Why compact cities aren't so smart

More advocacy for a compact city

I was interested to read the views of Rick Boven of the New Zealand Institute about central and local government needing to resolve their differences about the future of Auckland.  Well, they have worked on that since the establishment of GUEDO in 2005 (now the Auckland Policy Office). 

But that’s not what the article was really about.  Under the pretext of calling for “new ways of working together” Rick promotes urban containment and greater train travel for Auckland’s future. Well, we’ve heard all that before.

What Rick may have noticed by way of differences is not a failure of cooperation, but growing realisation that the old prescription for a compact Auckland is not working.  And while it may pain me to say so, in this instance the centre may be looking ahead, while the city continues to look to the past.  Any differences, Rick, arise from diverging views, not from a failure to work together.

Fallacies and frailties

And in this case I’m on the side of the centre.

I’ve picked away at the frailties of urban consolidation planning previously.  I can’t put it all together in one blog. But consider the following propositions about the compact city:

• A focus on centralisation guarantees congestion;
• A focus on centralisation reduces green space and concentrates urban pollution;
• Consolidation prejudices old infrastructure, increasing overload and the risk of failure;
• A focus on rail transit escalates costs, reduces flexibility, and caters for only a minority of trips among even those (relatively few) households that have ready access to it;
• A focus on rail transit commits us to developing unattractive brownfield sites with high remediation costs if we intend to increase residential densities nearby;
• A commitment to centralisation and higher densities increases vulnerability to extreme climatic events, rising sea levels, and other natural disasters;
• Medium to high density living is socially flawed, as it is associated with transience, increased urban crime, diminished quality of life, and loss of a sense of community, especially for households in middle to lower income brackets (and, ultimately, razing of failed apartment blocks);
• The market does not favour medium to high density housing unless well located, well appointed, and therefore out of the price range of most households;
• Refurbishment and restoration of inner city suburbs for higher density living leads to gentrification that displaces lower income households;
• Mixed use developments reduce the amount and push up the price of land for business while lowering the quality of life of residents;
• Limiting new business land and expecting to take up new employment by increasing densities on existing sites forces up business costs, reducing the attractiveness of investment and competitiveness of business.

None of this makes compact city policies look very smart.

Pushing for alternatives

The current council vision is for Auckland to be the world’s most liveable city.  Well, we won’t achieve that by “me-too” urban consolidation.  Don’t forget, in the corporate world consolidation is a defensive strategy, associated with stagnation not growth, holding the line, not forging ahead.

A better answer may be to take advantage of our distinctive physical environment and make sure that our urban form complements and takes advantage of it as we move ahead.

Here are some very broad ideas.

Allow decentralisation to continue.  It’s happening, don’t fight it.  Provide for it.  That means ensuring that people can meet most of their needs close to where they live.  A sustainable city won’t work without sustainable suburbs.  These should be at the heart of our plans.  And some of them might just have to spill over the urban limits.  Now there’s a real opportunity to practice some innovative urban design.

Let the city breathe:   We want a CBD which stands out among cities.  Well, by promoting sustainable suburbs we can lay off simply playing with structures and instead seize the opportunity to restore a green (and blue) heart to our city.  A timid but worthy start was made to Queen Street with the (re)introduction of Nikau palms, but we can go a lot further than that.  Barry Lett had great idea for the radical conversion of mid-Queen Street and Myers Park into an urban garden.  What a great place to visit!

If we take the pressure off forcing housing into the CBD, among other things, we could do a lot more of that.  We could think seriously about creating a pedestrian precinct the length of Queen Street. I would also push for my hot spots to be green – and forge walkways and cycle ways among them.  We could better Integrate the CBD with the quality areas around it.  On the harbour front we need to find ways to cross Quay Street, for example, to merge water and land.  We might start by taking note of Lambton Harbour in Wellington, and how it blends hard and soft surfaces, restores the harbour edge, and creates a place for all people. 

Develop Smart Sub-Urbs:  Forget Jane Jacobs’ nostalgia for the lost American city.  Those images belong to another age and another place.  Our life, our cultures, and our communities are in the suburbs.  Let’s ensure that strong communities can develop and thrive around urban villages and suburban centres throughout Auckland. 

If we are serious about sustainability, the suburbs are where it must happen. Here we can deliver smart urban design, strengthen social relationships, and provide capacity for improving the quality of life at all levels.  It’s also at a sub-regional if not suburban level that labour markets operate most efficiently, and employment opportunities might best be promoted.

And while we’re at it, we need to make sure that the suburbs are well interconnected by generous arterial corridors. This call for some difficult retrofitting.  It may mean reviewing how we use motor-ways; thinking more creatively about buses and bus-ways; and getting over an all-consuming desire to focus everything on the CBD, turning it into a giant interchange instead of a great destination.

Launch the Satellites: Some of the best places to live in Auckland are beyond the bounds.  We seem so desperate to cling to urban limits that we ignore the fact that people like Auckland because of what lies beyond them. Let’s see if we can encourage smart growth in places like Warkworth, Bombay, Pokeno, Wellsford and Drury, Beachlands, Pukekohe, and others.  Let our rural villages prosper, too. These are all places where we could do some exciting planning and design.  And let’s make sure that we have wide, green corridors linking them, corridors that can cater for whatever modes of transport the future might throw at them – electric cars, light rail, and the like.

There’s more, but I’m over my word limit.  If nothing else, let’s lift the discourse so that our ideas begin to match our aspirations.  The last thing we need to do, Rick, is to get together to recycle the old stuff.

Auckland Spatial Plan – 1: A Plan for all Seasons

Resolving issues of governance, sustainability, economic development, etc, etc, etc

Building on the suggestion of an international review panel that Auckland should have just One Plan, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance promoted the spatial plan as a unifying and integrating element for the region’s development under a single council.  The Commission commenced with the modest aim that the spatial plan would be “the starting point for the protection of Auckland’s environment and its heritage and the development of good urban design” (p199). 

However, it then set very high expectations for what the plan might achieve.

First, it suggested that the plan would “inform Auckland’s social and economic strategies, the regional policy statement and district plan developed under the Resource Management Act 1991, and specific service delivery strategies” but then it said that it should “coordinate plans for growth, economic development, and social well-being” (347).  It recommended an ambitious 30 to 50 year time frame. 

The Commission further stated that the spatial plan should:  

“analyse population, households, employment, major social infrastructure, open space networks, city-shaping infrastructure of roads, rapid transit, transport services, active transport networks including pedestrians and cyclists, water, wastewater, and stormwater networks, and major energy lines. It should identify the green and ecological network of the region, and areas that should be protected from all development and their natural values enhanced. It should identify growth areas for the region to accommodate urban population, and household and economic development, specifying timing, priority, methods, and agencies involved. The plan would address sustainability, outstanding urban design, a more efficient energy future, climate-resilient development, and the creation of cohesive communities” (531).

It said what tools should be used to prepare the plan, and proposed that it be informed by existing plans and by the new council’s own vision for Auckland, presuming concordance among them.  

It said that the Plan should feed “into the funding plans for key infrastructure (public transport, water, wastewater, stormwater, community facilities)”.  It would inform and be reinforced by an infrastructure plan for the region and be a tool for setting and enforcing Metropolitan Urban Limits. 

The compact city option

Peter Winder, CEO of the now defunct Auckland Regional Council outlined his take on Auckland’s spatial plan in September this year. He illustrated the incremental expansion of the urban area in the past, and its relationship to increasing mobility and an expanded transport network.

Peter highlighted the role of urban limits in planning for growth.  Initially, they were a tool for managing urban expansion.  Generous limits were drawn up in the 1950s in association with a commitment to major road network expansion.  Among other things, they helped open the north of the region to urbanisation following the construction of the Harbour Bridge.

In the 1970s, with revised planning legislation and growing economic uncertainty, a new concern to protect New Zealand’s primary sectors saw a hardening of metropolitan limits in a bid to preserve agricultural land in the region.

The rationale shifted again under the Resource Management Act 1991 as under the influence of Smart Growth proselytisers from North America, the Metropolitan Urban Limits (MUL) took on a life of their own in the interests of "sustainability".  No longer were they simply a tool for protecting valued rural or natural areas, but now they were an instrument for containing and reshaping the urban community.

To some commentators, this has been the source of problems – high cost land and poor housing affordability, a disincentive to industrial investment, traffic congestion and air pollution.  While there has been little definitive analysis to establish their merits in Auckland, MULs have been widely adopted as an urban planning tool.

Peter suggested that options for Auckland's future revolve around the pace at which expansion continues. Under these circumstances, the MUL would remain the defining feature of the spatial plan, whether that is the intention or not.

It was certainly explicit in the Royal Commission’s own policy stance:

“One of the key tools to secure a sustainable future for Auckland is to identify appropriate boundaries for urban expansion. The spatial plan will identify locations within existing urban areas where “densification” is appropriate in order to make public transport viable. Increasing sprawl would have an undermining effect on the provision of public transport and could make improvement unaffordable. Dense cities use less energy per person than the more dispersed model. For these reasons, the MUL is a key policy and the consequent control of land use will require significant enforcement efforts”.

This line of argument raises a number of questions. Despite the assertion that denser cities use less energy per resident, the costs and benefits of enforcing higher densities remains contested.  In any case, promoting land use plans to sustain a public transport preference smacks of the tail wagging the dog, a dangerous posture when public transport requires significant subsidy and its long term energy advantages remain unproven.

In any case, good public transport can lift long-distance commuting, enabling more people to dwell further from the centre.  This is not necessarily conducive to higher densities.  And given that commuting is a diminishing share of total transport use – and that public transport is an inferior option for non-commuting travel – the resulting dispersal may increase total transport demand .  

Peter’s options for the spatial plan echo the Royal Commission's argument.  They suggest that the rate of sprawl across the urban edge might be dictated only by the extent to which development can be forced upwards, and that this is desirable on the grounds that the higher the density the slower the pace of urban sprawl and the greater the prospect for viable public transport. 

Other than promoting increased densities, though, and protecting the obvious no-go areas, there is no sense of real changes or choices in the way we might live and work in Peter’s alternative maps.  Those that can afford nothing better will be confined to medium-rise living in crowded centres, and the others will do what they can to secure a place in existing suburbs, force their way over the city edge, or pick up a high amenity apartment on a central ridge-line or on the harbour edge.

Defending the city ramparts (keeping the hordes in rather than out) to support public transport is promoted as the means to shape infrastructure, dictate how we work and live, and incidentally, slow down an undifferentiated and undistinguished vision of growth by overspill.  Is that really what Aucklanders want?

Getting Real

I have raised concerns about Auckland’s spatial plan in previous blogs.   If it is seen as a panacea for all Auckland’s challenges – governance, sustainability, urban design, resource management, economic growth, community development – as the Commission seemed to think, the plan is bound to disappoint. 

The expectation that spatial regulation will determine economic and social behaviour echoes a long-discredited environmental determinism paradigm.  Its inadequacies have been well illustrated in the tortuous process of defending the 1999 Regional Growth Strategy with its own map and boundaries, and the long struggle since in getting Policy Change 6 in place so that the Regional Policy Statement might more effectively enforce this somewhat confined view of the world.

From ideology to expediency

We actually have the chance now to be more realistic in terms of what might be achieved through a spatial plan (and its bedfellow, the unitary district plan) and more pragmatic in our approach. Rather than defend our past positions,we might allow for the complexities of community and economic development and for the uncertainties that surround the future of housing demand, where we work, and where we play.

The Council’s commitment to completing the spatial plan quickly reflects a pragmatism and recognition, among other things, that any significant initiatives it might raise will need to be reflected in the Long Term Council Community Plan.

But haste also has its risks if expediency rather than reason prevails.  It could amount to little more than a recycling of a dated compact city paradigm; or designed simply to deliver the silver bullet of infrastructure spending.  It could inadvertently set up a master plan for locking down land use; or simply promote a planners’ view of how people should be obliged to live, a plan locked into the here and now of conventional wisdom.  That's what we need to avoid.

A framework for moving forward

Ree Anderson, Manager, Regional, Community & Cultural Strategy recently presented her thoughts on spatial planning to the New Zealand Planning Institute. In quoting the Torremolinos Charter she potentially turned two decades of spatial determinism in Auckland on its head:

Spatial planning gives geographical expression to the economic, social, cultural and ecological policies of society.

She brings four key components to the fore: balanced socio-economic development, an improved quality of life, responsible management of the environment, including built environment and heritage, and a rational land-use plan.  In effect, the spatial plan should be a reflection of society’s aspirations as these might be translated into policy, and not imposed on them to reflect a particular ideology or normative view of development.

Rather than proffering maps as options for her audiences to consider, she has invited responses around three possible elements of a spatial plan:

(1)    Big budget priorities – what public investments are needed, and where?

(2)    Place-based priorities – what needs to be done for individual localities?

(3)    Region wide themes – what needs to be done to make the region as a whole work better?

The notion of building up the spatial plan from understanding the physical limits to development, the communities’ aspirations, and the emerging character of local places, and those matters that require a region-wide perspective seems preferable to seeking region-wide conformity in development within a map of boundaries.

Keeping an open mind rather than extrapolating past preconceptions and practice is more likely to enable the region to deal with uncertainty and change.  Identifying what needs to be done and how – and what sits beyond the bounds of reasonableness – is likely to be more efficient and effective than exhaustive and fixed – and inevitably imperfect – prescriptions of land uses .  Getting the bare bones together, the foundations for planning, rather than trying to lock-down the future in master plan makes a lot of sense.

I might just try to respond to Ree’s challenge in my next posting.

Let's not jettison bold urban development plans

New centres fail to fire

Anne Gibson in the New Zealand Herald reported the recent failures of several large, integrated urban development projects on Auckland’s fringe.  Plans for a number of substantial developments are now defunct or substantially scaled down.   She said that this was a result of “the end of the boom-bust real estate cycle rather than any centralised planning attempt”.

The article attributes the failure to “commercialise” Auckland’s borders to financial failings, to the drying up of bank funding and consequent bankruptcies, and a reliance on too much debt to carry forward bold plans.  What planning could not achieve by way of containing the city, the global meltdown has apparently done. 

That is certainly part of the story, but it raises as many questions as it answers. 

Short-sighted planning still a problem

Perhaps most obviously, some of the projects cited were overturned because they contravened the Auckland Regional Policy Statement’s commitment to largely containing growth within Auckland’s existing boundaries.  In other cases, protracted planning requirements simply delayed getting projects to the market, precipitating or compounding any problems of financial over-leveraging. 

The irony is that a number of these projects were responding to the strictures of smart growth, reducing vehicle dependence, increasing housing densities, promoting pedestrianisation and public transit, and integrating local commercial and residential activity.  Some were potentially exemplars of the sustainability principlesbehind the Regional Policy Statement.  Unfortunately, these principles were buried by the practice of defending the Metropolitan Urban Limit at all costs and regardless of consequences.

So what have been the costs of these projects failing to fire?  

The financial losses associated with the failure of these projects can be far-reaching, especially as they impact on promoters, financial institutions, and investors.  More than that, they compound the nervousness of financiers for large developments.

But the impact reaches well beyond any undermining of the development sector.  The long-term cost is likely to be counted in a distorted housing market.  It may even undermine Auckland’s economic growth.

One cost has been a reduction of housing affordability.  In 2007, Motu Research demonstrated the pressure on residential land prices exerted by the Metropolitan Urban Limits.  While the study focused on an unsurprising gap between rural and urban zoned land, and perhaps the size of the differential was of some interest.  But what was most revealing about the data used was that growth in land values far outstripped growth in capital value. Inflating land costs have been a major contributor to falling affordability in Auckland.

Obviously, the inflation of land prices within the Metropolitan Urban Limits has done little for the economics of large-scale housing projects.  It adds to holding costs and by inflating prices for developed land may reduce the rate of uptake.  On this score , it is interesting that the one project cited as making progress in the Herald article, is Housing New Zealand’s Hobsonville development – a public project on publicly owned land.

The gap between the houses we need and what we are getting

Statistics New Zealand projected that between 2006 and 2011, Auckland region would grow by between 39,000 and 60,000 new households each year.  Over the four years to December 2009 there had been just 20,600 consents issued, a little over 5,000 a year.  With just 1,800 issued in the first six months of the current year, there is no sign of a recovery either.

There has been a solid decline in consents for dwellings issued in Auckland since 2004 (see figure below).  Whether this is a victory for market rationality or for our former regional planners so intent on holding the line, it has to be a defeat for new households and aspiring homeowners.  The fact that its share of national residential consents has fallen from 45% in 2002 to under 24% in 2009 suggests that whatever the reason  -- falling demand or constrained supply -- its impact is falling dkisproportionately on Auckland.

In fact, Statistics New Zealand’s medium projection would see 49,000 new households potentially entering the Auckland housing market between 2006 and 2011, and another 53,000 over the five years to 2016.  Even if this projection overestimates demand, it suggests that supply in the region is “short” by as many as 30,000 new dwellings . 

Impacts on Auckland’s growth

One response to a supply driven shortage, of course, is for households to go elsewhere.  It is instructive that Auckland’s share of new dwelling consents in New Zealand has been falling.  Other responses are deferred family formation, a growing number of multiple household dwellings, and in some instances over-crowding.  A turn down in the international migration gains that underpin Auckland’s long-term growth projections may be another result.

The reduction in activity in the new housing market has other effects, one of which is to hollow out the development, construction, and supply sector.  Trades move elsewhere, perhaps to Australia, and businesses shut down.   

While it is difficult to separate the downturn in urban development and housing and its consequences from the recession generally, the real issue is one of long-term impacts.  The city is looking at the prospect of a severe housing shortage.   Not only is land for housing likely to be a major issue for the foreseeable future, a diminished housing sector will see prices increases when -- or perhaps if -- demand picks up again.  Infill and brownfield development alone will not do it.  inevitably large scale projects within the urban fabric will compound infrastructure and congestion issues.  They cannot be cost effective, either, without a compromise to quality.

Such impacts and outcomes will be compounded if the significant urban development projects that are needed to provide the residential stock for the next ten to twenty years fail to get off the ground.  The demise of the projects cited is guaranteed to keep residential prices unduly high when there is a lift in demand, and may see the region faced with an unseemly scramble for housing, inside the Urban Limit and outside. 

Where to now?

Creating an environment in which plans support rather than stifle innovative urban investment wherever it goes will be one of the challenges that the new Auckland City needs to address now to ensure orderly long-term growth.  We need the sorts of projects which overzealous planning restrictions and difficult financial conditions have conspired to sink in the recent past if we are to have a properous and equitable future.