Item

Spread your risk: Reconsidering the "quarter acre" dream from an evolutionary perspective

Montgomery, Roy L.
Date
2015-04
Type
Conference Contribution - published
Fields of Research
ANZSRC::1205 Urban and Regional Planning , ANZSRC::120504 Land Use and Environmental Planning
Abstract
Throughout changing economic and political circumstances private home ownership has been an aspirational constant in New Zealand since the start of European settlement. Housing shortages and lack of ready supplies of land for housing development have dominated public debate and government policies periodically over the past century and we appear to be in one of those pressure periods at the present time, especially in Auckland. Is it simply a matter of matching policies with social and market trends? According to Quotable Value New Zealand data average house size was 131.7m2 in 1900, falling back to 117.5m2 in 1950, due mainly to war-time and recessionary effects, and by 2010 this had increased to 205.3m2 (Quotable Value New Zealand, 2011). This trend towards increased dwelling size has not been accompanied by a growth in average section size: “In the same time period, average section size has dramatically shrunk. As a proportion of land use, the typical 1970s single story 120m2 house on a 1012m2 section (11.85% site coverage), has evolved into a house around 210m2 on a 450m2 site, (46% site coverage).” (Marriage, 2010, p. 1). The “quarter acre” home ownership dream may have morphed into a “more house less land” aspiration but the attraction to privately owned property has not abated. Yet the nuclear family now seems an artefact of the twentieth century. What do trends in plot and dwelling size tell us? Are we now merely at the mercy of exorbitant land prices, slavish consumerism, demographic shifts, misguided land-use regulations, the future-proofing financial tactics of individual buyers? Alternatively, and changing site coverage ratios notwithstanding, do people aspire to private ownership of discrete land parcels as a way of spreading individual and collective risk because it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective? This paper argues for the latter interpretation. The paper also suggests that planning practice should take more seriously the concepts of prospect, refuge, hazard, affordance, complexity, coherence, legibility and mystery when setting rules and guidelines for the construction of both private and public “habitat.”
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