Eco-village to pioneer flax-mix earth building

By SIMON COLLINS

A "sustainable urban village" that will test a new technique of flax-reinforced earth building is about to get under way in Otara.

The first two buildings of a planned 30- to 60-home village will be built under the eyes of up to 20,000 visitors who are expected on the site for an "Eco Show" from February 25 to 29.

Kokiri Te Rahuitanga Ki Otara, a training centre which bought the largely vacant 10ha block on both sides of Alexander Cres from the Government in 1997, aims to grow much of the food for the villagers and reuse all of their wastes on site.

One of the first buildings, a 36sq m utility block, will include a wall made of flax-reinforced earth - a new system for which designers won a $1.1 million research grant last year from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Architect Rau Hoskins has designed the wall as one of the first two tests of the new technique.

The other test, also starting this month, is a building for the Waimangu Papakainga Trust at Kaiaua, on the Firth of Thames, southeast of Auckland.

Otara project manager Daniel Nepia said the urban site would "mainstream" the idea of sustainable papakainga - communally owned housing on Maori land.

"We've had discussions about maybe modelling this place on the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, so the community can come and use hands-on models here on site," he said.

"They might be able to come and learn these technologies and take them back to land-based indigenous cultures here and in the Pacific Islands. It will be an ecological university."

Mr Nepia grew up in Australia, trained in ecological design and worked on a humanitarian aid project in Africa.

"I decided while living in Zimbabwe that it was time to come home and offer some of the skills and knowledge that I had been part of over there," he said.

"I actually didn't see that there was too much difference between living in Harare and living in Maori communities in New Zealand. It all amounted to a developing world culture."

He returned in 1997 to the East Coast, which also nurtured his father's second-cousin, the 1924-30 All Black George Nepia.

Daniel Nepia ran a series of workshops on permaculture ("permanent agriculture"), a term coined by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978 for sustainable living and food production - essentially the same, he says, as the Maori tradition of kaitiakitanga (stewardship).

He now works in a charitable trust, Integrated Whenua Design, which has been funded by Te Puni Kokiri and the Labour Department's Community Employment Group to train Maori groups in sustainable food production and construction methods.

The Otara project will include a variety of earth-based building systems, including mud-brick houses designed by Warkworth architect Graeme North as well as Mr Hoskins' flax-reinforced mud slabs.

"We'd like to see a percentage of the homes, and definitely the public buildings, have composting toilets and grey-water systems so we are reusing the water. I'd like to catch water off the roof," said Mr Nepia, who plans to live in the village himself.

"I expect us to be able to grow ... our own vegetables and fruit, as well as have some left over to go to the organic market."

Kokiri chairwoman Zena Tamanui, who also plans to move her family into the village, is working with Housing New Zealand to raise the required finance, which was quoted last year at $6.5 million.

Housing NZ spokesman Tom Bridgman said if a need was proved, the project might qualify for finance under a new Housing Innovation Fund.

www.ecoshow.co.nz