Social scientists attached to the Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research at Victoria University of Wellington examine issues of New Zealand identity.

In 1946 a group of students and idealists got together to realise their visions for a modern city. Over the following half century, the Architectural Centre they founded helped to shape the possibilities of modern life in urban New Zealand and profoundly influenced the remaking of the capital city of Wellington. More than just an association of architects, the Centre furthered education, published a magazine – Design Review – hosted modernist exhibitions in its gallery, staged an audacious campaign for political influence called ‘the Project’ and fought for better planning, better design, better built environments in Wellington. Its members also built a demonstration house, but ‘planning was the battle-cry’. Charting these activists and their projects over the years, Julia Gatley and Paul Walker in Vertical Living also offer a history of urban Wellington from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. The book reminds us that, in modernist ideology, architecture and urban planning went hand-in-hand with visual and craft arts, graphic and industrial design. In recovering the multi-disciplinary history, politics and planning of the Architectural Centre, Gatley and Walker begin writing the city back into the history of architecture in New Zealand.

This collection of invaluable essays explores, analyzes and critically evaluates the interaction between globalization and New Zealand sovereignty. The volume is the first to seriously address this subject in a systematic fashion. It pursues three interrelated lines of enquiry: the impact of globalization on the policy making machinery of the New Zealand state; the development of New Zealand political culture, including its sense of national identity; during the globalization era; and New Zealand's role on the international stage in a globalizing world. The book reveals the paradoxes of New Zealand's encounter with globalization. It will provide essential reading for specialists of globalization and for general readers interested in the complex national experience of New Zealand.