Guardian: Want to build high-rise homes for 74,000 more people in Wellington? Build consensus first

Read the original article in the Guardian

It’s like a slow-moving nightmare, in which the same battle is fought over and over again, without resolution.

The city council in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, has announced plans to house an extra 74,000 people – plans that would require some low-rise inner-city villas to be replaced by dense modern apartments.

This has provoked howls of outrage from property-owning 70-year-olds – who, in turn, face sneers of derision from young would-be house buyers. Both sides are entrenching themselves behind their battle lines, the same lines that have bisected recent attempts at increasing urban density in cities in New Zealand – and indeed around the world.

But there might be a path out of this impasse. In the 1980s, the US city of Seattle tried to densify, but saw its efforts sunk by intense neighbourhood conflict and Nimbyism (the ‘Not in my backyard’ phenomenon). So a decade later, the city council took a different tack: it decided to trust its communities.

City council staff, in particular their legendary neighbourhoods department head, Jim Diers, realised they needed to rebuild relationships – both between the council and residents, and within fractured communities. The council appointed neighbourhood development coordinators who acted as “intermediaries of trust” and held hundreds of one-on-one meetings with often-suspicious residents.

One coordinator, interviewed by the academic Carmen Sirianni, described their role this way: “I find people who are frustrated and are not plugged into the process and are just throwing rocks, and I meet with them and help them understand how they can work with their neighbours.”

Community ties re-established, the council then made their pitch, which in essence was: “We all know we need a denser inner-city, but you’re fearful about that – so you take charge. You draw up the plan for how this will go down.”

Communities earmarked for greater density were given $10,000 each to develop their plans. That done, they got further funding for the next stage – but only if they could prove they had reached out to every part of the community and hadn’t let the usual suspects dominate. Officials supported these “citizen planners” with neighbourhood design toolkits and software that mapped demographics, land use and transport flows.

The community plans were then tested at “alternatives fairs”, sent to residents for approval, reviewed by officials, and subjected to neighbourhood hearings. Displaying remarkable engagement, some 20,000-30,000 residents took part in a city of 560,000.

After years of conflict, the process brought together politicians, neighbourhood leaders, and even local groups that had formerly been at loggerheads. Best of all, it delivered densification: added together, the neighbourhood plans provided all the housing the council had sought.

Along the way, a pro-development, anti-Nimby constituency was born. Seattle today remains – for various reasons – one of the few American cities to be densifying effectively. Citizen planning hadn’t been quick or cheap but, as Sirianni puts it: “The city council’s investment of money and time ... had clearly paid off.”

All this might seem counterintuitive, given Seattle’s previous animus towards densification. Two factors made the difference: control and environment.

People often feel more relaxed about change if they have a modicum of control over it. And in a good, well-facilitated environment, one where people are encouraged to listen deeply to the arguments of others, consensus can be reached where it seemed impossible. People who shout slogans at each other in vox pops or newspaper front pages can find surprising common ground.

Such results could be expected in Wellington, or indeed elsewhere. It’s easy to laugh at older left-wingers opposing the housing so badly needed by those they claim to help. But what if baby-boomer fears about densification turn out to be legitimate concerns about what private developers will build if left to run rampant? What if, once they hear good arguments in a relaxed setting, their concerns can be assuaged by stringent rules that ensure high-quality architecture?

What if, conversely, young people who see no merit in draughty old villas come to better understand the value of built heritage, the stories of old houses and neighbourhoods that can so profoundly enrich the present? What if they realise that some suburbs do need more protection than the city council’s plans allow, and that mouldy houses can be improved, not just demolished?

This potential consensus is the prize on offer. The challenges of running such a deep, community-led process are of course real, and complex. In New Zealand, there would have to be elevated role for local iwi (indigenous tribes), given their role as mana whenua (groups holding customary land rights and authority).

The alternative to dialogue, though, is all too predictable: a long bout of trench warfare, one in which bickering prevails, the council’s plans are dragged through the courts, catastrophic amounts of time and money are wasted, and no one gets what they want. Right now such an outcome seems likely – but not, as Seattle shows us, inevitable.