More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

Wellington is facing both a housing crisis and a climate crisis. House prices and rents are exploding along with homelessness and poverty as people are turned away from overflowing housing shelters. As house prices rise, so do Wellington’s carbon emissions. The city is slowly drowning as sea levels rise and droughts and wildfires become the new reality. A major cause of this is the low-density urban sprawl and vast highway network developed in the second half the 20th century. It created a city dependent on the car filled with single family homes that increasingly, no one can afford to live in.

Cities around the world have begun to look for solutions to high housing costs and emissions and have reached a bold conclusion; tear the highways down. There is a large and growing body of research that shows higher housing density, mixed use developments and reduced car use can improve not only the cost of housing, but the amount of greenhouse gases cities emit. Cities across the world, from Paris to Seoul to San Francisco, have removed sections of their highways and experienced incredible results.

Removal is more and more becoming a viable alternative to expensive maintenance as mid-20th century infrastructure reaches the end of its designed life. This thesis explores how highway removal could affect Wellington and if it could be used to reduce the sky-high cost of housing and ever-increasing carbon emissions.

The factors of the built environment that contribute to affordability and reduced emissions are examined and used to create a master plan for Wellington. The plan involves the design of a new multi-modal boulevard to replace the Urban Motorway, the design of a regional mass rapid transit system and the design of new areas of medium density housing.

This thesis ultimately aims to demonstrate that a holistic approach to housing, transit and urban design can provide a greater outcome than any single intervention. This project shows the paradigm shift required of New Zealand if we hope to achieve housing affordability and carbon neutrality.