Footprinting Urban Form and Behaviour in New Zealand

The research project described in this article, which starts in October 2009, is based on the hypothesis that current New Zealand lifestyles are unsupportable in the long term because they are based upon increasingly scarce finite resources. The research will answer the following questions: What is the resource impact of the current lifestyles of New Zealanders? What lifestyles would be possible in New Zealand assuming a fair share of the world’s resources? What would be the effects of such lifestyles on existing rural and suburban communities? The research project is designed to provide knowledge on how to lower the “ecological footprints” that make up human living patterns, in order to guide policies and practices for robust future settlement development. It will deliver a detailed understanding of the environmental impact of current New Zealand life-styles, as well as a theoretical ideal scale and type of both built environment and behaviour for a community with an ecological footprint that is much nearer to the available global footprint than the current New Zealand footprint. This theoretical ideal will be measured against real New Zealand rural and suburban communities to discover what needs to be changed. The outcome will be a set of footprinting tools for use by local authorities and communities to help guide their future development decisions.