Auckland Draft Plan: Flying in the Face of Common Sense?

What Aucklanders Want

At last, a clear statement about the flawed nature of the draft Auckland Spatial Plan. It was on the leader page of the New Zealand Herald on Saturday, too.  Thanks, John Roughan, for pointing out the plan is to deliver what Aucklanders don’t need and don’t want.  Read it, and pass it on.  Perhaps send it in to Auckland Council as your submission on their plan. 

The article focuses on the plan’s fixation with rail and how it looks as if the plan is about creating a city to justify the transport system planners want, not what Auckland needs. 

But the problem of pushing a planning fad runs deeper than that.

Is not what the Council wants

Why do we need to transform one of the most liveable cities in the world into a compact city, something out of 1960s London or Chicago, or 1980s Portland. If young families or retiring baby-boomers have little housing choice other than medium density living in the CBD, around ageing commercial centres, and along busy arterial roads will they be celebrating living in Auckland?  And if what we’ve had so far by way of residential intensification is what we can expect in the future, there's a good chance they will be in poky apartments and shonky buildings with minimum public space, surrounded by traffic 24/7. 

Is this why we live in Auckland?  I know that if I want to live in a city apartment or central terrace, then it will be back to Sydney for me, or (if I was younger and ambitious) perhaps Singapore, or London, or New York.

But no, my family, me, and plenty of others prefer Auckland’s suburbs or exurbs, places close to, on, or beyond the urban edge.  Here we are not too far from a coast of variety and beauty, and a countryside of farms and villages, bush, birds, and hills.  Or suburbs and their parks and reserves, where the housing is varied, and people are enjoying the renaissance of small centres.  And where it is as easy to get into the countryside as the central city.

Why won’t the compact city just go away?

From the 1980s on Auckland Regional Council tried to contain Auckland.  Despite enlisting a string of international cheerleaders to push it and getting the idea endorsed in local government legislation in 2004, the Council acknowledged in a 2007 review of the Regional Growth Strategy (Growing Smarter) that it wasn’t working.  Sure, people were living in smaller houses (maybe because their choices were narrowing or households were getting smaller), but -- surprise, surprise -- not where the planners wanted them to. 

The medicine, they decided, needed to be stronger.  And stronger measures to enforce their ideas seem to be what the Draft Spatial Plan is administering, moving from medication to straitjacket. Even if the new Rural Urban Boundary (RUB) is a little more expansive than the former Metropolitan Urban Limit, the draft plan holds even less prospect of breaking out than there was with the MUL.

Doubling up

The plan calls for a tripling of the central city residential population – and density – and for 75% of the city’s entire growth between now and 2041 to be within the RUB.  This gives rise to around 40% increase in residential densities across the city. 

But of course, it won’t happen right across the city.  So where?  You’re neighourhood?  Well, if not, then everyone else will just have to put up with a bit more density and a little less open space.

In fact, there are likely to be large parts of Auckland where housing densities have to double.  Because land for housing will be at a premium, that just may be at the cost of green space and sunlight.  And you don’t need a social science degree or planning qualification to work out that this is least likely to happen on the leafy eastern slopes or in our pleasant coastal suburbs.

So why aren’t we shouting from the rooftops (while we can still see the view)?

This is a radical plan, heralding a transformation that few Aucklanders are likely to embrace.  So why so few submissions (143 at the last published count) on something so fundamental? The Mayor blamed this on our preoccupation with the World Rugby Cup. 

Maybe, but it’s more likely to be because the Draft Plan is dense, complicated and confusing.

Can we really discuss this document?

For a start, its 250 pages long, which most of us have to download.  It has four sections plus thirteen chapters.  It is largely bereft of analysis but does contains an avalanche of tags: one vision, six outcomes, eleven strategic directions and their core components, a four part high level development strategy, six principles, and five transformations.  And then there’s 52 targets, 47 priorities, 96 directives(!), and 232 actions – look at the table below.

Plus a Central City Master Plan with its own strategic direction, transformational moves, challenges, opportunities, and delivery.

What a busy council we will have when this lot goes through!

	Targets	Priorities	Directives	Actions
People	8	3	8	31
The Southern  Initiative		6	2	17
Auckland's Maori	6	5	5	18
Arts Culture Heritage	6	4	9	28
Auckland's Economy	5	5	14	17
Auckland's Environment	7	4	14	34
Auckland's response to Climate Change	2	2	3	11
Rural Auckland	2	2	5	13
Urban Auckland	4	4	8	15
Auckland's Housing		5	8	19
Auckland's Physical and Social Infrastructure	7	3	10	20
Auckland's Transport	5	4	10	9
Total	52	47	96	232

This is hardly an effective way for a council to engage with its community. In fact, the draft includes a daunting five pages (including assorted flow charts) simply explaining how to be involved.  I wonder how many people have read them? 

But there’s more

Other reports have also been issued with or around the Draft Plan.  They should help illustrate where the plan is coming from.  So better read them, too.  Not that any are easy reading, and with the exception of the housing reports (which don’t really support the plan’s priorities anyway), the level of analysis is decidedly limited.

Here’s the list (as far as I can make out):

Reports	Pages
Residential Capacities	42
Policy Options for a Compact City	10
Technical Workstream: Housing	73
Auckland Unleashed: Discussion Document	228
Draft Economic Development Strategy	108
Background Paper Auckland Economic Development Strategy	133
Towards deriving a Central City Master plan	15
Total Pages	854

The real bite is in the Evidence Based Bibliography.  This lists 602 vaguely relevant and often obscure “reports” issued over the last decade held to inform the plan. 

What to do?

How can you make a meaningful submission on that lot?

Well, I think John Roughan got it right.  Just use a little common sense to tell them the plan is wrong.  We don’t want it.

Fiscally challenged

And I doubt that we can afford it.  The draft identifies around $31bn of known capital expenditure over the next 30 years (and flags a lot of spending it cannot provide the numbers for, much of it reliant on central government coming to the party).  And it’s not easy to follow the figures it does have.  They have a certain imprecision and don’t appear to include contingencies, or allow for the operating, maintenance, and depreciation costs the new projects will incur, so I may be underestimating them. 

Whatever the detail, this looks like a major fiscal challenge.  For what and for whom?  I have already pointed out the bias in the plan against where the overwhelming majority of people live and work (the suburbs, not the city centre). 

Its also a high risk plan, and if it fails to enhance the attractiveness of Auckland the fiscal downside will be so much the worse as there will be fewer households and businesses to fund the folly. 

Yes, a plan can be useful, just not this one

Sure, we need to align some decision making, rationalise bureaucracy, work out how to cater for growth in an orderly manner, and how we might use scarce public resources most effectively with the widest possible community benefit.  Yes, we need to boost our export in trade and services if Auckland is to be anything more than a centre of consumption (now there’s a transformation worth pursuing) but that’s about education and incentives.  We need a plan to help us deal with change.  But squeezing land use and pushing Think Big projects won't help.

City planning is about keeping costs down and connections up, the fundamentals of urban development.  This plan carries with it unnecessary costs and will threaten the local quality of life if it ever gets momentum.  We know that from the way the cost of investing in new houses and new factories has escalated in Auckland since we began toying with a compact city in the 1990s: home ownership has become that much harder, and employment performance that much weaker.

I can only echo John Roughan: save Auckland from this plan!

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.

Subsidiarity: putting civil society in its place

Communities doing their own thing

An article in today’s New Zealand Herald reported on the progress being made by a voluntary association of residents of the Matakana area developing local walkways.  Businesses, residents, and donors have pitched in to work with council support to create off-highway links between the rural settlements of Matakana Village, Point Wells, and Omaha Beach.  This is a modest local initiative.  It is a sign, though, of increasing community interest in the quality and accessibility of the physical environment outside our cities.  The Tawharanui Open Sanctuary Society is in the same vein (and locality).  Here, a local community voluntary initiative has been encouraged and supported by local government (the regional council) to achieve conservation outcomes. 

This is a sign that working together communities can deliver projects with a public benefit.  They do not need simply to join the queues contesting government delivery of taxpayer funded projects.

Volunteering, the foundation of civil society

Of course, community focused voluntarism has been with us for a long time, especially in urban areas.  The Māori Warden Association is an excellent example we are all familiar with in New Zealand.  The NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations includes around 130 member organisations, which among them employ 11,000 paid staff and represent 41,500 volunteers. The Federation is committed to building strong and equitable communities.

Volunteering New Zealand is an organisation that provides resources and support to organisations in emergency services, health, welfare, education, culture, faith based services, community support, ethnic interests, sport and recreation, conservation, special interests, advocacy and international volunteering.  It provides a strong framework of volunteering centres throughout the country. It  estimates that around 34% of the population aged over ten years is involved in volunteering. 

A high rate of volunteering is confirmed by recent research by Massey University and the Ministry of Social Development.  This puts New Zealand number seven among nations when measured as the share of the economically active population in the not-for-profit workforce.

This is all evidence that New Zealand enjoys a strong civil society, made up of the range of organisations and associations of individuals (and businesses) that contribute freely to the effective functioning of communities without relying on the strictures of the state to do so. 

Civil society, the state, and the market

Civil society has long played a role in getting underprivileged communities moving in developing nations.  For them it may be the main means of group survival, and a force against anarchy.  Often non-government organisations arise from the ground up and become important organising agencies for infrastructure and services in poor communities which depend more on social capital than state direction and resources.  

Now, it seems, civil society may have a more visible role to play as developed nations move into a new, fiscally challenged phase of slow growth and development.

An active civil society can underpin social progress and build stronger communities, ideally supported by the state.  Even better, civil society, the state, and commercial organisations (those regulated by the market) can come together to achieve beneficial social and economic outcomes.  

It’s interesting that a growing awareness of the potential of civil society has triggered some rethinking even in conservative quarters.  Think Tank Res Publica with its emphasis on a more inclusive form of democracy has informed the British government’s thinking about new ways of advancing the social programme, ways less dependent on welfare and more on capacity building. 

There is a risk that moving more towards a society based on voluntarism is no more than a means of running down central government, undoing hard-fought for welfare programmes.  Some equate it with inserting the market where the state has traditionally operated. But this thinking risks confusing the elevation of civil society with corporatisation of services that no longer fit comfortably into the state’s mandate. 

Sure, the relationship between state, civil society and the market needs to be debated.  But that should not prevent us exploring what is potentially a much more effective and balanced form of government (and governance) in which communities, business, and governments act in partnership.

Subsidiarity – a better form of governance?

I have recently been involved in a project looking at subsidiarity in Lombardy (population 9.9m ) in northern Italy.  Subsidiarity is the principle that responsibilities for governing should be allocated from central to decentralised agencies wherever practical.  This is the vertical subsidiarity that features in much of the literature about democracy and governance.  The rationale is that decisions are best taken as close as possible to where they will have most effect.  This arrangement helps communities relate to different tiers of government while providing for more effective governance.

In Lombardy the related principle of horizontal subsidiarity is also important.  This sees functions allocated to the agencies most suited to implementing them.  These may be voluntary or commercial organisations.  Functions that have traditionally been the role of government might move out under these circumstances.  It goes without saying that if the government does allocate responsibility to an outside agency it needs to be accompanied by public funding and monitoring to ensure the best return on the taxpayer investment.  The point is, though, that government need not take direct responsibility for delivery  to get the best outcome.

A suggestion: endorsing subsidiarity in the constitution

Built on our strong and growing civil society, an established and transparent market place, and sound agencies of government, the forthcoming review of the New Zealand constitution might consider vertical and horizontal subsidiarity as potential governing principles, and in doing so acknowledge and endorse the growing importance of community-based organisations in future New Zealand governments.