Matchmaking function with aesthetic

“If you allow water to be a more integrated part of society, and you do it well, you end up with a better living environment, meaning more pleasant, more beautiful, more healthy and more safe,” Hafkenscheid said.

“If you design a new residential area just behind a concrete wall and the river is on the other side and the dry land is on this side, it’s not very attractive. If you design it in such away that you have waterways flowing nearby, if every single house can have a jetty for a small boat, if roads are designed in such a way, that if the land is inundated, the actual effects are not so huge, you can create a very attractive landscape.”

Source: Global Post - The Dutch plan to combat rising seas

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Looking at Aranui for my Major Design site and it frankly shocked me when I realised how much of Christchurch would be affected by future rising sea levels and inundation levels from a 1% AEP rainstorm. But at the same time, with each threat, presents a design opportunity to bring design to a whole new functional level - or perhaps the other way round, to bring function to a whole new aesthetic design.

Although Aranui at first glance might not provide much excitement for an MD site (no fancy yachts in my area, not even a pretty aerial image with lots of pretty water surrounding it, sigh haha) but it's such a challenging site with so many complexities that there's so much to be done, and I strongly believe that this is a community that truly needs attention. Enough of giving the attention to tourism or to the richer folks of communities (not that I have anything against that at all), but it's high time landscape architects focus on the community rather than on flashy illustrations! (Not that other landscape architects haven't done so, but it would always be great to see more planners and designers realising that design is about communication, it's about narratives, it's about function - not just pretty graphics and looking stylish.)

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