Can New Zealand become a “renewable energy superpower?” — OUR 2023 election campaign has been fairly lacklustre up to now. Many say that there has been little vision on offer. And yet, for all that, a vision is starting to emerge in the course of the campaign. A vision of a future in which we boost our generation of…

Why it matters that ‘we shape our cities, and then our cities shape us’ — (Chapter 21 of The Utopia Thieves) URBANISTS have long drawn our attention to the way that some rather old-fashioned urban environments appear to be, somehow, more sociable. Environments that look like this: That is, as opposed to a more recent suburb that looks like this:

How Auckland’s growth came to be officially denied — (Chapter 20 of The Utopia Thieves) IN 1977, Professor John L Roberts, head of the school of government at Victoria University of Wellington, wrote, of Auckland’s growth, that: . . . there is widespread uneasiness about this concentration of political power away from Wellington. …

The End of the Settler Contract — (Chapter 20 of The Utopia Thieves) ONE of the most interesting things about the Maori and Pasifika protest movements of the 1970s was that they did not strive to re-establish or re-normalise old folkways in the face of modernity, so much as to assert a ‘right to the city’ on…

The Unexpected Revival of the Pastoralists — (Chapter 18 of The Utopia Thieves) IN 2014, the Māori-issues commentator Morgan Godfery put up a perceptive blog post about the impact of a growing multiculturalism, and neoliberalism’s painful adjustments, on New Zealand society since the 1960s. I’ve kept a careful note of the following paragraph: When you peel away…

How the Kiwi Riviera became a Pākehā Riviera — (Chapter 15 of The Utopia Thieves) IN FACT, if we look at New Zealand and Australia and the way that the great majority of those countries’ colonists inhabit something akin to a Mediterranean Riviera, one comes to be struck, eventually, by the thought that the closest parallel to the colonisation…

The Social Contract and the post-World War II Suburb — (Chapter 16 of The Utopia Thieves) PERHAPS the greatest myth of the frontier, the West, rurality and the New World is that of individualism: the libertarian homesteader and do-it-yourself farmer. Or, the self-sufficient rural laborer who can mend anything with a piece of Number 8 wire, as we say in…

How New Zealand pursued a Mediterranean form of colonisation — (Chapter 14 of The Utopia Thieves) THAT settler colonialism has gone hand in hand with urbanisation is just as true of far-flung New Zealand, Anglophone settler-dom’s final frontier, as it is of the United States. Indeed, a good case could be made for the argument that settler colonialism was more…

Was the myth of the West a pretext for the US Senate gerrymander? Even one originator of the phrase ‘Wild West’ thought so. — (Chapter 13 of The Utopia Thieves) A FEW years ago I came across an old-time book called Western Wilds, by J. H. Beadle. More fully, Western Wilds, And The Men Who Redeem Them: An Authentic Narrative, Embracing An Account Of Seven Years Travel And Adventure In The Far West, first…