As I read, behind my lifted eyebrows and widening eyes, I put another Post-it note on an imaginary wall in my brain. On it are the words: another world event to rub your head over and over which to feel a sense of powerlessness. Other Post-it notes have things like WTF and lol — but without the laugh. There is a growing patchwork of these, plastered over happy and innocent memories of childhood, ice cream, Santa. As a response to inflationary pressures, Britain’s new chancellor has signalled a new era of austerity. The outlook is dark. I’m currently watching my pennies (fiscal times, etc.) so I didn’t get past the Premium paywall for the Herald’s Business Opinion column but the first line by business editor Liam Dann on the economic outlook as of October this year is: “Ugh… US inflation data was not good and that is bad news for our inflation fight in New Zealand”.¹ So, he concurs, I think.

While I make my way through Hayekian philosophy and narratives of the market very slowly (the market-market rather than market-market like the French market or Organic Farmers’ market), I have been thinking about my other love as opposed to economic policy: a rapidly expanding SPCA pup. Earlier in the year, I joined lockdown dog adopters, having inspected my social world and found that, once it was emptied of the commuting, chance chatting in corridors, exchanges at cafés and supermarkets, there were new spaces and consciousnesses in which I was interested: also, a puppy.

Coexistence with another species that is dependent on you opens a mode of experiences that can refresh perspectives and create new ones, such as the daily walk, where the ground condition plays a key sensory role, or the significance of community spaces for the little pupper. I am fortunate that, where I currently live, there are two off-lead dog parks within a 10-minute walking distance. This is not the case in many of the city’s suburbs. One of these, a reserve, is quite an extraordinary space from an architectural perspective, in that it is almost completely enclosed by low-density housing that ranges from that built in the 19th century through to new builds, in the central city area. The majority are two storeys at most.

The space is a soundscape filled with birds, the sort of quiet you can make out when a leaf falls through branches and, often, the sing-song of a dog-owner calling out to their best friend coo’s in harmony with a bird’s chirping overhead. At this time of year, wandering into its dewy meadow, so springishly green, one can feel as though they are Eve herself, eyes taking in the Garden of Eden. The call of a loving dog-owner in the distance: “Wriggly…. Wrigggllllyyy…… Wriggly….” a pause so peaceful it feels like a mindfulness app. The quiet is a caress on the skin. Then: “WRIGGLY NO, NO, NO. WRRIGGGLLLYYY! WRIGGLY! LEAVE IT! I SAID LEAVE IT!” A pair of gumboots steams into a cluster of trees.

Forming a ring around this stage are the back fences of some 25 or so homes. Many have seen the advantage of dissolving the boundaries between their properties and the reserve, erecting porous barriers, which leave a clear view of the rear aspects of these houses. Interestingly, in the current housing crisis and what feels like a reactive housing intensification, these houses are zoned Mixed Housing Suburban, according to the Auckland Unitary Plan Operative. From my own vantage point, almost all have a touch of the architecture about them: incisions to a bungalow’s façade to fit in aluminium joinery; modernist corners to a series of townhouses, which repeat against the sky and, from certain angles, could belong to coastline baches; and new builds clad in black, reflecting recent façade technology and the dark sublime of the land’s poetry.

As I lap the reserve with the pup, it is as if I were walking through an exhibition of architectural critic and historian Kenneth Frampton’s chapter ‘Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’, whereby each house presents itself as an object where global modernisation vis-à-vis mass industrialisation encounters the locality of place.² There versus here. Or, rather, here versus everywhere. Motivated to recognise periphery practices (to the West), Frampton made a case for a shift in architectural practice that saw early modernism as naïvely utopic. Architecture that was critical and regional was consciously in service to place, intentional as a tectonic, particular to its geography… the list, it goes on. Site specificity is in there, too. Not to use etc. but… etc. These points are positive and, yet, there remains some filling-in for me. Despite the intention to de-centre European legacy architecture, other locations and practices are still framed as peripheral, marginal, othered as opposed to central in themselves and, therefore, capable of self-referential ecologies of practice.

In seeking out a theoretical independence from the West’s architectural canons, critical regionalism seems to collapse onto itself for me. Interestingly, Frampton was interested in thinking about Critical Regionalism as an emancipatory project, whereby satellites could self-determine what their architecture should be. The thing is they already had. In the case of the region and the land we are on, they had done so, in fact, for thousands of years. And the erasure of those ideas and ways of thinking is present even in this small case study of my local reserve. As I wander the dog park and take in the backyards of the reserve’s neighbouring houses, I consider this: what frameworks do we need to make sense of these rolling gardens that back onto more meadowy space as housing remains at a crisis point?

Even as house prices drop and other types of market anxieties ensue, the recent emergency motel housing remains an under-addressed issue. There are related problems cropping up elsewhere. While drafting this column, diesel was announced as more expensive than 91: an event which will shadow global supply chains. ‘Ugh’ was the business term used earlier. From the importation of boundary lines to demarcate property ownership, to ways of thinking about them that foreground European traditions of discourse, it strikes me as I write this that architecture’s legacy of ’isms remains inadequate for confronting complex problems such as land rights in the wake of land confiscations or unchallenged thinking that passively accepts shifts from housing as a human right to housing as a market, a housing market one might say.

I look at our housing and wonder what the role of the profession is in futuring. Futuring is different to prediction, something usually associated with economics. It is an imaginative act that is ambitious in spite of challenges. It is action that is cognisant of past and present; you can’t have a future with other states of time. Is this how ’isms implode on themselves? They don’t recognise the doingness of practice. And is this how we catalyse the new ideas we need, by seeing ideas that have always been here?