Recover / Rehabilitate / Regenerate: Inhabiting Flood Ecosystems.
Masters of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Stage—Project Development.
2023.
Recover / Rehabilitate / Regenerate aims to design a living urban ecosystem that is resilient to floods, and actively works to address the root cause of floods—climate change. The project interlinks architecture, urban design, and policy to build an ecosystem model that can be realistically scaled and adapted to implement across Tamaki Makaurau.
Ecosystem: The complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space.
The thesis draws from regenerative architecture principles, centering on the recovery and rehabilitation of Auckland’s buried streams and wetlands. It ponders how we can not only live beside wetland ecosystems, but inhabit them.
Before concrete and sewer pipes, the Opoutukeha stream flowed freely through the native forests, wetlands, and mangrove swamps of what is now known as Grey Lynn. The stream lay forgotten, buried for long swathes underneath Cox’s Bay Reserve, Grey Lynn Park, and a whole lot of villas—until January 2023, the Auckland Anniversary Floods. Grey Lynn was one of the most heavily impacted suburbs in the city. It is also an inner-city suburb subject to ongoing intensification. The project site focuses on the pathway and flood plains of the stream through Grey Lynn Park, and takes into account the contextual relationships of water at a catchment scale.
Ecosystem mapping model to identify characteristics, opportunities, constraints, and relationships for any site’s potential to integrate into a local wetland ecosystem (for developers, planners, architects, and general decision-makers)
Medium density, income-diverse architectural development within a rehabilitated Opoutuheka ecosystem (exemplar of ecosystem mapping applied to a flood-vulnerable location)
Ecosystem zone chapter for Grey Lynn (exemplar of objectives, policies, and standards which require or incentivise a high baseline of environmental performance and wetland integration)
A three-part project that harnesses the micro-to-macro relationships within the Opoutukeha catchment to create a habitat rich in biodiversity, flood resilience, and social wellbeing.
