Breaching the barricade: the beginning of the end for containing Auckland's growth

After 25 years of opposing indiscriminate urban containment – some of it through this blog, more through advising clients (including councils) and participating in Environment Court Hearings – it is pleasing to me to see the growing tide that looks like sweeping it away.  This is not a tide that will block higher density development where that offers benefits to the households and businesses that may occupy it. But it is a sea change in thinking that promises to restore a semblance of balance in planning and policy for Auckland City and its citizens.

And this should not just be about houses. It is about the people who occupy them and the communities they live in. 

Breaching the barricade
It’s clear that limiting land supply by means of the Metropolitan Urban Limit (MUL, and now the proposed Rural Urban Boundary) is at the heart of the Auckland housing crisis – too few homes, over-priced dwellings, and a growing economic and social divide defined by access to housing. 

The housing storm is not only causing social distress and undermining the liveability of Auckland; it is also influencing the Reserve Bank’s role in monetary policy and impinging on public discussion around migration and population policy.

After two decades of myopic urban policy, this travesty is finally gaining widespread recognition .  Today politicians are picking up on years of analysis by the Productivity Commission, among others in proposing doing away completely with the MUL. 

Failure to recognise the simple truth that we need to expand the city to accommodate an expanding population means that candidates who don’t change tack could find themselves foundering in the forthcoming council elections.

The bigger picture
This is not an Auckland-only debate.  All OECD nations are experiencing it one way or another; and even developing nations are confronted by western advisors seeking to transfer this particular practice to places where it is neither relevant nor appropriate. How urban policy has got into this mess is another issue for another time.

Within New Zealand, plans to compress urban settlement are not confined to Auckland.  Containment has long-been a preoccupation in Canterbury, driving thinking about the shape of Christchurch even though the city has little more than a quarter of the residents of Auckland.  The compact city policy was hung onto even after earthquakes destroyed swathes of the inner city and its eastern suburbs.  It also holds sway in Wellington where the physical geography and risk profile are hardly conducive to more intensification.

The risks
Now that the Auckland community, through its politicians, is contemplating changing course, let’s not make the mistake of assuming that this can be done simply by building more houses.  It’s actually about building communities, and repairing the damage done by years of denying the need for more land.  And it’s about doing so in a manner that is sympathetic to both the environment and the public pocket.

Launching lifeboats does not solve the problem: it simply changes the risks.  Take the creation of Special Housing Areas in Auckland.  First, there is the collateral damage to the Resource Management Act. Its credibility and currency are undermined when it has to be bypassed in this manner.  That has to be attended to.

Second, and more importantly, we are now faced with proliferating housing under pressure, much of it sprawling grey over the edge of currently built up areas, with little regard to the need for local employment, access to retailing, services, parks and walkways, and green space, or for strong arterial connections to other parts of the region.  We risk creating potentially new forms of deprivation in communities, lacking amenities, physical stranded, and socially isolated.

The haste with which the Council is rushing through Special Housing Area approvals risks a shortfall in the quality and capacity of infrastructure.  And the opportunities SHAs offer for developers to make rapid commercial headway also raises questions over the quality of urban design that will be achieved.

Some success stories?
That is not to deny examples of well-designed housing areas with some integration into the fabric of the city.  Hobsonville Point is the exemplar, but well-founded developments like this shouldn’t need to rely on special housing status and, ideally, should be readily achieved under existing legislation. 


Ironically, the success of such projects results from the damage already done because they can command high prices in a market starved for dwellings.
 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t make for affordability relative to even Auckland City's aspirational cost-to-annual income ratio of 5 (compared with the more conventional, and historical 1:3 ratio). 

For example, a three bedroom, one garage home  in the latest Hobsonville Point release would typically cost in excess of $800,000. Four bedroom homes with capacity for two cars are priced around $1m or more. The recently reported average salary in Auckland (of $74,000, which has been labelled unrealistically high, and no doubt sits well above the median income) suggests prices well over 10 times the average income for the majority of new homes in a high density suburb.

And even well-designed developments generate substantial traffic on an already overloaded regional network.  Hobsonville Point adds to congestion on the under-capacity north-western motorway. Additional swathes of housing on the Hibiscus Coast are overloading critical motorway intersections in the north, even as their commuters crawl past local land long-slated for employment uses that for some reason has yet to get off the drawing board.

Charting the way forward
The only way to get new Auckland houses priced anywhere near a price to income ratio of one:five is not to lift supply in an incremental fashion behind an arbitrary barricade (a sure recipe for sprawl), or in keeping with potentially spurious projections of dwellings, or even to toss out Special Housing Areas here and there.  It is to open up the supply of land across the region to the disciplines of the market, subject to some important qualifications.

Doing so should be innovative, comprehensive development shaped around the needs of households and communities, rather than by the predilections of a particular phalanx of planners and their political patrons,

At the very least, though, any new housing areas should at the outset include land for new business investment to absorb and take advantage of an expanding labour force without obliging commuters to sit for hours in cross-regional traffic.  This means enabling large, generously landscaped, high amenity, and readily accessed land for employment. 

New urban precincts also need adequate community resources by way of commercial and cultural centres, formal and informal parks, and the means to access them, on- and off-road.

Finally, it is important to find new ways to fund development, ways that recognise the long-term benefits to the community as a whole of investment in modern, efficient infrastructure.  It is pleasing to see the proposal by the Labour Party to move towards long-term funding via bonds which will spread both the costs and the benefits of sensible, comprehensive development.  

Avoiding the shoals
Breaking down the barricade does not mean that we should sail into uncharted waters.

Basic building codes and environmental standards will be required to ensure the integrity of development. 
It is important that areas of environmental sensitivity beyond the city are flagged.  Most of them are known – areas of native bush and regeneration, cultural and heritage land marks, areas of physical instability, wet lands, reclamations and low-lying coastal zones, flood-prone river valleys, and the like. Areas of elite, high producing soils that society particularly values may also be flagged for preservation.

But charting these shoals in the course of expansion is a preferable approach to development than a city anchored behind a barricade.

The Answer Is Urban Consolidation – What Was The Question?

Perpetuating the Myth

The Green Party is perpetuating the claim that development beyond Auckland’s “city limits” imposes a high cost on ratepayers.  A spokesperson claims that the current Auckland plan which allows for some new development outside the current urban area, “will cost ratepayers $42b billion to 2042, an annual levy of $200 per ratepayer”  according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.   

But is just so happens that  study on which these calculations are based is a flawed commissioned report  rather than a peer reviewed academic study (Roman Trubka, Peter Newman and Darren Bilsborough (2008) Assessing the Costs of Alternative Development Paths in Australian Cities, Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, Fremantle, Report commissioned by Parsons Brinckerhoff Australia). 

Oops – Contradictory Claims

The authors of the Curtin report acknowledged at the outset that

"The challenge ...  is that infrastructure costs are so heavily dependent on area-specific values.  For instance, road costs among different prospective development areas may vary based on the necessity for major arterial roads, costs for sewerage and water infrastructure could vary immensely depending on terrain and trenching conditions, and many infrastructure components will differ depending on the level and degree of excess capacity” (p.4)

So why did they try to develop a generic tool for estimating the cost of urban development in Australian cities based on a mishmash of evidence from different cities and suburbs in Australia and the United States?  And why would anyone even contemplate applying such “findings” to Auckland with its distinctive physical geography, so different from its Australian counterparts? 

A Quick Critique

The Productivity Commission actually considered the study, among others, in a brief review of housing costs and urban form (Appendix B of the final report).  It noted substantive differences in the physical and social settings  behind the data assembled to support the  study’s claim to some sort of universal cost relationship between development and distance from the city centre.

And there are glaring methodological deficiencies:

“An obvious one is mixing discount rates (zero for infrastructure capital costs, 7% for transport-related costs, and 3% for health and emission costs), and omitting operating costs for some items (non-transport infrastructure) and not others (pp. 295-296)

To these flaws can be added the assumption of a cost of Aus$170/tonne for carbon emissions when the carbon floor price set by the Australian government (of $15) has since been rescinded and figures at or below $10.00 may be more appropriate based on today’s European prices.  So the environmental argument is seriously overstated.

And the analysis fails to deal with the costs of expanding the capacity of ageing infrastructure in long-established urban areas, of remediating services designed for far lower loadings than they are now expected to sustain, of the health impacts of apartment living in an increasingly brown – not green – environment, and of reductions in the physical and socialresilience of high density and often congested urban areas in the face of possible natural disasters or infrastructure failures.

Penalising the Household - is that Socially Sustainable, or Politically Justified? 

Even if it can be proven that the balance of public benefits favours medium or high density living, is there any evidence that such savings will not be offset by the better affordability of traditional suburban housing and the benefits residents derive from living into it?

Putting aside  flawed data and methodology for the moment, the results indicate that 70% of the differences in costs between decentralised and central locations is attributable to travel and transport.  Over half of these comprise travel costs and  time carried  by households.  If we take these private costs out of the equation the authors' estimate of the difference  between centralised and decentralised development falls by 40%.  

The resulting "present cost" for the average household (whatever that might be) of A$22,000 is easily  justified by savings on land and housing in “outer” areas, the benefits households get  from  additional space, greater choice over housing style, and the security and community benefits of suburban environments.

So who pays if we deny people the choice of living in medium to low density housing?  Mainly new households through exclusion from household ownership, or commitment to punitive mortgages, or through the insidious extension of housing poverty through ever higher income brackets. 

So what about the Auckland case: where does the evidence really lie?

Surprisingly-- given the obstinacy of the planners and politicians pushing the consolidation barrow --   no-one has actually done the analysis required to determine the relative economic benefits of different urban development paths for Auckland.  

A technical analysis of the gaps in the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy made the point that the planning  model that informed it was hardly up to the task.  The principal conclusion that came from using the Regional Council's land use and transport  model was that there is “little [identified] economic difference between growth options”.(McDermott Fairgray Ltd (1999) Gap Analysis, Review and Recommendations: Auckland Regional Growth Strategy, Technical Report, Auckland Regional Growth Forum )

The failure of the model to demonstrate economic differences between alternative urban forms was used to suggest that intensification imposes no additional costs than traditional  decentralised development.  Of course, the converse is true – although it has been conveniently ignored: there were no demonstrable economic benefits from consolidation or net cost penalties to decentralisation.  This suggests that it would make most sense to let the market prevail, subject  to broad environmental standards and fiscal constraints.   

The  conclusion  that consolidation was the best option for Auckland ignores other shortcomings  in the  model that could  tip the balance  in favour of strategic decentralisation:

• The failure to actually define realistic alternatives that would  clearly demonstrate economic differences;
• A failure to evaluate the marginal rather than average impacts of differences in urban form;
• The failure to identify the costs of implementation.
• Ambiguous measurement (both omissions and double counting);

To this list we can add underestimation of the high infrastructure and development costs associated with brownfield development and urban consolidation.  These are turning up today in high financial and development contributions for inner city projects.

Calling for  Consolidation – a Case of Artificial Intelligence

So why is the Auckland Spatial Plan so fixated on consolidation –despite the begrudging lip service the final version pays to decentralisation (a small concession to market reality that appears to have  upset  the Green spokesperson)?

I can only think it is "artificial intelligence": if enough people say the same thing, it must be right.  Consensus becomes an excuse for lack of evidence, critical analysis, or even common sense.  Groupthink prevails,: a phenomenon defined by psychologist Irving Janis as:

A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action (Janis, I L (1972). Victims of Groupthink Houghton Mifflin p. 9)

Contrary evidence is dismissed while reports favouring an emerging consensus, such as the Curtin one, obtain a degree of currency which, while unjustified,  plays into the hands of policy makers looking for easy (or ideologically comfortable) answers to difficult problems.

And so we blunder on, potentially building our cities on myth and misconception and reinforcing the gap betwen generations as we do it.

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Auckland Spatial Plan – Part 2: What would I do?

A sideline view

In my previous blog I expressed a concern about over-inflating the spatial plan for Auckland – promoting it as the panacea for the region’s ills.  Equally, a deterministic an approach that seeks to enforce behavioural conformity by mapping a particular urban form onto the region is unlikely to be successful.

It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and criticise, though.  What if I had responsibility for designing a spatial plan for Auckland?  Fortunately, I don’t.  But without accountability it’s easy to offer advice.  So here goes.

Can we limit prescription?

I liked Ree Anderson’s light handed approach, one that focuses on function rather than form, and priorities rather than comprehensiveness.  That’s the approach I would like to follow, one starting with how places within the region work and recognises relationships among them. This is along the lines of the network model applied to Zurich over the years, which Shane commended to us.

In keeping with this approach, let’s limit prescription. Let’s develop a framework within which people and organisations can be creative in addressing the environmental, economic, and community issues they will face.

How?  Well, I accept there do have to be bottom lines to start with, no go areas around which the plan can be developed. Then we need to address how infrastructure and land-use might evolve to support whatever growth Auckland experiences, and, finally, think about turning the whole thing into a framework for reducing uncertainty and resolving growth issues as they arise. 

We still need bottom lines

The bottom lines are the immutable, non-debatable features the community wants preserved. They will be given weight by being defined sparingly. Beyond volcanic cones, ranges, estuaries, wetlands, and shorelines they might relate to regional parks and open spaces (a town belt would be good), cultural heritage, iconic structures, critical infrastructure, and hazard avoidance.  Many of them we know about already.  Others will emerge from listening to the community. 

We cannot afford to overdo them, though, because we should be prepared to spend what it takes to secure, enhance, and preserve our bottom lines.  Relying on regulation is an inferior option.  If we cannot afford it, it may not be a bottom line that we can justify.

Make sure our infrastructure is affordable

Infrastructure is critical to community, economy, and environment.  Network services such as electricity and gas, water supply, wastewater, and drainage need to be integrated to deliver on all three fronts.  Like the transport network, they must meet the diverse demands of business and residential communities within a constrained physical – and fiscal – environment. 

The spatial plan is the place to pin down the key trunk services and their possible extensions.  It is also the place in the spatial plan to highlight the region’s critical infrastructure lifelines.

Beyond that, though, we need not rush the detail or commit to unproven investment.  The real key with infrastructure is its efficiency.  Does a major commitment lead to a commercial return?  If not, does it generate sufficient benefit to justify public expenditure?  The alternative is monumentalism – extravagant infrastructure spending for dubious returns. 

If the demand for major investment does not materialise the outcome will be lower aggregate productivity.  Over-capacity or redundant public projects add to the fiscal deficit, create structural distortions, and undermine economic performance.  The larger a project and the more imprecise the rationale, the more suspicious we should be. 

So let’s be sparing in what new commitments are written in and ensure that ill-justified works are not imposed on Auckland simply by inclusion within the Spatial Plan. Significant initiatives should be subject to the disciplines of rigorous evaluation both in their own right and as part of an informed view of how Auckland might develop.

And how might Auckland develop?

Envisioning the future

Ree Anderson suggested differentiating between things that work for individual places and Auckland-wide themes.  The vision should be discriminatory, but founded on realistic priorities and not a vague wishlist.

I’m a technician, not a visionary.  So I go to observation and measurement as my starting point.  Let’s first map where people live and where they work, socialise, and play today.  What’s here now will dominate Auckland’s activity patterns over the next thirty years.  And what people are doing today should provide some guidance as to land use needs tomorrow. 

But we should also look hard at emerging values and behaviours. We should think about inter-generational change in needs, tastes, and attitudes. We need to look and listen to diverse views to expand insights about the future and avoid extrapolating the limits implicit in our own knowledge.

We will find that distinctive communities and settlements are already being carved out within Auckland.  The spatial plan may have to provide for an emergent localism, and avoid submerging community character with a preoccupation with densities rather than people and places.

The emergence of distinct communities raises interesting land use possibilities in terms of encouraging – and allowing – people to meet future needs in a series of urban and ex-urban villages each with its own character. 

Acknowledging the limits to our knowledge of the future

Of course, we also have to explore options for accommodating population and employment growth.  Any detailed forecast of either is bound to be wrong. That has been the recent experience. Instead, projections should be undertaken to ensure that we maintain options, rather than to fool us into closing options down because we think we know now all there is to know about the future.

Better to stick with principles and leave choices to be made by future decision-makers rather than to anticipate particular outcomes built on current behaviours and knowledge.

So where will we develop?

There is a contrast between centralised and decentralised settlement, and the current thinking presumes that the former will – or should – prevail over the latter.  But perhaps we should avoid policies that promote one over the other. We have been slow in Auckland to acknowledge the reality and challenge of simultaneous concentration and decentralisation.  We need to cater for both.

Decentralised development need not depend on expanding the urban edge, though, the option implicitly favoured by present policies.   It might occur instead through the growth of distinctive centres along major transport corridors within and beyond the current Metropolitan Urban Limit. 

The spatial plan cannot necessarily pick where ex-urban centres will be or how they will evolve over the next thirty years. It might try to signal some of the more obvious candidates – Pokeno and Drury in the south perhaps, Warkworth and Wellsford in the north, Waimauku in the west and Beachlands in the east.  Beyond that, it can simply set out the conditions under which new, efficient, and attractive settlements might emerge and be linked.  Fortunately, Auckland’s new governance structure has increased settlement options within what has become a large unitary authority.

The role of the spatial plan, then, might be to set out the conditions under which different land uses might proceed, rather than to say what can or should happen, and where. 

What sort of plan? The physical framework

Bottom lines, urban villages, outlying centres, lifeline infrastructure, and land use principles can be tied together in the spatial plan, not as an exhaustive overlay of zones but as a framework around which the city can evolve.  The plan might provide for a string of centres across a strong linear transport network, a range of villages within the existing urban fabric, separated by leafy suburbs and parks, an iconic CBD as the meeting place of Auckland’s peoples and cultures, and harbourside, and the infrastructure needed to support these diverse places.  

The keys, though, will be the linkages between functional centres, not the boundaries between zones, and the principles which might be observed in the interstices rather than rules stitched into a map.  The plan should almost certainly identify those special bits of Auckland where we are prepared to meet the cost of avoiding change.  Equally, though, it should highlight the extensive areas that remain from which the changing needs of a city of growing communities might be met in the future.  

The plan can be flexible rather than exhaustive, at least in the first instance, indicative rather than definitive, informed by principles rather than prejudice, and transparent in terms of where the costs and benefits of its elements fall.

It should leave the detail open, subject to continuing development in light of the circumstances, preferences, the means, and the views of the day.   

Opting for simplicity and structure in the spatial plan might well provide the best way for the council can meet its 2012 deadline.  And keeping the plan general but informed might be just enough to satisfy diverse interests and expectations without making commitments that prove problematic down the track.

The ins and outs of spatial planning - options for Auckland

If coming up with a single spatial plan to provide harmoniously and comprehensively for regional land use and infrastructure was easy, it would have been done already.  The 1999 Auckland Regional Growth Strategy was a start.  Unfortunately it generated a lot of friction between regional and local councils as it was transformed from a “work in progress”, reflecting the uncertainty felt by its original authors (a forum of trans-Auckland councillors), into a blueprint with which to strait jacket the region and stifle local initiative.

The region’s councils had another go at cooperation after "the One Plan for Auckland" was recommended by the Metropolitan Auckland Project in 2006.  They started by agreeing on priorities and projects, this time aiming for the big plan to evolve out of manageable steps .

The Auckland Transition Agency, however, has decided that a single spatial plan, incorporating all the elements of a regional strategy and district plans, can be delivered in a single hit.  This is to be done quickly, to inform the new single city’s 2012 Long Term Council Community Plan.  However, given the widespread expectation that the single plan will produce peace, harmony, and order as Auckland moves ahead, this timetable may be just a little optimistic. 

Quite apart from the prospect that expectations for a single spatial plan may be overblown, there are some thorny issues that need addressing, if not resolving, before a credible plan can be prepared.  We raise two of them here.

(1) What will happen to the Metropolitan Urban Limits?

These have been seen as a source of salvation, containing the city and saving the countryside; or as a source of ruin, driving up land prices and driving down affordability and investment.  For better or worse, this is a tool that has a major, formative impact on Auckland's urban form.

So what do we do with the metropolitan urban limits now?  Do we expand them to reflect the expansive nature of our new city?  Or tighten them up in the iron grip of a single council, leaving the bulk of the city's new territory rural?  Or, do simply extend them here and there as demand, expediency, and circumstances dictate?  

Here’s an idea.  What if the edges of the city were actually designed by reference to the physical geography of the region, its cultures, heritage and prospects?  Or even by thinking about how to provide for what people like about living in Auckland, including easy access to countryside and coast?

Auckland is a long, narrow region.  Much of it is peninsula indented with estuaries and creeks, cut off by ranges and coastlines.  This provides constraints and opportunities.  In response to our geography, to the constrained nature of the CBD and the isthmus, and perhaps to past infrastructure failures , business and households have already decentralised to more amenable and affordable surroundings . 

Perhaps this is a clue as to how we might ensure a sustainable, resilient, and attractive city, one which appeals to residents as well as planners.  Maybe Auckland’s future lies to the north and south, rather than concertinaed in the middle. 

Let's think seriously about the alternatives.

It could, for example, be based on a string of stand-alone settlements connected to a strong arterial corridor formed by highway and railway.  Such settlements could have a definitive  rural edges if that’s what their residents want, and busy, human-scale centres.  Wellsford, Warkworth, Orewa, Dairy Flat, Riverhead, Coatesville, Helensville, and Waimauku in the north and west are all potential candidates.  So are Drury, Takanini, Tuakau, Pokeno and probably more in the south.  

Rather than stacking apartments along corridors and around centres designed for smaller numbers and a different age, we could use imaginative design to populate interconnected towns of perhaps 20,000 residents each in the hinterland, and a few more in rural villages. 

Urban villages can play a strong part, too.  They would sit within the metropolitan area, each with its own distinct centre, with local services and employment close to where people want to live, improved local walkways and public space, and efficient corridors connecting them.

Much of the framework for a polycentric future already exists in current infrastructure, commercial centres, community networks, employment, and residents' preferences.  We simply have to decide whether we want to strengthen it or submerge it. 

Strengthening would mean highlighting the separation of places so that throughout and beyond the metropolitan area we can move between character-filled and distinctive neighbourhoods which offer a high degree of local amenity and self-sufficiency for their residents.  Green spaces could become a feature of our landscape, rather than simply defaulting to urban areas in waiting and the planting of ever diminishing back yards and city parks.

Submerging would mean filling the gaps in our present pattern until we simply share one big homogeneous built-up area, knowing where we are by referring to public transport maps.

Either way, a a polycentric future has not featured among the options for Auckland's spatial planning in the past.  Whether this is better for the environment, the economy, or the community, and in what format, is yet to be tested.  But these options involve quite different ways of living and justify rigorous comparison before any one is elevated over the others.

As another alternative, we could revisit some of the ideas of an earlier generation of planners, more concerned with form than density.  They looked at the prospects for entirely new cities, one possibly to the southeast and another to the northwest. 

This may provide a real opportunity for applying ideas related to new urbanism, so much easier achieved in greenfields than through retrofitting.  Smaller cities lend themselves to greater efficiency and movement and foster local self-sufficiency.  In Auckland they could be designed with a sensitivity towards stunning local environments.  They have the capacity to create a greater sense of community than simply stacking apartments and offices around suburban and town centres across an urban canvas engineered for another era. 

Those old centres remain important, but refurbishment and redevelopment -- place making -- may best be achieved without the pressure to trample heritage by transforming them into continuous mini-metropolises.

In Sydney today yet another alternative is being floated: the possibility of encouraging future populations to move into the secondary cities, something that has already happened for a growing number of former Aucklanders heading for provincial centres. 

Sea and tree change is not simply an indulgence of the retired, it is becoming a real option across the board, with benefits to the households moving while easing the pressure – just a little so far – on the metropolitan areas they leave behind.  If we are really serious about thinking through the options, our spatial plan may have to deal the surrounding regions into play.

(2) What about the Central Business District?

What of our oldest and biggest centre, the CBD?  This is a bit of a puzzle.  The CBD has become the focus of attention, the assumed centre of the spatial plan.  It is certainly the centrepiece for visitors and business.  But is it the centre of Auckland life, or Aucklanders' lives, when the region is already decentralising?   

Take transport planning, for example.  Plans for public transport in particular continue to focus on getting people in and out of the CBD at peak work hours.  Yet how important is the CBD commercially?  It’s certainly not where most Aucklanders work, 81,200 out of a regional total of 621,000 in 2009.  This was 13.1% of the total, compared with 13.8% in 2000 (see diagram).  The equivalent figures in 2009 were 32% in Wellington and 18% in Christchurch.

Employment in the Auckland CBD, 2000-2009

In any case, the role of the CBD is changing.  It remains important in a number of key areas.  It still houses a quarter of the region’s hospitality employment and 7.5% of its retailing.  Both shares are falling, though.  Traditional strongholds such as financial and professional services have weakened.  Education has held its own thanks to a strong tertiary sector, and employment in arts and recreation has grown relative to the rest of the region.  But, clearly, the Auckland CBD is not the dominant job centre that it once was. 

And why should it be?  A strong metropolitan area needs to be built on strong communities and successful business.  In Auckland communities are diverse and dispersed, and clustered around a series of secondary centres.  It is in these urban hearths that different groups meet their day-to-day and week-to-week needs.  The CBD for them is only for occasional visits. 

Of course the CBD remains important as a visitor destination, as the symbolic centre of the region, and, in  Auckland’s case, the core of tertiary education.  A downtown port also reflects its historical legacy as an industrial centre, otherwise long gone.

But, how far should we continue to focus on an area which is potentially one of the least resilient parts of the city, with congested and aging infrastructure, and perhaps -- reclaimed from a swamp on the harbour edge -- may be most vulnerable to natural disasters? 

In thinking about a new city, the Royal Commission promoted the link between the CBD and the waterfront as a centrepiece of its ideas about Auckland's layout.  This emphasis has been carried through into the structure of the new council.  It is also where the government is playing its own hand most obviously with the new Waterfront Development Agency including central government representatives.

But, it is not where the majority of Aucklanders live, work and play.  For them, Auckland is about the surrounding suburbs, centres, and amenities.  This reality raises a whole lot more questions about Auckland's internal form than allowed under the current emphasis on the centrality of the CBD to key planning. 

It seems important that whatever urban form prevails and in whatever direction the city develops – and whatever future state is promoted in the spatial plan -- as much or more commitment is made to the secondary city centres, to suburban and town centres, to the villages and townships of metropolitan Auckland as to the CBD.

So what does this mean for a spatial plan?
In the final analysis, Auckland's future form is largely determined by what is here now.  But how we provide for the next decade or two will have a big impact on the quality of life.  And the choices and their consequences are not to be taken lightly. 

Harmony may not be achievable and conflict inevitable.  Despite this, we owe it to ourselves and future Aucklanders to make sure that all the options are given due and realistic consideration.  Past -- and current -- prejudices may not be our best guide to where we go from here.