"A major step forward would be to take out the glass, and the university had submitted to the local Alcohol Plan for that to happen, [University vice-chancellor Grant Robertson] said."
Why just for O-Week or Castle St?
When is someone most likely to impulsively smash glass? When they're drunk. What do we sell alcohol in? Glass bottles. It's like giving people a box of bullets with their beers.
(1/?)
I would suggest a ban on selling alcohol in glass. But I think a ban on glass stubbies would do it. Put beers, RTDs and other stuff that currently comes in stubbies in either aluminum cans, or plastic bottles.
So you can still have wine and spirits in glass. There's a whole lot less of them, and they're a small fraction of the smashed glass pollution problem. They're almost never the ones I find smashed on streets, in green belts, or at festival sites.
(2/?)
Coming back to Castle St though, back in the Cretaceous I lived there for a few months (long story). When I lived in Ōtepoti again in the 2010s, I walked through there a lot.
I've seen the mountains of glass, and the remains of the odd burning couch. But I've also seen vacuum cleaners being passed around from flat to flat. There's an incredible sense of community, even though almost nobody lives there for more than a few years.
(3/?)
There is *so much* a bit of thoughtful urban design could do to build on that sense of community and student tradition, and mitigate the persistent rubbish problem and other issues that have plagued studentville for decades.
Maybe Otago Uni could deploy some of the world class anthropologists they have on staff to do some ethnographic fieldwork in studentville? Workshop solutions with the DCC community engagement team and the welfare team from the student union?
(4/?)
For a start, houses with 5-7 busy students are obviously going to generate far more rubbish than a normal household. Yet houses in studentville only get the same size and number of recycling and landfill bins as a regular family home. This creates the conditions for overflowing bins and loose rubbish, regardless of how conscientious students are about using their bins.
(5/?)
Let's get creative here;
* The simplest option is for DCC to just give anyone with a student ID more bins - especially for glass - at no extra cost
* The worst of the rubbish is generated over the weekend. Why not send the collection trucks around studentville on monday morning? Then they've got empty bins for anything that didn't make it in there, and for the rest of the week
* Maybe consider a second rubbish collection on Thursday morning, so the bins are empty for the weekend
(6/?)
What else? Castle St would be a prime candidate to become a Living Street;
There's really no reason anyone needs to drive down Castle St if they don't live there. Instead of a standard, car-orientated road, it could be a pedestrian and bike corridor connecting the uni to the gardens. With a 1 lane road for essential traffic.
This is not without precedent in Ōtepoti, given what they've done with George St from the Octagon to Frederick St;
(7/?)
The redesign of the street could be a mass collaboration. Gathering ideas and needs assessments from past and present residents, student union reps, students and staff in relevant academic disciplines, uni governance reps, and botanic gardens reps, along with DCC city planners and community teams. This space that's so often characterised as a problem to be solved could instead be a living artwork.
As permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison famously said, the problem is the solution.
(8/?)
A Living Street design project would allow a blue skies approach to addressing parking, rubbish collection, etc.
Each end of the street could have an area of car parks, for people visiting residents. Car parks could be designed in for any houses that currently lack off-street parking.
Maybe more household bins isn't the best solution? Maybe larger scale collection areas for glass and aluminum could be designed in? Freeing in space in existing recycling bins, and thereby landfill bins.
(9/9)
@jens
> Bottle return scheme should be a no-brainer
When I was a child it was common for drinkers to swap-a-crate. If they could collect a full crate of the large brown beer bottles, they could get a significant discount on their next crate. I'm all for this, and polluters would do this if a government had the spine to mandate it.
But it doesn't solve the problem of breaking glass being really fun when you're drunk. Maybe also mandate making bottles out of tougher glass as well as reuse?
@strypey
The Sophia Charter is all about community building along roughly similar lines
https://www.otago.ac.nz/about/social-responsibility/sophia-charter/the-charter
@RedRobyn
> The Sophia Charter is all about community building
Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of this. Mostly sounds pretty positive. Are there are reports on what's been actioned?
"Continue to work with the NZ Police on the 'Good One' party register."
Sounds creepy AF. But if it's a privacy-preserving Free Code tool that enables flats hosting parties to keep invites from getting out of the control, without giving cops a central register of who goes to what parties, then cool.
Strypey
Jens 🖤
Robyn