Spread your risk: Reconsidering the "quarter acre" dream from an evolutionary perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout changing economic and political circumstances private home ownership has been an aspirational constant in New Zealand since the start of European settlement. Housing shortages and lack of ready supplies of land for housing development have dominated public debate and government policies periodically over the past century and we appear to be in one of those pressure periods at the present time, especially in Auckland. Is it simply a matter of matching policies with social and market trends? According to Quotable Value New Zealand data average house size was 131.7m2 in 1900, falling back to 117.5m2 in 1950, due mainly to war-time and recessionary effects, and by 2010 this had increased to 205.3m2 (Quotable Value New Zealand, 2011). This trend towards increased dwelling size has not been accompanied by a growth in average section size: “In the same time period, average section size has dramatically shrunk. As a proportion of land use, the typical 1970s single story 120m2 house on a 1012m2 section (11.85% site coverage), has evolved into a house around 210m2 on a 450m2 site, (46% site coverage).” (Marriage, 2010, p. 1). The “quarter acre” home ownership dream may have morphed into a “more house less land” aspiration but the attraction to privately owned property has not abated. Yet the nuclear family now seems an artefact of the twentieth century. What do trends in plot and dwelling size tell us? Are we now merely at the mercy of exorbitant land prices, slavish consumerism, demographic shifts, misguided land-use regulations, the future-proofing financial tactics of individual buyers? Alternatively, and changing site coverage ratios notwithstanding, do people aspire to private ownership of discrete land parcels as a way of spreading individual and collective risk because it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective? This paper argues for the latter interpretation. The paper also suggests that planning practice should take more seriously the concepts of prospect, refuge, hazard, affordance, complexity, coherence, legibility and mystery when setting rules and guidelines for the construction of both private and public “habitat.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".