Urban environmental ethics on the edge of the city

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Taking the marine spatial plan Sea Change - Tai Timu Tai Pari for Auckland published in 2016 as a starting point, the three-year research project deals with the urban ethics around Auckland’s marine area. The report and plan is the result of a four-year participatory planning process for the Hauraki Gulf, coordinated by a group of experts. It’s aim is to create a healthy, attractive and more economically productive gulf for which Sea Change not only proposes a spatial planning approach, but a new governance structure and code of conduct for the Gulf, backed by ethical statements and claims. It plans to connect future generations to the marine environment, and thus sets to work making urban ethical citizens for the ocean. At the same time the plan can be read as a re-mapping­ of the city. The report maps the city of Auckland in terms of its effects upon its edge environment, thus taking a view of the city from the water. It maps the land areas that drain into the marine area visualizing ‘city’ and ‘backyard’ as integrated and in need of a responsible ethics of care.

The ethical statements, debates and discourses around the Hauraki Gulf and Sea Change are the focus of the research. The project aims to identify the ethical ocean citizens of a livable city, the ethical planning discourses that constitute them, the ethics of the planning professionals at work, and the contestation of this new constellation of urban ethics in Auckland relating urban ethics with political ecology. We will select case studies for analysis, and track the relevant planning processes and decision making to reveal the use and results of urban ethics.

The project is part of the second term of the interdisciplinary DFG research network "Urban Ethics. Conflicts over good and proper urban living in the 20th and 21st centuries".