In Conversation with Natalie Allen

This transcript is an excerpt of an informal conversation between Elyjana Roach (MAUD ‘22), and Natalie Allen from The Urban Advisory.

Directed by Dr. Natalie Allen and Greer O’Donnell, The Urban Advisory (TUA) is an urban strategy consultancy leading the thinking on urbanism in New Zealand. Their work includes developing regeneration projects, housing strategies, and neighborhood developments. 

TUA’s recent work includes advising some of New Zealand’s most complex development projects on how to define success in terms of wellbeing and monitor and evaluate tangible wellbeing standards, working with iwi (Māori tribes) to design housing programs, assisting Council’s to support innovative housing models and to design and deliver housing needs assessments that capture real story of demand. They’re also involved in a variety of research projects tracking the progress of alternative development projects, looking at ways to improve the governance of public housing programs, and the role of our town centres in delivering wellbeing in our neighborhoods. 

Elyjana Roach (ER):

How do you see your role as urban strategists in achieving equitable and sustainable cities?

Natalie Allen (NA):

It comes down to the question; what is an urban strategist? It’s not widely accepted like being an architect or an urban designer, but it’s become an important discipline with the increasing complexity of cities, towns, and neighborhoods. We see the urban strategist as the glue between these complexities. For example, in the case of an urban regeneration project, it’s critical we deliver things through partnership between layers of governance, community service providers and the community themselves. In New Zealand, we have the Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) context as an important layer of critical partnership too. We need people who can weave all these aspects together, to be delivery focused but to not lose sight of the larger goal, which is to achieve equitable and sustainable cities.

ER:

What is the distinction between the role of an urban designer vs an urban strategist?

NA:

The distinction for me is that for urban designers, the design is the output of the process. For an urban strategist, it's about the more intangible outcomes often, which doesn't have to be built-form. The delivery project as an urban designer would include the engagement, conceptualizing the design, and taking it to implementation. The urban strategist would start right from the beginning around building a strategy that frames how you might consider the social, cultural, and economic cases. It would be about bringing together all the stakeholders to create a shared vision and brief for the project, and facilitate that ownership throughout.

We think about all the different ways that a project could come to fruition. We ask questions like, how would the money stack up? How are the different groups becoming involved? How could you potentially change the services to make this town center buzz? Do we need a skills and jobs hub because we're trying to change the trajectory of this place and create new opportunities for people? It’s this coordinated approach which isn't always design-lead. While design is critical, it's only one piece of the puzzle. Everybody blurs the lines between where design begins and ends, but I think it's important to acknowledge that there's a big difference between your physical outputs and the community outcomes sometimes.

ER:

A lot of your work proposes frameworks across different sectors and engages various stakeholders. How do you begin to approach the individual priorities for each stakeholder while still advocating for public benefits?

NA:

Without wanting to throw around buzzwords, we frame all our conversations with people around “wellbeing.” We think about how it impacts everybody before we start talking about the individual needs. We first start with visioning to get a collective picture of what success looks like for the outcomes we want to achieve. Only then do we start talking about everyone's individual needs and getting into the details of the project. The thing about doing it like this, is that when people have collectively agreed what success looks like, they have a very different trade-off process for identifying what their priorities are. I'm not saying that we don't have to negotiate and get into some awkward situations, but it makes a big difference when you start with the process of defining success collectively.

ER:

The housing research that you are engaged in promotes a range of alternative housing models and advocates for affordable housing in the context of a private-led market. How do you imagine these models to be applied in this context? What are some of the challenges around bringing these principles and structures of such housing models?

NA:

We often talk about it as a housing ecosystem. There's the social housing component which is important. This includes Community Housing Providers, state rental and emergency or transitional housing, which we think is one big piece of the puzzle. And then, as well as your market rental and ownership options, there are a whole plethora of housing options in the middle. These include models such as rental or equity cooperatives and community land trusts. These models can be game changers for perpetual affordability. Zürich is one of the most well-known examples for cooperatives and Burlington, Vermont is an incredible example of a community land trust. There's all kinds of different ways that you can structure housing. It's really like a big toolkit of options – one which we basically don't explore all in New Zealand. We need to, as one part of the systems change we need to address our severe housing crisis.

There are many places with good examples but nowhere in the world do we have a truly thriving housing ecosystem. In my view, a thriving housing ecosystem would be one where everyone has access to secure and affordable housing that meets their needs. This would enable you to move around, changing your housing needs over time as your life stage or circumstance changes as well. The market could continue, but to maintain such high prices, there’s a whole lot of people who we are putting tremendous stress on. It’s not a system that's compatible with what they're able to earn, where they want to live, what else they need out of life, how they want to prioritize the goals of their family. For that reason, we need other diverse solutions. Sometimes people call it a secondary market but essentially, it's about providing options.

ER:

So, what do you think is the solution to the housing crisis?

NA:

Firstly, it needs to come from leadership, top-down. We can’t continue with the ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff solutions. We need a systems change and we need the funding to support the existing sectors in place. Community Housing Providers, for example, could be doing many more great things but they need support to upscale. Places like the UK have recently given around 40 million pounds capacity and capability funding to support the community sector.

We need the implementation of cooperative banking rules and legislation that supports different housing models. These already exist internationally but New Zealand hasn’t signed up to them. We need to address supply-chain issues. We're grossly underrepresented in terms of all the skills and training that's required to deliver the amount of housing we know we need.This is a problem that many countries face; skills development and immigration to match critical infrastructure needs. 

We also haven't been gathering the right data around a needs-based, wellbeing approach to how our neighborhoods, towns and city’s function and should be delivered. We need to embrace complexity and become more multidimensional in our approach. The environments that we live in are not simple. Simple solutions don't work.

Lastly, I don't think that “too hard” is a choice we should give ourselves. I think fixing the housing issues, like so many things, is our choice, whether we want to admit that or not. We can absolutely change it. If COVID has taught us anything it’s that things can change in a heartbeat, whole countries can go into lockdown overnight. We can completely change how we do business and how we interact with one another - everything. Why can’t we do this for affordable housing solutions? 

ER:

When working on a master plan or a new strategy, how do you approach resident engagement and participation when thinking about existing and new identities of a neighborhood?

NA:

We have a six-step process for genuine engagement. The first one is to determine the purpose and value of the engagement. The second is where we map all the stakeholders, and different community groups. It’s here that we “cast the net wide” to think of all the possible groups that could be brought together. The third step is to go through a prioritization exercise, to identify the opportunities that could be created through engagement done well. The fourth step is to design a full communications and engagement plan - now we know why we're talking to people, who we're talking to, let's figure out when and exactly what we're going to say. The fifth is to undertake the engagement and to make sure that we’re capturing the complexity of everyone's viewpoints. It’s then critical to feed that new knowledge into creating better outcomes, this is step six. It's not a linear process but more like a live feed-back loop so that the engagement, everyone being generous with their ideas has somewhere to influence real change. We believe this feedback loop is critical to our success. We haven't done a good job if that hasn't happened!

ER:

Both you and Greer have different professional backgrounds. How has this influenced your approach when considering urban issues and issues particularly in housing?

NA:

My background is in architecture and in urban design and Greer’s is in law and social infrastructure procurement. She also studied a bit of anthropology. Our team at TUA reflects this diversity too. We have people from backgrounds with architecture, psychology, marketing and social-impact design, engineering and urban design, and economics. While we all bring different experiences and technical expertise, we all fundamentally approach the outcome in the same way. I think this is what makes our workshop sessions hum. I genuinely believe that because of this difference in background, we all feel we’re contributing and learning at the same time. This richness of discussion is what we try to cultivate in each of our projects.