Acknowledgements
At base the design features incorporated into this book emanate from practice. I
gratefully acknowledge the experience also gained and lessons learned from my
own and James Lunday’s studio classes at Auckland University; student-planner
design efforts for tract after tract, setting out to free up community space, provide
mixed-use neighbourhoods, and doubling – often quadrupling – the formula
density. An outstanding illustrator from these classes was Bruce Weir who cheer-
fully took on the job of preparing most of the line drawings featured as urban
detail in chapter 5 (Urban Growth Management).
There are colleagues and friends to acknowledge; bringing back pleasurable
ever-fresh memories. At the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1964–72 Paul
Brenikov and Cameron Blackhall. From Cambridge 1972–84 David Williams
(Wolfson College President, later Vice-Chancellor), and the late Paul Howell also
of Wolfson College. At Auckland University (1984–2000) I was influenced by, and
remain grateful to past and present faculty colleagues, who will I hope warm to
passages where they discern vestiges of their influence: Jim Dart, Derek Hall,
Michael Pritchard, Morris Taylor, Harry Turbott, Tricia Austin, Dan Barry, Jeanette
Fitzsimons, Robert Hotten, Megan Howell, Mark Tollemache, Tony Watkins,
Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, Hirini Matunga, Catherine Edmeades, Bill Berrett,
Marjorie van Roon, Robert Collin and Mark Bellingham. I am also grateful to
Phil McDermott, latterly Professor of Planning at Massey University, for his
insight and support.
Following retirement from Auckland University I was fortunate to be invited
to assist at Auckland’s UNITEC campus where I teach a little, use the excellent
library service, and profit from the stimulus of new design insights, for all of
which my particular thanks go to Jacqueline Margetts, Katrina Simon and Rod
Barnett; and also to my stimulating and helpful new colleagues in the School of
Landscape and Plant Science.
New Zealand affords a capsule context for studying the New World regional
urban and suburban situation, and the sustainability phenomenon, with research
support for an individual academic in proportion to the nation’s population!
This I have cause to regard as an advantage in the wider context of open
scholarship and freedom of expression. So, armed with institutional support
from the University of Auckland, and with the benefit of sabbatical visits to the
other Anglo-styled settler societies and their groves of academe, I set about this
project.