Antonia Lapwood
The Avondale Stream runs through the neighbourhood of Clark’s Common in New Lynn and currently divides the light industrial zone on Portage Road and the residential community of Ulster Road. Lack of access, disconnection between the zones, and minimal activation diminish the Avondale Stream, and its surrounds are a lost amenity to the area.
On the Western side of the stream, the industrial-zoned space behind the industrial block is a largely impermeable surface, unused the majority of the time. On the residential side the back fence-line has created the condition of an informal rubbish-dump. The site is an interstitial space not only physically, but also politically, located along the previous boundary between Waitakere and Auckland City. Thus the neighbourhood has been strategically unresolved and ranked as low priority for redevelopment in the New Lynn Urban Plan for 2030. The site sits on the periphery of the proposed Bob Hill Precinct for the area, where the Eastern boundary runs along the stream, excluding the residential side and further creating a divide between the zones.
Through mapping the social, environmental and political conflicts in the neighbourhood as a generational tool, a critique of conventional ‛top-down’ urban planning was developed which opposes existing frameworks that often eliminate or ignore site complexities rather than addressing them.
This critical mapping generated a design catalogue of twelve tactical interventions that serve as a catalyst for long-term redevelopment and remediation of the neighbourhood through four strategic schemes of riparian improvement, temporary use, community schemes and appropriating space.
These tactics are focused on operational restructurings that rethink roles of ownership, facilitation and exchange by considering institutional agencies as facilitators and residents as curators of their own neighbourhood; this can create new economies of exchange and knowledge that override existing arbitrary zoning, through exchange and performance beyond the physical environment. Tactical Urbanism challenges existing notions of ‛zoning’ ‛program’ and ‛development’ by creating speculative possibilities that examine the co-existence between long-and short-term planning, large scale and small scale, and temporary and permanent interventions, beyond the homogeneity of urban-planning practice.
MUDDY URBANISM lab 