| Carbon-neutral New Zealand |
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 Bosphorous houses
Perhaps we should all pause for a cup of tea. When the new Built Environment Minister pointed it out in 2008 it was of course obvious to everyone. Building was not fun any more. When life is no longer fun you need to seriously ask if you have lost the plot. The prospect of a carbon-neutral New Zealand presented an opportunity, not a challenge. Life is only fun when you are fully alive. The dilemma people discovered back in 2007 was that it was very difficult to be alive if you were trying to live in a world was itself not fully alive. The land agents said "Sell the world now while the market is strong, and we will send you an invoice along with a glossy brochure of other better worlds." The developers said "We may have messed it up the last time, but you trust us to get it right next time. We have now formed a new company anyway so that we are all off to a clean start." The architects said that the two billion people living in slums cannot afford architectural magazines, let alone architects, so that if ethics and morality are left out of the equation there should be no problem. The business community only wanted to know how they could make money out of climate change. Everyone is your friend when the going is good. When the fish are biting, and the uranium is just waiting to be dug up, life is not a problem. When times get tough you find you are on your own. On a dying planet the "Lord of the flies" becomes a valuable handbook. Back in 2007 individuals began realising that they were indeed on their own and could not look to the people who had caused all the built environment problems to also provide the solutions. At first individuals were not up to the challenge. The ordinary people had not only allowed themselves to be disempowered, but they had also developed a taste for obese architecture. Fat was the fashion and the architectural magazines were full of it. Then people began realising that architectural obesity was killing them. Triple glazing and insulating your obesity made it a little more comfortable but did not change the fact that it was killing you. Back in 2007 the only people enjoying building were those doing so without permits. Everyone else was caught up in the endless agony of Resource Consents, the stress of financing mortgages, and the madness of wishing they were living somewhere else. Then everything changed. The old negative, desperate, control-focused 2006 Building Act was repealed, and a new positive, creative, environment-focused Building Act was introduced. The change was as radical as the one which had taken place when the control-obsessed Muldoon era gave way to the Douglas free-market economy. Overnight the dollar was floated, all the assets New Zealand owned were sold off to privatise the wealth of the country, and everyone seemed powerless to do anything about it. Revolutions do happen, sometimes for good and sometime for ill. Anyone interested in climate change needs to understand history and how those revolutions occur. Volatile times present opportunities for the power-hungry just as much as they do for the idealists. Indeed environmental idealism can be twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. The Building Act which had been introduced back in 2006 as a knee-jerk reaction to the Leaky Building Syndrome had only made everything worse. Instead of penalising those responsible for leaky buildings it had penalised everyone else. Draconian restrictions were placed on owner builders although owner-building had had nothing to do with the developers' rotting timber. The good news was that the Act was so extreme that it created the climate which led to its self-destruction. Douglas would not have been possible without Muldoon. Einstein observed that you cannot solve a problem unless you move outside the consciousness which has produced the problem. The 2006 Building Act was flawed at the most basic level. It saw the house as nothing more than a materialistic object to bought, sold and thrown out with the trash. The Act was a deeply religious document and its religion was materialism. It reinforced all the causes of climate change, while pretending to do the opposite. In a carbon-neutral world building is seen as a verb rather than a noun. The process is more important than the product. A house becomes an exploration of life, just like life itself. The architectural climate change began when the 2007 Local Government Rates Inquiry came up with an extremely simple solution. Abolish rates. An equitable and just alternative was introduced. Under the new regime when a property was sold a third of the sale price was given to Local Government for them to build Vector Arenas in every little shopping centre. The immediate consequence of this new strategy was that people began to think twice about selling. The property market collapsed overnight and land agents closed their doors. Councils found they only needed half the staff. The architectural revolution was on the way. When it was no longer sensible to sell your mistakes and make a loss the architectural focus moved to getting buildings right in the first place. Instead of constantly discarding dysfunctional houses as family needs changed houses began to be built where the brief for the house was generated by the site. Ten minute architectural wonders were replaced by buildings which became better and better as every year passed. The new building species took its place alongside the thousand year old kauri. The kiwi and cicadas no longer felt threatened by the architectural bulldozer. The smell of summer returned to subdivisions and only then did people remember what summer had once been like. Houses were no longer seen as sheltering people from the natural environment. They were seen as assisting people to relate to the natural environment. Suddenly the time limit pressure came off the whole building process. It takes time to cook a good meal. The diet of architectural fast food which was the norm in 2007 was replaced by quality and craftsmanship. The architectural fast food outlets which were once to be seen on every corner slowly disappeared and architectural obesity ceased being a health issue. There is no rush to build once you understand that it takes a lifetime to come to understand the world around us. A few simple changes in the planning rules also helped slow society's lemming dash to self destruction. In 2007 you were not permitted to build within the drip line of a pohutukawa. Reversing this so that you were not allowed to build anywhere else except within the drip line of a pohutukawa, or some other native tree, resulted in a complete change of fashion. Everyone started planting trees so that they would be able to build beneath them. Rather stupid research such as exploring the best kind of grass to grow on a green roof was no longer necessary. The money was better spent on fertiliser for the Green City. Of course when your house is an exploration of life you need to do it yourself. Having a developer build your house for you is rather like paying someone else to make love for you. It is efficient and it saves time. However someone else has all the fun. You also need to pay the cost of their Personal Indemnity Insurance in case something goes wrong. Initially it was feared that repealing the old Building Act would result in massive bureaucratic unemployment with inspectors having nothing to do, but the Smacking Children Syndrome which first became apparent around 2007 solved that problem. The "Child Act 2008" brought in sweeping changes, which turned out to be very similar to those of the old Building Act. Only parents who had had children before were permitted to become Licensed Children Practitioners. Parents could be licensed as Grade One for simple children, Grade Two for children who showed some initiative, and Grade Three for children who might show leadership potential. Before having children parents still needed of course to get a Children Permit and a Resource Consent. Every detail needed to be fully explained before a child permit could be issued and no variations were permitted without going through the whole Resource Consent process all over again. It seemed perfectly reasonable that parents who had not had children before were not allowed to have any because they had no experience. One result of the new Act was the "developer parent" who did what people had once done for themselves. The business community wondered how they could make money out of this new process. The answer, as always, was to create a market. People could then buy and sell children. Instead of having to make do with the ones they had everyone could make a capital gain out of selling their children and move up the scale. All the unemployed real estate agents now became child agents. Someone whose name has been forgotten suggested at the Select Committee hearings that you could not treat children like houses, but the chairwoman misunderstood and recorded in the minutes that you could not treat houses like children. The handwritten note alongside said succinctly "Ridiculous". Tinkering with architectural design does nothing to resolve systemic architectural problems. Introducing more draconian carbon-neutral controls will do nothing to make New Zealand carbon-neutral. At best they will only serve to entrench the power structure which is the problem. A consumer society consumes, and consumer architecture does just that. The bigger your ecological footprint the happier you are, or so the advertisements would tell us. Unfortunately, if you are heavily committed to a consumer society, and fortunately, if you are interested in being carbon-neutral, you cannot buy fun, in spite of all the consumer advertisements. Life comes free. It is a personal choice to live it to the full. Having fun building is just one aspect of having fun being alive. Being fully alive in a world which is fully alive is the ideal. Getting the balance right is a spiritual quest. That is the core question which every carbon-neutral building and every carbon-neutral city needs to address. Tony Watkins |
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