Toward a Climate Adaptive Street Framework: Investigating Landscape Performance

Population growth and rapid migration to cities together with inadequate climate planning has become a catalyst for the loss of green spaces abundant in natural resources and biodiversity (Kambites & Owen, 2006; Thorn, Thornton, & Helfgott, 2015). These spaces play a vital role in our health and well-being and their absence leaves cities and their residents vulnerable to modern challenges such as climate change and natural hazards. Increasingly, urban residents are at risk to extreme weather events, including drought, heatwaves, and flooding with climate change impacts expected to continue to exacerbate these issues (Satterthwaite et al. 2007). As urban development is a key factor in terms of how cities are affected by and affect climate change, urban planning and design policies are striving to integrate adaptation and mitigation strategies to meet climate objectives. While there has been a great effort to explore adaptation and mitigation options at regional scales, a lack of research on climate adaptive urban strategies at a local scale exists. In New Zealand, cities are vulnerable to the projected impacts of climate change such as extreme rainfall events and extreme storm events (NIWA 2017; NIWA 2019). A climate adaptive street framework was developed and then tested through speculative street re-design proposals. This design-research investigation of climate adaptive streets demonstrated how reinvented streets may perform as more than thoroughfares for traditional transport, but as places for socialisation, recreation, cultrual connection, and ecological health. These speculative climate adaptive streets demonstrate how urban streets in New Zealand and particularly Wellington might increase the climate adaptive capacity of cities.