Placemaking & climate adaptation planning
March 2024: A couple of posts reflecting on applying placemaking principles to Adaptive Pathways Planning.
Post 1: Overview
I think placemaking and placemaking practitioners need to be more involved in planning for climate change.
The needs are extensive.
Just where I live, well…, heads up, Cantabrians. Waitaha Canterbury has the most buildings (29,325), largest population (51,293) and most extensive road network (525km) of any region in Aotearoa – by FAR – at risk of coastal flooding in a 1%AEP event (that used to be called a 1-in-100-year storm).
This from the new 2024 Ministry for the Environment Ngā pūmate takutai me te ārahitanga huringa āhuarangi Coastal hazards and climate change guidance.
These updated projections since the 2017 report include data from the IPCC AR6 report, the NZ SeaRise research programme’s updated work and new data on localised rates of vertical land movement. (In addition to sea level rise, much of Aotearoa’s coast – and all of Banks Peninsula – is subsiding.)
The great news is that MfE has clear recommendations for a 10-step process to follow to develop an Adaptive Pathways Plan for every at-risk area.
And at heart it’s basically a placemaking process of empowering locals to make decisions for their communities – taking a 100+ year view, establishing collective values, considering the welfare of the community as a whole and being iterative (continuing to monitor, review and adjust).
This process could be improved with some tips and input from the realm of placemaking, especially how to frame some of the challenges as positive opportunities and how to make the process more fun and open to participation from youth.
I’m looking forward to imbuing the adaptive planning process for Far North District Council with some placemaking principles and practice!
Post 2: On the need to restructure Councils away from teams organised by technical function
I’m finding more and more similarities between the principles and practices of placemaking and climate adaptation - especially at the local government level.
Both require highly participatory processes where locals need to be empowered not only to take part in some decisions but also to get their hands dirty with actions that benefit their community.
Both involve balancing speed and long-term thinking, making urgent plans and taking quick actions that are pointing towards and preparing for generational change.
Both involve monitoring, reflecting and iterating – being open to changing paths as you observe the results of earlier decisions.
Both need to find ways to make it attractive for a wide range of people to take part, including all demographics, communities of identity and communities of interest – which requires more creative approaches that aren’t always focused on the spoken or written word.
Crucially for local governments, both placemaking and climate action teams should be impacting BAU across the organisation: how other units like Parks, Transport, Planning or Asset Management apply their technical expertise and interact with the public and with other parts of government.
But both usually consist of very small teams of technical experts that sit level with the other teams of technical experts whose work they should be helping to shape.
This tension could possibly be resolved by reorganising some local government activities to be place-based rather than function-based. Such a place-based structure feels increasingly necessary, quite radical and difficult to ‘pilot’… I wonder if there are any useful case studies out there??
