What Wellington could look like as a city of the future

First Light Studio architect, Nick Officer, says Poneke’s buildings will need to be adaptable to climate, to respect the tsunamis, he says. “There will need to be buildings that virtually lift up on their feet, move and are adaptable. We’re seeing tornados on the Kāpiti Coast, how could buildings shut down? We will need to have living buildings that have gardens on the rooftop to grow food and collect water,” he suggests. 

What we do too often is think about the world today, not about what it’s likely to be, Nick finds. “It’s time to think about how we create buildings that could move, rise and flex, that change with the owner, that come in shells that go up and down in size,” he explains 

“The hundred year way is making sure the building is supporting the function of the people who live in them,” adds the architect. 

In terms of housing, small apartments won’t fit the bill. “What we’re missing is family-sized apartments. Imagine buildings with a level per household, these buildings will be about bringing families together,” says the architect. 

Fellow First Light Studio architect, author and Victoria University lecturer, Guy Marriage is an advocate of medium density architecture, which you can see in cities like London and Minsk. He says he’d like to see a rebuilding of Wellington’s suburbs, not trying to pack them in, but with very good multi storey housing woven in. 

“Wellington needs to densify hugely,” says Guy. “I imagine buildings rebuilt at four storeys, with high densification, better quality and better designed for sun.” 

The thought leader sees a big future in cross-laminated timber buildings, which is one-fifth the weight of concrete. You can build medium height buildings very easily with it and it’s structurally very seismically strong, says the architect.

If more people are going to live in the city centre, a future Wellington needs more recreational spaces and less priority for vehicles, says Angela Foster, director and urban designer with Foster + Melville Architects. “Let’s take the city back to the 1930s when it was trams and people, open streets and just a few vehicles,” she says. 

Strasbourg, in France, is a city with narrow 3 to 4 metre streets with paving, and there the cars wait, they go slow, while pedestrians dominate, explains Angela. 

The architect would like to see Wellington built with more awareness of its environment. Other cities have challenging weather, she says. And rather than big parks, people need lots of little spaces, mini stages, near Civic Square for instance, where you can sit around on different levels. Vancouver, which is windy, has a number of pocket parks, covered areas, greenery and shelter. All you need is to light it well, says Angela. 

Hannah Hopewell teaches landscape-led urbanism at Victoria University of Architecture with degrees in urban design, spatial design and landscape architecture. Also a landscape urbanist with TOA Architects, she would like to see more house boats at sheltered spots like Point Jerningham, in a similar way to the on-water living in San Francisco’s Sausalito. Housing product in Poneke will be more diverse and include tiny houses and self-build homes, she adds.

Wellington City Council Tātai Heke Māori (Chief Māori Officer) Karepa Wall is looking forward to a future where Māori’s local identity and history is incorporated into the decisions the council makes around buildings and spaces throughout Poneke. 

Building an identity where you feel like you’re entering a Māori-Pakeha integrated environment like Rotorua is something to aspire to, he says. “It’s all about fluency and hearing it in the city,” Karepa explains. 

A stake in the sand was made around four years ago with mana whenua to make Poneke the only bilingual capital city in the world, by 2040, says Karepa. 

One of the new spaces in the city incorporating Mana Whenua identity and history is the new Tākina Convention Centre across the road from Te Papa. Built on one of the biggest Pā sites for Taranaki Whānui, tākina means to summon and connect, and refers to the wind that’s the city’s most powerful source. 

Pā used to be transitional places, moving from one place to another depending on growing conditions; they might move up and down a street, says Karepa. This transitional concept could be the foundations for the next big development opportunity for the council and mana whenua, he says. 

What does public housing look like through a Māori lens? It might be apartment buildings that are multi-family, have community gardens and are run as a community. 

“If we were doing something like this on Willis Street, it might have a community Māori language speaking hub, including a youth hub on the ground floor,” suggests Karepa. 

“Let’s think of Poneke as a blank canvas. Let’s not just build a city, let’s do something innovative, something that creates the best environment for everyone, especially those who come after us,” he says.

To Three Line Studio architect Amanda Bulman, it’s simple. Her future Wellington is all about the domestication of urban space. 

“You’ve got to take it and live in it, become super focused on the occupation of the city. Forget about densifying in the suburbs, that’s a red herring,” says the architect. 

The traffic has to go, she adds. “That gets phased out so we occupy our streets again, it’s fundamental. Every city that’s done it in the world has thrived, that’s preparation for our future,” says Amanda.

“We don’t have a choice but to do something different. We don’t have time for incremental changes, we need a paradigm shift,” says Massey University senior lecturer in the School of Design, Jennifer Archer-Martin. 

The spatial design lecturer’s work with students has sparked some ideas for future Wellington which have heartened her. One student has looked at Oriental Bay beach, asking what might happen if sea level rise and climate change resulted in the beach and the road disappearing. Samantha Spencer has designed a series of floating islands for play, where people could do all the activities currently done on the beach or waterfront. The islands are inspired by clumps of flax and toetoe which, after the 1855 earthquake, floated out into the harbour from the swamp that existed where the Basin Reserve is now. “What this says is, our world will change but we can adapt and even flourish,” says Jen. 

Another of her Massey students, Luca Crampton, meanwhile, is reimagining the whole layout of the Hutt Valley, rewilding it and concentrating it into three zones. The zones are sited on the hills, where the old wetlands were, and along the river banks, and are about looking at how structures that can house people can also amplify and regenerate the natural environment, says Jen. 

“Rather than trying to bring nature back into the city, the idea is to flip the thinking, so landscapes return to cities, then we find ways to dwell within those landscapes,” she explains. 

As for the way new buildings are built, the senior Massey lecturer believes any new building should be built with components which can be reused in other buildings, so it’s all part of a future circular economy. “We have to be designing for transition and ongoing transition, ” says the spatial designer.

Wellington is a city of artists and William (Bill) Carden-Horton, cultural anthropologist and artist, predicts the capital of the future will be a font of creativity and sustainable innovation in the decades to come. 

Poneke would have a wide number of meeting spaces, work spaces, privacy spaces and collaborative project spaces with gallery space for show and tell. And a new kind of retail which is all about entertainment, combined with eating, seeing, working and teaching, each in “combo hubs”. 

And on every city corner, there will be urban farms to feed schools, restaurants and local homes, says Bill. The city would be off grid, powered by community-generated power of waves, surf, wind, solar and manure, he envisions. Meanwhile, people will be working a 3.5 day week so they have more time to grow and make food, work on personal projects and get into nature close by.

The key to a successful city of the future is that people have to have job opportunities, says town planner Tom Anderson from resource management consultancy, Incite. Without people, you don’t have the vibrancy, he says. “If Wellington City Council gets that density right then it’s going to be fantastic,” says Tom. 

And then it will be about making the most of public parks, he adds. Public spaces don’t have to be single purpose, an outdoor theatre in Wellington’s Botanic Garden, for instance, could be used for a variety of events, he suggests.

Wellington City Council chief planning officer, Liam Hodgetts, notes that Wellington has some of the densest urban environments in New Zealand. 

Liam, who grew up in Auckland and has lived in Melbourne and London, says he couldn’t think of a more lively city than Wellington. 

“What makes Wellington city so cool is its density and more housing growth close to it means it’s only going to get better,” says the chief planner. It’s what makes Wellington great while Auckland by comparison will be more dispersed and decentralised in the future, he explains. 

In the coming years, there’ll be significant intensification in the CBD, Te Aro, Johnsonville and Kilbirnie with apartment buildings in these metro areas from six to 10 storeys high, he says. These areas will have a broad range of retail, commercial and housing. 

“We expect these centres will be helped along by the post-pandemic trend of working from home,” says the planner. 

Suburbs like Island Bay and Miramar will also be expected to carry a bit of extra housing load in the short to medium term. 

It’s estimated Poneke will have population growth of 50,000 to 80,000 in the next 30 years, the Wellington region by as much as 250,000. The current population of Wellington city is 220,000, and the Wellington region is 542,000. 

A lot more housing will go up in Newtown and Te Aroha, along Kent and Cambridge Tce and Adelaide Road to accommodate part of this growth, says the chief planning officer. The housing along that spine is likely to double from 18,000 residents to 36,000, he says. And with this doubling in size, the new housing will have to go up. 

“The planners at Wellington City Council are preparing for how we meet the needs of the people living and working in these new “vertical suburbs,” says the chief planning officer.

Wellington City Council chief planning officer, Liam Hodgetts, who’s in charge of both the city’s climate change response and the cycleways programme in Wellington, says the ambition of the WCC is to provide transport choices: In giving people the choice of Mass Rapid Transit, cycleways, a good bus network, he says, “the point is the more choices we can give them, the more chance we have of reducing road congestion and our city’s car centricity, so to reduce our carbon footprint,” says Liam. 

Time is of the essence. “We’re in a climate emergency, it’s why we have to transform quickly,” he says. A total of 17 km of cycleway has been approved over the past 12 months, double what’s been delivered over the last five years, says Liam. 

For Wellingtonian, CoreLogic’s head of research, Nick Goodall, the Wellington of the future will have big changes in infrastructure to connect to all different parts of the Wellington region. He suggests a tram south of the city to the eastern bays as well as cycling infrastructure. 

And how about connecting better with the South Island? A plane hovercraft combination that flies just a couple of metres off the water was just flagged in Stuff recently.