia of all the chaos of the typical Brazilian city: slums, crime and traffic jams were banished by the architect’s pen. Pedestrians were separated from cars. There was exactly 269 square feet of green space for every resident. The principle of equality ran right through the design: all residents would have similar-sized homes. Everything had its place. On paper, it was a triumph of straightforward and egalitarian central planning.

But when the first generation of residents arrived to live and work in Brasilia, the simple approached showed its weakness. People felt disorientated by the sameness of their residential complexes. They felt lost in their perfectly ordered environment and its vast, empty spaces. They missed their old, cramped market streets, places where disorder and complexity led to serendipitous encounters with sights, scents and other people. Residents even invented a new word –brasilité, or Brasilia-itis –to describe the malaise of living ‘without the pleasures –the distractions, conversations, flirtations and little rituals –of outdoor life in other Brazilian cities’. The simple, rational plan extinguished the intrinsic social benefits of messy public space and loaded the city with a psychological burden that was entirely new for its residents. (Eventually the city spilled beyond its plan, and now messy barrios spread like a tangled nest beyond the wings of the great bird.)

Alain Bertaud describes the balance of where top down should meet bottom up in the following way in his December 2014 article Housing affordability: Top-Down Design and Spontaneous Order. (Abstract, P.1, 2)

The spatial structure of large cities is a mix of top-down design and spontaneous order created by markets. Top-down design is indispensable for the construction of metropolitan- wide infrastructure, but as we move down the scale to individual neighborhoods and lots, spontaneous order must be allowed to generate the fine grain of urban shape. At what scale level should top-down planning progressively vanish to allow a spontaneous order to emerge? And what local norms are necessary for this spontaneous order to result in viable neighborhoods that are easily connected to a metropolitan-wide infrastructure? Examples from Southeast Asia show that an equilibrium between topdown designed infrastructure and neighborhoods created through spontaneous order mechanisms can be achieved. This equilibrium requires the acknowledgement by the government of the contribution of spontaneous order to the housing supply…..

Spontaneous order appears in the absence of a designer’s intervention when markets and norms regulate relationships between immediate neighbors. Most evolving natural structures, from coral reefs to starlings’ swarms, are created by spontaneous order.

Top-down design is indispensable for the construction of infrastructure that spans urban metropolitan areas. Spontaneous order cannot create a metropolitan road network or a storm drainage system. However, as we move down the scale from metropolitan area to individual neighborhoods and toward individual lots, top-down design becomes less useful and should progressively disappear to let spontaneous order generate the fine grain of urban shape. At the neighborhood level, unfortunately, top down design often usurps the role of spontaneous order in allocating land between households. This substitution of spontaneous order by top-down planning is responsible for the existence of slums in developing countries and for very high housing rents unaffordable to the lowest income population in developed countries.

Urban managers are suspicious of spontaneous order, associating it with chaos and anarchy. They try to replace it with top-down design. Top-down design could be direct and explicit as in Brasilia, or it could be indirect and take the form of detailed regulations and zoning maps, as in most of the world’s large cities……

This paper will not attempt to dispute all the aspects of the “need to plan” logic used by planners. It will only address the impact that minimum land and floor consumption regulations have on housing affordability. These regulations fix minimum sizes for lot, floor space, parking, and access street width. They also set the permissible ratio between the area of a lot and the floor space that may be built on it by setting a maximum floor area ratio…..

Because regulations usually set minimum consumption of land and floor space and not a maximum, they have a high negative impact on the poorest households who might trade-off a lower consumption to be able to settle in a preferred location. For low income households, regulations rather than consumers’ choices are therefore driving individual housing consumption…….

It can be rational to trade off space for location and affordability as Lily Duval explains from personal  experience with her 14 sqm Christchurch house. Alain Bertaud explains it is quite natural for people to make these trade-offs to best maximise their needs. (P.14, 15)

Low-income households looking for a dwelling in large cities have to make trade-offs between location, lot and floor area, width of access streets and availability of urban services. As seen above, they should not rely on government planners to make these trade- offs for them. A number of countries allow low-income households to select the set of housing standards that would maximize their welfare. In these countries, households who can only afford very low standards are not stigmatized by living in informal settlements. Governments recognize that their low standards are the result of very low income and as a consequence subsidize part of their infrastructure, instead of attempting to subsidize their entire housing consumption. Three successful examples, described below, occur in Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. In these countries, within a given perimeter, low-income settlements with no top-down regulations are organized in small condominium-like communities that set their own internal rules. The governments deal with them as communities. They have to follow government standards only for their connections to city-wide networks like water, sewer, power and refuse disposal.

Indonesia

Indonesia Kampongs

Kampongs constitute an invaluable stock of affordable  housing to those who cannot afford a car or are ready to trade-off the convenience of a car for the centrality of a kampong’s location. The original rights of ways for narrow lanes and footpaths have been kept intact even after significant improvements in drainage; water supply has been made available and streets have been paved. As a result, most of the houses located inside the kampongs are hardly accessible by cars. These low road standards prevent land prices from aligning themselves with those of the more traditional houses built along vehicular roads in adjacent communities. The housing stock located in kampongs constitute a parallel housing market for low-to-middle income households. Most kampongs are densely populated, centrally located and close to commercial areas and job clusters…. The lack of car access or at least the impossibility of parking a car on a residential lot makes the kampong’s population more likely to make motorcycles, electric scooters or public transit their preferred means of transport.

Kampongs are making an efficient use of land. (P.17, 18)

Indonesia Kampong land use

Vietnamese vertical urban villages

Vietnam Vertical Village

Vietnamese cities have adopted similar policies and urban development ideology as Indonesia’s kampong program (note Bertaud’s description of China’s mega-project developmental process in this 2012 article would be an apt description of Christchurch’s Crown/Fletchers CBD development). As cities expand, planners carefully avoid encroaching on existing villages while connecting them to the city-wide infrastructure network.

Within an urban village’s perimeter, no specific top down regulations are applied. Houses are mostly townhouses built on narrow plots about 3 meters wide. They are traditionally 2 or 3 levels high. But as demand for housing increases the village townhouses can often grow up to 6 or even 7 levels. The village house owner expands vertically, eventually renting rooms or apartments to new households, adapting the standards to the demand. There are no city-imposed standards in these villages, only good neighbour norms. The supply for new market-provided low cost housing is extremely elastic because of the possibility of vertical expansion compatible with local tradition. Some recent migrants rent only one room, others an entire floor or two. (P.19, 20)

Shenzhen China

Shenzhen

Shenzhen evolved into a megacity, reaching about 15 million people in 2014, from what was in 1980 a cluster of fishing villages.

Like in Vietnam and Indonesia these villages have been given freedom to adapt from the bottom up. Alain Bertaud describes (P.21 -26) how a group of ‘handshake’ villages, 2.5 km from the centre of Shenzhen occupy an area 31 hectares and provide housing for about 100,000 people.

This extreme density has some pitfalls such as a lack of natural light -not so much of a problem for the local tropical climate. This design configuration would not be appropriate for more temperate climates such as New Zealand.

But as an example of bottom up control over urban development it has some important lessons, especially in aiding low income residents to find affordable housing. A full reading of Alain Bertaud’s article would be recommended….

Shenzhen street

Has New Zealand got the right balance between top down and bottom up? What do you think?

Alain Bertaud believes (P.2, 3);

Planners use a number of rationales to justify the extension of top down design to the micro aspects of individual consumption of land and floor space. Planners have to plan infrastructure and social services based on future population densities. Therefore, they must estimate future densities in different parts of the city. Too often, planners transform these density projections into zoning plans, which become regulations.

Estimating future density is a legitimate urban planning task. It is wrong, however to transform a planning projection into a regulation, thereby putting households into a regulatory straightjacket……. In constraining land supply planners create an artificial land scarcity resulting in high land prices and high housing prices, reducing the housing consumption of the lowest income households.

High property prices reducing housing consumption for the lowest income households is true for New Zealand too, the urban areas with the highest land costs and lowest incomes has the most overcrowding.

Figure 3.2 Crowded households (2013)

Proportion of households living in a crowded home (per cent)

NZ Household Crowding

Figure 3.2 shows the proportion of households that live in a crowded home. Auckland and Gisborne top the list. Some households are forced into living in places too small for their needs, as they cannot afford a suitable home. The cost of housing, the cost of transport, location and many other factors are among the causes. Crowding is most prevalent for people on low incomes, who are already spending a large share of their income on rent and cannot afford a larger home.

Sources: Statistics New Zealand, Generation Rent (P.82) by Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub

Should it be possible in some localised blocks within New Zealand’s high cost urban areas for communities to bypass planning rules? Perhaps if say more than two-thirds of the residents agree? Creating something like a community controlled body corporate with the purpose of becoming a small high density zone.

The community’s norms like in Indonesia, Vietnam and Shenzhen, China could govern what type of high density is allowed by setting the rules for car parking, shade, height, set-backs….. Normal planning rules would be set aside. Only the building code would apply as a top down regulation. Top down institutions –the Local Council and the Crown only taking responsibility for bringing services to the edge of the community controlled zone.

Would this sort of process help address New Zealand’s housing crisis?

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21 comments

  1. How do you define the “community”?

    I’ll give you an example… imagine a “community” named X that consists of 5×5 blocks of space
    Now, that community decides it wants planning rules Y
    But within that community, let’s say a section of 3×3 blocks wants different rules. Can they secede? And what if within that section, a sub-section of 2×2 wants yet different rules?

    Boundary setting is *vital*.

  2. And the solution is actually more top-down
    1. Better regional tax rules to better distribute population (special economic zones)
    2. Capital gains tax
    3. If necessary, price caps on property sales.
    4. Massive state-funded residential property development. The KiwiHome

    1. CGT hasn’t worked anywhere on the planet. All that happens is that any potential taxation is then built into the selling price. CGT is a dead horse. Might put a little more money in the IRD’s pocket, but nowhere in the world it was implemented to ‘solve’ rampant house price rises did it ever achieve anything of note. The pressure on house prices globally is now coming (and thanks even more now to the TPP and also the Chinese Premier telling his wealthy to ‘invest’ globally) more so from the richest of the rich nations. And they don’t worry about any CGT. CGT is often espoused by those at the lower rungs hoping to teach the rich a lesson and make them ‘pay’ the price for being rich. The only people it ever really impacts is those at the lower end who sell their single investment property, if at all. Those buying many homes, properties or farms don’t even consider it an issue, in fact with a decent accountant it is simply a cost of doing business.

      1. I guess it should be less about capital gains but rather a tax on all capital. To push capital into economically productive sectors rather than just sitting in residential real estate.

        1. Capital shouldn’t be taxed as capital is what created wealth and economic growth.

          Inefficient things like land should be taxed instead using a land value tax.

        2. You could equally well say, “Labour income shouldn’t be taxed as work is what makes people wealthier.” For most people, that’s true – they will earn far more from working than they do from investing. And yet we happily tax labour income…

        3. Taxing all capital (especially at the same rate) isn’t really much of an incentive.

  3. Get capital gains tax.
    Get rid of land rates.
    Regions get funded by income tax based on their population.
    Divide Auckland back up into several cities in terms of regions so they compete for people.
    When funding is dependent on the number of people you have, and not on just increasing rates, your methods change pretty quickly to attract people. Works for Germany/Swizterland where housing is more like a commodity, and less like an investment.

    1. Income Taxes are very inefficient people can avoid them through multiple means they don’t really benefit the economy, they are hard to collect the list goes on.

      We don’t have land rates we have property rates so people who develop their land are punished. Land Rates would be a Land Value Tax where you would only be taxed on the land value not on the value of your improvements. It’s much more efficient and better creates the culture you want which is houses as homes not investments.

      We could use the same system as your income tax using the Australian GST model where the states collect the tax for the Commonwealth who then distributes it. We could do the same with Local Govt and central tieing allocation to population.

  4. “Should it be possible in some localised blocks within New Zealand’s high cost urban areas for communities to bypass planning rules? Perhaps if say more than two-thirds of the residents agree? Creating something like a community controlled body corporate with the purpose of becoming a small high density zone.”
    Except that in most cases it would probably work the other way around and these blocks would prevent higher density housing (as they have done with the unitary plan).

    1. They can already do it -a community of any size -a individual property, a street, a block can all decide to impose the same restrictive covenants. They don’t do it because although they might want to restrict neighbouring development opportunities they do not want to restrict their own.

      Another word for NIMBY is hypocrite…….

      1. They can *restrict* development, but they can’t agree to allow development over and above what’s in the district plan.

        As with everything, the ratchet is always layer upon layer of different types of restrictions upon development, never a layer that promotes or allows it.

  5. Regarding bottom-up development: the unitary plan makes it very hard for individuals to build their own house.

    Despite the name of the “Terrace Housing and Apartment Buildings zone”, developing terraced housing in the usual way (single houses on a single narrow plot) is illegal in that zone:

    A site must be at least 25m wide:
    a. at the road boundary

    If you build terrace housing, 25 meter is much wider than a house. Typically the houses are less than 10 meter wide.

    In the Mixed Housing Suburban zone: normally you are allowed to have one dwelling per 300 or 400m², depending on site frontage. However for large lots (> 1200m²) the allowed density rises to 1 per 200m². And the Mixed Housing Urban zone as a similar exception.

    So basically if you’re a developer with the capital to develop a bunch of houses at once, you get 25% off on land cost. Or what am I missing here?

    1. That refers to the site overall, not the site per dwelling. If you meet all the other requirements you could stick four or five terraced houses across a 25m frontage quite comfortably.

      But yes, you need to develop the site in one go, but I think you could do that by selling off strips with covenants on the title saying you can develop right the boundary lines.

      I’m not sure where doing single terraces one at a time is the usual way, they always seem to be done in rows or blocks. At least in Australia and Britain, im not familiar with other places.

      1. OK, I’m not quite able to understand the exact meaning of the word “site” in the Unitary Plan. Would it be legal to split that 25m wide site into 4 freehold titles?

        AFAIK in Europe terraces, apart from the building form, are developed in pretty much the same way as detached houses.

        A subdivision may indeed happen one street at a time. But that’s also the case for detached housing. Individual sections normally have one house each. Of course with terraced housing the footprint for the house is fixed so they will eventually form a row. Individuals or small businesses may buy a single section and have a contractor build a house. You sometimes see a gap in the row where no house has been built yet. That house can still be built later because the adjacent houses are required to have a blind wall on the sides. And since each house is on its own section, those sections are freehold sections. You don’t see terraced houses with a body coorp.

        As a result of that development process, adjacent houses have a slightly different height. They may be built using different materials. They may have quite different ages. Although houses are built side-by-side, they normally don’t actually share a wall, so it is possible to do things like adding a storey, or even demolishing one of the houses in a row to replace it.

        I have seen terraced housing in Auckland as well, but they appear all to be developed in one go by a developer and sold off the plan. That is a very different model of development. The market for individuals to buy a section where they can build a house seems to be regulated out of existence. Instead development of new housing is reserved for those who can afford to build a whole bunch of them at once.

  6. The new planning rules in Auckland is overly restrictive and top down.

    For example they require each room to to be a certain size, have a window that points to a open space of a certain dimension. The deck cannot exceed this size and this height. A disjointed building must not exceed this height and cannot have cooking facility. Certain percent of land must be non building and certain percent must be permeable even if we wish to lay extra storm water as work-around.

    Some of these restrictions has good intention, however sometimes trade-offs has to be made.

    I would suggest the council planning rules to be less strict and allow some degree of flexibility and grant exception if a good workaround that satisfy the intention is proposed.

    1. The issue is that as long as there is a shortage, the smaller apartments you build simply go up in price to where the previous entry level apartments were, and the price of the other housing types all adjust up accordingly.

  7. This morning the editor of medium.com/making-christchurch, Barnaby Bennett made some suggested editorial changes, which we worked on this afternoon. So there is some significant changes to the final article, including a completely re-written introduction paragraph. I think it greatly improves the clarity of the article. Please visit https://medium.com/making-christchurch/where-does-top-down-meet-bottom-up-755823328ca5 to see this completed version. Hopefully Transportblog can update this article too.

    Please if you like this article -inform others, spread it around the multi-media. My original article on Christchurch’s CBD re-development got about 700 views on Making Christchurch. My wife says not many people are interested in the technical/theoretical ideas about how our cities develop. I hope she is wrong.

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