Diane Brand

• University of Auckland

This paper evaluates the masterplan for Christchurch which was conceived in the wake of the 2011 earthquakes, against projects completed in the intervening 8 years, paying special attention to three key objectives of the blueprint: a low-rise/compact core, a green city, and an accessible city. The paper finds that the design-led, top down, recovery...

The notion of bluespace in urban planning and design discourse is relatively new, as is a whole-systems approach to con- sidering water spaces as integral to overall city form and the urban experience of citizens. This paper investigates the role of blue spaces in port cities, delineating the critical relationship bluespace has to traditional green...

Identified by utopian writers from the seventeenth until the nineteenth centuries as one of the last territories on Earth capable of being a potential paradise, the islands of New Zealand became the setting for a number of utopian schemes subsequent to their European discovery. The European colonization of the country in the mid-nineteenth century...

How might the urban structure and public space of Christchurch change as a result of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes? This paper will look at council and community led post-earthquake urban space projects in Christchurch, New Zealand, to investigate the potential reconfiguration of urban public space and structure and the balance of top-down and bott...

Viennese architect Ernst Plischke arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Europe. His long career began and ended in his native Austria, but he spent 24 influential years in New Zealand, first in government service and then in private practice. This paper will focus on the first nine years of Plischke’s time there when he...

This paper will investigate the settlements associated with hydroelectric power projects in New Zealand between 1925, and 1985. A review of public works settlements will be undertaken to understand the progressive development of these communities, with respect to their urban planning, transportability, sequencing and redeployment on new sites. The...

A widely accepted assumption concerning the form of Chinese traditional cities is that they are derived from Confucian Cosmology and Fengshui theory, thus making them full of myth and symbolism. In this paper, we attempt to build three arguments based on political economic perspectives. Firstly, borrowing Kevin Lynch's definitions (1981), we argue...

After a devastating earthquake, tsunami and fire in 1755, Lisbon's Terreiro do Paço, or Palace Square, was transformed by the Marquis of Pombal into a state of the art 18th century urban space called Praça do Comércio. This paper looks at the configuration and use of this space from the 16th to the 18th centuries, tracing customary, ceremonial and...

Diagonal street orientations in urban Europe were cut through the crust of the ancient city by popes, monarchs and governments to create a network of voided lines and points which injected the city with new levels of functionality and legibility for a particular regime. In the Anglo-Colonial New World, the grid was the dominant plan form with diago...

The dramatic tropical landscape and extensive public realm of 19th-century Rio de Janeiro created the conditions for multiple spatial, political and ceremonial dialogues between the contained watery expanse of Guanabara Bay and an intricate and institutionally specialized necklace of urban waterfront squares. This paper investigates the dynamic rel...

The sea covers more than 70% of the Earth's surface. Now for the first time in history more than half the world's people live in cities and many of the world's most populated conurbations are located on the ocean periphery. Climate change is making littoral zones a potentially productive location for the development of new forms of urban space in c...

At the end of a 300-year period of colonial expansion, Britain established four cities in the Southern Hemisphere; Sydney, Adelaide, Wellington and Auckland. This paper analyses the figure/ground condition of these cities in the early years of settlement by using maps and survey plans drawn between 1788 and 1848 sourced from archives in Australia a...

At the end of a 300‐year period of colonial expansion Britain established two cities in Australasia: Adelaide and Wellington. Two surveyors, William Light and William Mein Smith, were charged with planning grid cities on remote and geographically extreme sites, one in Australia and one in New Zealand. This paper looks at the survey plans of these c...

The years 1809 to 1822 were pivotal in the formation of Sydney as the pre‐eminent city in Australasia. Under the patronage of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, a small group of officials with considerable architectural expertise set about laying the foundations of identity of the young city. A social and political order was imposed with military precisio...

This paper interrogates the application of historical Parisian urbanism to the new towns at the city's edge. The traditional urban components of landscape, urban structure, public space, block type, building type and façade are identified and compared in the two contexts. Memorable elements of the city's past are translocated to the edge. As isolat...

This paper interrogates the application of historical Parisian urbanism to the new towns at the city's edge. The traditional urban components of landscape, urban structure, public space, block type, building type and facade are identified and compared in the two contexts. Memorable elements of the city's past are translocated to the edge. As isolat...

This paper re‐evaluates the 1841 plan of the first Surveyor General of New Zealand for the then Capital of Auckland. The plan is of interest both because of its relationship to a varied topography, and its collage of geometric precedents in a new landscape. These precedents and the political climate of the time contributed to the ultimate demise of...

This paper looks at the space of the colonial harbour and defines a transitional zone of 'bluespace' where the urban public realm bridges land and sea. Urban space conditions that occur at this edge are discussed with reference to colonial ports in Brazil (Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), Australia (Sydney) and New Zealand (Auckland and Welli...

After a devastating earthquake, tsunami and fire in 1755, Lisbon's Terreiro do Paço, or Palace Square, was transformed by the Marquis of Pombal into a state of the art 18th century urban space called Praça do Comércio This paper looks at the configuration and use of this space from the 16th to the 18th century, tracing customary, ceremonial and ins...

"Spring, 1986." " ... in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design ..." Thesis (Master's)--Harvard University, 1986. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-62).