As part of the Gordon Wilson Fellowship (Expression of Interest)
The ‘Sausage’ Flat? In this research is understood not as a problem to be replaced but as a latent resource. Like its shared driveway...long the source of conflict, is also the commons from which a new model of resident agency can be built.
Team CV
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Drawing of Mt Eden Road and Ngauruhoe St intersection
About
This research addresses housing affordability inspired by kaitiakitanga, the ethic of collective stewardship over land and dwelling that resists housing as mere commodity; and finds its subject in the latent possibilities of a ubiquitous and stigmatised dwelling type: the sausage flat.
Produced by the cross-leasing of single, deep property plots from the 1960s onward, sausage flats arrange units along a shared driveway, their frontages facing the comings and goings of other residents rather than the street. Roundly criticised for their lack of privacy, limited outdoor space, and conflict-prone shared driveways, they nevertheless retain a level of affordability for singles, couples, and the elderly.
But sausage flats are not simply under-performing buildings. They are homes, lived in by people whose daily routines, habits, and constraints shape how any built environment actually performs. Recent research into retrofit programmes across Aotearoa has shown that technical upgrades alone consistently fall short: not because the technology fails, but because programmes ignore how people actually live. Domestic knowledge! How to air a house, manage moisture, maintain shared spaces, adapt a dwelling to changing needs..has not been handed down across generations the way it once was. As practitioners of our generation, we know this gap not only professionally but personally. It is as consequential as any draughty window.
‘Sizzle’ takes this seriously. It asks not only how sausage flats can be physically adapted, but how the process of collective adaptation can itself rebuild the domestic knowledge and shared practice that the housing market has progressively eroded.
The name carries its own argument. The sausage sizzle; that most characteristic of collective fundraising acts, embodies a readily activated pulling-together in service of under-resourced endeavours. Such collectivism, present across so many areas of New Zealand life, suggests that the knowledge and energy needed to improve how we live may already be closer to hand than we think. Sizzle takes this spirit seriously as both method and ethic.
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