2 Infill Liaison

West End Rowing Club

Kurt Bremer Reserve

7 Industrial Recreation

Zee Shake Lee

Left:

Impermanent architectures and informal recreational interventions perforate the Span Farm industrial area and re-territorialise

inaccessible public space. Collage

Overleaf, left:

Mapping of existing mixed-use programmes (residential and recreational) within the Span Farm industrial area; Mapping of access to Span Farm Esplanade Reserve; Impeding public access to water edge.

(Top to bottom)

Overleaf, right:

Proposed informal occupations, interventions and activities.

Industrial Recreation explores the possibility of expanding zoning categories through threading ‛living’ and ‛leisure’ programmes within the Span Farm industrial zone.

Span Farm is an anomalous area on the western banks of the Whau River. Technically fringed by open public space (Span Farm Esplanade and Hepburn Reserve), this area of light industry turns its back to the river, and in doing so renders the water’s edge public space inaccessible. This public-owned piece of the ‘Queen’s Chain’ is colonised, fenced, gated, and padlocked.

Hemmed in between the Whau and the low-rise residential suburb of Glendene, Span Farm exists in a passive contradiction of states. The industrial area was historically used for the brickwork industry before being planned as a waterfront industrial area in 1967. Unfortunately, this has strained the relationships between the residential, recreational and industrial programmatic conditions. Though incongruous, this remnant of the Whau’s industrial past shows traces of informal mixed use. Scattered amongst the light industrial uses are residential, leisure, and recreational programmes such as the Span Farm Boat Club (where people reside in caravans and buses), the West Auckland Radio-Controlled Car Club, the Bancroft Lunch Bar, a sports bar, and a pony barn.

The proposition made here expands the possibility to increase the informal occupations, interventions and activities through several strategies which include opening lockeddown industrial routes, amplifying centre and edge connections, as well as introducing new interventions such as an urban skate route, a (black) market-place, a caravan park, a foreshore walkway, artificial landscapes, and further industrial recreations.

Drawing on Iain Borden’s notion that “urban space is not just about the great monuments of city, but places where we go about our everyday lives,”1 this project expands from existing underlying models of urban living and occupation patterns. The proposed interventions emerge as agencies that reclaim and recolonise the water edge as public space. By layering temporalities, the architectures of impermanence fill in the gaps created by the industrial area’s modes of operation—which are active during the day but become an unproductive dead-zone in the night or at weekends—with active spaces of recreation. The proposed micro-spaces break down the monumentality inherent in industrial zoning and activate it through the urbanism of adaptation. By injecting elements of ‛live and play’ within the industrial areas, the proposal offers alternative urban experiences, and meanwhile challenges a new typology to mediate the cross-pollination of programmes with complex, gradual, and even invisible boundaries.

By rethinking our existing zoning frameworks of top-down regulation, this proposal raises the question: Can homogeneous zoning envelopes be broken down and altered into agencies of operations to deal with the present urban complexities and diversities of social living?

8 Remediating the Whau

Vinni Paget

Left:

The Remediating Landscape.

Visualisation

Overleaf:

Staged Remediation of the Whau river.

This project addresses the serious issue of heavy-metal contamination within the Whau River. Heavy-metal contamination harms the aquatic ecosystem, reducing the possibility to positively utilise this natural resource. A recently developed technology called ‛phytoremediation’ may prove to be the solution to this problem. Phytoremediation is a natural process acquired by specific living organisms for the removal of heavy pollutants from the environment1 .

A strategy was devised to utilise this natural technology to its full potential. The strategy consists of 3 stages:

Stage 1 - Prevention - The technology is first adapted at micro scales in an attempt to fight contamination before it enters the river’s waterways. Micro-scale systems target the main sources of metal contamination which include chemical run-off from roofs, contaminated water travelling through the storm-water drainage, and landfill seepage.

Stage 2 - Passive Treatment - The technology is then adapted at a larger scale in an attempt to remediate the current situation. A controlled wetland system aims to control the rate of flow of the water in order to take full advantage of the process of ‘phytoremediation’. This controlled wetland system also incorporates programmatic amenities to improve the economic value of the river.

Stage 3 - Active Treatment - The final stage involves an active floating modular system. The modular system consists of a collection of pods that react and move to changes in levels of contamination. The pods accumulate in areas that require the most treatment, generating an efficient, targeted treatment process while also giving a visual representation of the state of the river.

Alongside the remediation process, further strategies are employed to incorporate relevant commercial programmes or public amenities. These additional programmes will greatly contribute to the socio-economic status of the surrounding area as well as generating a closer connection and greater public awareness of the river’s value.