The Question was never "whether?" Just "when?" The Unravelling of the Auckland Plan

Getting the housing equation wrong
The failure of the Auckland Plan to reflect the simple aspirations of Aucklanders for home ownership and predominantly low-rise suburban lifestyles and promote instead the lofty compact city vision held by its planners and policy-makers made its unravelling inevitable.  And now it’s started.

Rationing land to squeeze the city upward was always going to create problems.

Given the fundamental shift in aspirations, expectations, and behaviour that implementing the Auckland plan demands, the first problem is the need for an over-blown and over-complicated rule book - the draft unitary plan - to get citizens to comply with a transformation they didn’t ask for and don’t want.

The result is, predictably, growing alarm at the proposed transformation of communities and streets to achieve high densities in an area already constricted by its coastlines, its estuaries, and its ranges.

Regulatory Risk
Another problem: the draft unitary plan introduces unknown regulatory and fiscal risks.  Despite an avalanche of material advocating higher settlement density and centralisation, there is no accessible Section 32 analysis (which the Resource Management Act requires in support of policies) confirming that crowded is good and more crowded is better.  The lack of evidence in support of a compact city is particularly telling during the limited period allowed for public consultation on the plan. 

We don't know the cost of implementing the plan, its rules and regulations, so we don’t have figures that might be weighed against purported benefits, or on which to judge how effective it might be in achieving even its authors’ hopes, and how much it will cost the community to try.  

Rhetoric won’t carry the day.  We have no idea of whether the plan will be a drag on the Auckland economy, or a boon to it.   Creating a planning framework that looks set to promote unrealistic land use options to try to compel the majority of Aucklanders to change the way they live will create conflict, though, and inflate the cost of development – and living. 

This is over-regulation: a weighty, complicated legal document which probably exceeds the council’s capacity to implement it, which will impose significant costs on the community, and is bound to have unintended consequences.  And the means, the unitary plan, look set to undermine the ends, a more liveable city.

Loss of autonomy
Another problem with the plan as conceived was the prospect that ill-founded regulation would lead to central government stepping in.  That was predictable, and now it’s happened.  There is no point in decrying the loss of community input if the government has to champion the interests of people aspiring to own homes in Auckland because council plans and procrastination have made it that much harder for them.

When the council decided to go down a prescriptive path to assert a centralised city format – one that had already struggled to gain traction over the previous two decades – informed by principles and nostalgia rather than feelings and circumstance, it lost touch with the Auckland’s diverse peoples.  It confused a singular (and high risk) vision with unity of purpose, and pre-empted a simpler plan that might better cater to the vagaries of a growing city. 

The real irony is that central government has been brought into play as a result of a heavy-handed, over-centralised approach by the local council. 

Can an accord be imposed?

Having made clear its concern over the economic and social consequences of the plan, the government has required the council to work with it in an accord to free up land for housing.  By insisting that its way was best the council has ceded control of the cornerstone of its plan.   

Addressing the supply of land for housing is well overdue, but it would have been more satisfactory if the council had been a little less dogmatic and done so in the first place.  This would have protected its credibility and autonomy.  Instead, a streamlined consenting procedure has now been established virtually by decree, a procedure that may well downplay the environmental checks and balances that an autonomous, local planning process might employ.

A Change in Direction?

This shift is fundamental to the plan.  The Accord provides for a degree of decentralisation that the draft unitary plan is written to resist.  Multiple opportunities for expansion on or beyond the fringe may be pursued under the Accord, in a number of forms, including extending existing settlements, new settlements, villages, and suburbs. 

While no ad hoc solution is straightforward, the Accord does what the unitary plan doesn’t: it enables rather than limits development.  Hopefully, creativity, design skills, and market and commercial acumen can now be brought to bear in a variety of settings and solutions – operating within sensible and justifiable environmental limits. 

What else is needed?

While accelerating the release of land for housing is critical to solving the housing crisis, by itself it’s not enough.  Moreover, it fundamentally changes the tenor of the Auckland Plan and Draft Unitary Plan, built as they are around centralisation.  The promotion of the CBD ahead of suburban living, the heavy commitment of resources to a dubious increase in the capacity of rail serving the central city, the presumption that future employment will grow most Auckland central – all these assumptions need to be revisited and revised.

That’s the nature of an integrated plan – you cannot fundamentally alter one component without changing others.

Back to the drawing board

Promoting a doctrinaire and single-minded view of what Auckland should look like in the future, and a commitment to urban form out of touch with the City’s history, its residents, and its prospects was always a high risk project.  That risk has just been magnified.

If the unitary plan is to survive, there will need to be some radical responses to the current round of consultation – and from now on a careful ear to the ground on what the government as well as the community at large has to say about some of its other provisions.

 

Integrated planning - it’s all about working together

Just another catch cry?

We hear a lot about integrated planning.  What is it?  I checked that out with the authority on everything, Wikipedia. 

the Integrated Planning System is a structured planning framework adapted from the US military's Joint Operational Planning and Execution System:. 

This isn’t particularly helpful. But it does remind us that modern planning has rigid, hierarchical military origins.

So I looked elsewhere.  In business defined integrated planning as

A joint planning exercise that ensures participation of all stakeholders and affected departments.  Its objective is to examine all economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits, in order to determine most appropriate option and to plan a suitable course of action.

This is better, introducing ideas of collaboration and cross-disciplinary analysis.

How do we see integrated planning in New Zealand? 

According to the NZ Transport Agency,

Integrated transport ...  takes account of and connects [transport systems, the form of urban development and how land is used] [and] helps ensure that development of the transportation network and land use is coordinated.  

Issues traditionally treated separately should be considered jointly.  The NZTA provides a toolkit for doing integrated planning, containing case studies and guidelines to help practitioners align transport and land use outcomes.

The New Zealand Planning Institute also offers a toolkit.  This rolls up spatial plans, asset manage-ment plans, planning balance sheets, financial plans, and the like.  Presumably integration happens when we get all our plans lined up, an exercise focused on procedure.  

Working together

It’s unlikely that integration can be delivered simply using a toolkit. It is more important to focus on outcomes rather than prescribe methods.  Case studies are helpful for lessons learnt.  But integrated outcomes cannot be defined simply by imitation or documentation. 

In fact, they rely on getting people who would not normally do so to collaborate. 

It’s a good idea to focus first on what objectives the relevant agencies and their personnel share.  Getting this to happen takes leadership.  In cities, shared objectives may relate to large projects, urban form, economic revival, community development, ecological restoration, and so forth.  

The challenge is not to make ever more complex plans, but to create the environment for collaboration through which hard-to-achieve objectives are met by working together.

Getting results through leadership and collaboration ...

This blog was sparked by a recent Listener story about Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, an expat Kiwi who led a revamp in London’s West End.  She did this not by writing plans and spending public money – although there has to be some of that – but by working with a range of stakeholders “from retailers, to police to transport chiefs to the mayor”, getting them to agree on what needs to be done.  “The thing I love” she says “is getting public, private and voluntary to work together, taking the best of each sector and getting them to knit together”.

There are some interesting themes here.  Dame Judith got people out of their silos.  And she worked across three sectors, government, business, and civil society, the latter being individuals and organisations working voluntarily towards social ends.  

How often do we overlook the capacity of civil society?  Too often planners assume that community consultation covers off community interests.  Perhaps we should be thinking about civil society as a partner in the development of our communities, and a key element in our constitution.

Dame Judith also emphasised action – getting things done, not just talking about them.  If that means working with voluntary associations or community groups, so much the better.

Getting past adversarial planning

There is overlap between this and CityScope’s recommended approach to integrated planning for large urban projects.  Our review of experience in large urban projects suggested that leadership and governance to enable different stakeholders to pursue shared goals was the key to success.   

Currently we rely too much on process and adversarial conflict resolution in planning, and on regulating for what cannot be done.  This may be necessary if we have widely different objectives.  But it would be far better to focus on plans that can be agreed upon, achieving and acting on consensus outcomes, while resolving details of difference through mediation and even compromise.

People may have to agree to differ on smaller issues so they can deal with the big ones.  They may have to work outside their professional institutions, to work across departments and organisations, and in doing so back off institutionalised values and ideological clichés.

Can we restructure our way to collaboration?

Perhaps that is what restructuring Auckland local government was about: merging eight councils to create more a collaborative, less professionally or geographically hide-bound body? 

But is that enough if people’s old values and professional affiliations persist in the new structure?  A new organisation needs a new culture, and a sense of a common purpose that goes beyond feel-good documents.  Otherwise, the old inefficiencies and prejudices persist. 

Integration and culture

So how do we achieve the organisational culture necessary for integrated plans and outcomes? 

Well, another New Zealander has had some quiet success at this.  Gregg Innes has developed a business bringing about cultural shifts in US local governments.  Councils there have much wider responsibilities.  They have to work against the inefficiencies created by departmental silos and professional patch protection. 

Greg has successfully developed and applied techniques to counter this, techniques that help shift cultures so they are more responsive to wider organisational objectives and work together despite different backgrounds.  But that’s another story.

It’s important at this stage simply to acknowledge that today’s urban areas and issues are complex and conflicted.  Change is not linear – things don’t proceed smoothly down a clearly marked path.  But let’s not push complicated processes under the guise of integrated planning when commitment and cooperation are most needed.

Rather than lock ourselves into over-complex planning methods we should perhaps consider how professions, organisations, and people can simply be encouraged to work together across local government and civil society.  It’s not a matter of scale.  Bigger units of government will not be more effective.  Restructuring alone won’t do the trick.  Overlapping plans won’t carry the day.  It’s fundamentally a matter of sustaining the leadership and culture required to get the cooperation necessary to deal with the big projects and big issues.