Breaking Through and Moving on: Beginnings of a New Plan for Auckland

The Break Through
After years of pushing the compact city fallacy and ignoring the obvious approach to solving Auckland’s particular growth problems, the city and its planners have at last begun to water down their dearly held but doomed compact city plan.  The New Zealand Herald revealed that today “the council's planning committee will consider a report to allow for 120,000 new homes at six main locations in the north, north-west and south of the city.” A range of smaller rural settlements has also been identified for further development, spread over 130km from north to south. 

While only 30% of the assumed requirement for 400,000 dwellings is targeted for the “mini-cities”, the appetite for new greenfield, peri-urban settlement won’t stop there.  After all, there is only so much that can be crammed into the current urban area, especially in central Auckland. without destroying its appeal.  Apartments in the suburbs, the latest battlefield for entrenched urban planning, is least popular of all options.

We’re not there yet, but momentum is gathering for moving Auckland into a sustainable future. 

Breaking with the past makes sense
The ground has been giving for a while now.  The conceit of planning by projection is clear as migration figures deviate wildly from the analysts’ assumptions.  The estimates of housing supply underlying the Unitary Plan are demonstrably spurious.  The impacts of intensification on air and water quality and nature in the city are now coming to be realised.  And the impact on council finances as it aims to retrofit under-capacity infrastructure and pours money into transit threaten the City’s credit rating and the pockets of its citizens.

The advantages
I have been documenting the short comings of a compact city plan somewhat tediously since my report on the proposal to the Auckland Regional Council in 1999.  So, to change my tack, here are some advantages of the new direction towards satellite cities and settlements.  It provides:

·       The opportunity to develop attractive, affordable 21^st century settlements, with emphasis on diversity, mobility, mixed activity, and balance – all so much easier to achieve in green fields compared with retrofitting existing services, congesting the suburbs, and squeezing housing into compromised brownfield or mixed use sites;

·        Better access to nature, greenspace, clean air, cycleways and trails, and recreational amenities;

·        Consequently, better health – an antidote for the urban epidemic of obesity;

·        Greater opportunities for self-reliance (detached, terrace, and duplex houses provide safe play space for toddlers and food growing opportunities) and more time to enjoy it;

·        Pressure off traffic congestion in the urban area;

·        Protection and restoration of community life –an alternative to the transience and anomie of apartment living;

·        A chance to focus on quality development in existing suburbs and on sustaining what makes Auckland an attractive place to live in and visit; quiet streets, healthy treescapes, generous parks and play spaces, bungalows and gardens, ease of movement, local shops and services, and a sense of place.

·        Urban form better suited to limiting the impact of extremeevents (mainly associated with climate change, but there is an increase in fretting over Auckland’s volcanic field), reducing over-concentration of resources, people and infrastructure, and an improved capacity to recover from disasters with dispersed development.

The provisos
Will all these good things come to pass?  Here are four provisos we need to consider as we allow our “pearls on a string” to expand:

(1)  Ensure that the mini cities have adequate commercial and employment land and in doing so avoid applying 20^th century views of what should be where on that land, and how densely it should be occupied.  Just set some standards to manage conflicting uses, protect the environment, mandate minimum levels of amenity, and let the investment happen;

(2)  Ensure that mini-cities are well-connected, to each other, to the main urban area, and to key economic nodes (including port and airport).  Corridors need to be generous to allow for diverse traffic, transport modes, and growth;

(3)  Planners need to back off saying what should happen where and when, and instead say what is required before development can proceed.  This will allow demand to influence the timing of investment.  It will lower the speculative gains and land banking that coercive planning and orchestrating development sequences foster. 

(4)  Treat these as greenfield opportunities in the widest sense: encourage innovation in design, infrastructure, and investment to achieve more cost effective delivery, allow for new funding instruments, and reduce demands on public finances.

So what can the Council offer?
Many years of resistance to peri-urban growth suggest that planners are not necessarily the people to determine when this the proposed development might take place, or even to design it.  Instead, the Council needs the skills to negotiate delivery packages with investors and developers, and to provide oversight, and authority. 

And Wither Auckland Council?
Finally, while I find this development a justification for the many critical pieces I have written about Auckland’s planning in the past, I will indulge in one more observation.  Marry the mini-cities approach with the push for Urban DevelopmentAuthorities and we can begin to peel back the institutional onion that is Auckland Council.

So here’s a thought.  The mini-cities could be subject to development under an Urban Development Authority.  This should involve some community representation.  And when the development task is over, perhaps they could assume the managerial and regulatory role of a local authority.  

Sure, I was wrong when I gave the new, consolidated (or overweight) Auckland City just five years.  It’s still with us.  But maybe it’s time we acknowledged the short-comings and costs of a super city.  And if the region’s future does lie in Council Controlled Organisations and special purpose authorities to fulfil its functions, perhaps it’s time to at least shrink it down to fulfil basic funding, purchasing, high order spatial planning, and regulatory functions.

An alternative to compacting Auckland

Envisioning an alternative

David Wilson (Director of the  Institute of Public Policy at the Auckland University of Technology, Dushko Bogunovich Associate Professor of Urban Design at Unitec Institute of Technology and I got together recently to make a submission of the Discussion Document outlining Auckland Council’s aspirations for its spatial plan.

The submission canvassed some common ground between our interests in economic development, urban design, urban form and land use.  It suggests an alternative to a prevailing vision constrained by commitment to a compact city. 

Our aim was not to provide another prescription, though, but to suggest what might happen if we start with Auckland's own geography and culture.  We wanted to create a vision that is distinctly Auckland in the 21^st century rather than an aspiration simply to do better here what has already been done elsewhere. 

It’s easy to criticise the mainstream – sadly it can be too easy sometimes.  It’s not so easy to articulate an alternative.  Here’s a shortened version of our attempt.

Our submission

There are limitations to developing a compact city because of Auckland’s geography.  If we want the world’s most liveable city we should exploit the green and blue spaces that penetrate and punctuate its distinctive form.  Rather than urban containment we favour development that recognises the linear nature of Auckland’s setting, its extensive rural hinterland, dramatic coastal and bush-clad edges, and the desire of some residents and businesses to locate ‘outside the city but not too far’.  A combination of low impact development and decentralised intensification allows growth while respecting the physical setting.

Green urban form could provide entrepreneurial and economic opportunities and make Auckland more attractive. Respecting geography and committing to a green city can lead to an indigenous urbanism not beholden to Europe.  Auckland’s design should be about space, sea and sky; weather and vegetation; and openness.  We don’t need the tight, stone-paved spaces of a Siena or Salzburg.

The CBD will only be distinctive if we create more green space, and highlight our indigenous, settler, and Pacific cultures.  Public investment and design should focus on spaces of merit and accessibility.  The amazing thing about the CBD is that wherever you are, nature is there - through views and proximity to volcanoes, harbours, beaches and parks, and in constantly changing weather.

Increased living in the CBD has been driven by built form that has subtracted from urban design and city character with featureless apartment blocks either on ridges or barricading the harbour edge.  We need a design response to halt and offset this partial privatisation of our best public spaces through innovative approaches to what we’ve got left.  A quality living environment might include green, people-focused corridors separated from vehicle focused streets; pockets of parks and play; and more opportunities for street life (markets, static and performing art).  Quality and liveability should permeate the entire CBD.

The Suburbs: Let’s apply really good urban design to where most people live already and will do so for the foreseeable future.  We need sustainable suburbs developed around town centres, urban villages, quality streets, public spaces and community amenities. 

The New Urban Spaces in the northwest and south need urban design that promotes local containment: coherent urban centres, village centres, quality common spaces, alternative local transport networks (cycleways, walkways), stream and stream edge restoration, gardens and bush plantings.  They also need good local links between where people live and where they might work.  And planning should ensure that they might have the opportunity to work locally, not a 60 or more minute commute to the CBD or, more often, to the other side of the city.

Beyond the Fringe: Natural linear form conforming to Auckland’s topography is readily achievable through the growth of towns and settlements like Wellsford and Warkworth, Helensville and Huapai, Pukekohe and Pokeno.  Some of these, and more, can be allowed to grow giving more people better access to our natural environment, while taking advantage of our main road and rail corridors.

The arterial transport network should be generous in dimensions and sufficiently flexible to accommodate future advances in, for example, electric vehicles, light rail, improved bus design and performance.  Wide corridors might accommodate low impact modes (walking, mobility vehicles, cycles), segregate heavy traffic, promote greenways, and provide generous separation from housing. 

The design of this arterial network should allow for the increased flows that will eventuate with a more integrated system of northern North Island production and settlement and the expansion of Hamilton, Tauranga, and Whangarei – and smaller settlements – as joint drivers of economic development.

Our vision

The long-term shape of Auckland could be a 100 km-long 'city'.  It would retain one clear major centre – a green CBD – but there could be a dozen secondary city centres. They would lie from north to south – like pearls on the chain – along a natural central spine.  They would be urban in appearance.  They would be separated by the greens of farmland, town belts, and parks, but well connected by private and public transport.

This alternative vision builds on reality: Aucklanders live on an isthmus and that shapes our choices.  (Some live on an isthmus within an isthmus).  The completion of the western ring motorway and planned investment in the rail – if it happens -- will only reinforce the north-south development of the city, its region, and its hinterland. It is hard to imagine planning policies that could force change on this natural geography without compounding congestion and costs.

We can have a future in which settlements of various sizes (towns, villages, kainga, hamlets) all contribute to Auckland's capacity and character.   Some could accommodate 20,000 people or more with a little smart design. This would also open up greenfield potential for business land close to major arterial routes and labour markets while allowing people to live closer to the natural environment which is the mark of Auckland’s character and the key to its liveability.