Living in Boxes Revisited
Thinking back to my previous post about living in boxes, I have been thinking about how the two cities compare. Palmerston North City (395 square kilometers) is about 13% smaller than Wellington's (442 square kilometers). Wellington's population however is just over double the size (214,200). If you take into account the area within the city devoted to everything other than residential accommodation, this results in a density estimated at 746 people per square kilometer (Palmerston north is 234). So it is easy to see, that with three times the density, housing in Wellington requires different solutions than those in Palmerston North. This challenge has resulted in quite different architecture and patterns of living.
Living in boxes was not a dig at apartment buildings or the accommodation in Wellington, but more a question. In some ways we all live in boxes of one kind or another. The box we live in, may be divided into many smaller odd shaped boxes, but ultimately it’s still a box. We assign such prestige and value to these boxes, to the style of them, the decorations, even the area where the box is. Should they be mass produced to make them cheaper? How vulnerable they are to natural disasters, how ecologically friendly they are, the questions are many and varied and say a lot about who we are.
