In what sense a region? Drawing a line around economic development

Unleashing the spatial plan

Auckland’s Spatial Plan is intended to help shape the city/region’s future development.  The council has just-released a Discussion Document to engage the community in its preparation. 

It’s an ambitious document that goes well beyond discussing just land use and infrastructure.  The Auckland Plan is proposed as a blueprint to transform the region into “the world’s most liveable city” and “the economic powerhouse of the nation”.

This focus raises questions of just where the city’s economic borders begin and end.  In what sense is Auckland City with its sprawling borders a discrete economic unit?

Inclusiveness – where do the neighbours fit in?

Among many other things, the discussion document acknowledges that “Auckland is also part of an emerging northern North Island urban and economic system – a cluster of cities and towns north of Taupo (Hamilton, Tauranga and Whangarei)”. 

This, it says, calls for “a strong planning and policy relationship” with adjoining regions and ”an inter-regional agreement for the upper North Island ... to cover land use, planning, infrastructure and a range of other issues”(p21) and that it is “essential to develop inter-regional transport links to support the burgeoning Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty urban and economic systems” (p48),.  It also notes Auckland’s dependence for some services and resources on the Waikato region.

But that’s about all it says about these key relationships in its 220 pages.  

At a seminar of the Institute of Public Administration this week, Hamilton Mayor Julie Hardaker said that this was not enough.  She pointed out the economic significance of her region, the Waikato, as the heart of New Zealand’s dominant dairy export sector for example.

Mayor Hardaker also reminded us that what happens to Auckland’s land use influences what happens in other cities in the Northern North Island. 

Hamilton, for example, has had rapid investment in light industry, warehousing, and distribution around its northern gateway over the past 10 to 15 years.  This is a cost effective location for accessing a wide market, including Auckland.  The resulting investment in Hamilton has been boosted by a shortage of reasonably priced industrial land in Auckland. 

In a similar vein, Tauranga and Whangarei both receive significant population contributions by way of migration from Auckland (as detailed in Margins Matter, p18).

Auckland as a regional centre

The notion of inter-regional integration is not new.  Auckland’s original growth was driven by the output of its resource-rich hinterland.  It also came to enjoy prosperity as an import substitution centre through much of the last century. That role has almost disappeared today. 

More recently Auckland has prospered as a centre of consumption. Nevertheless, the city continues to depend for much of its income on that hinterland, and on providing services to trade and business in the northern North Island.

Much of the value added in the processing of primary output from this “region of regions”, especially food products, happens in Auckland.  The city is also the hub of many financial, business, and technical activities that service the resource-based industries of the northern North Island. 

Even the much vaunted “marine industries” value added cluster associated with Auckland reaches deep into the neighbouring regions with their skills and marine infrastructure. 

Four into one might just go

Equally important is the cumulative economic capacity, infrastructure, and resource base of this extended region, a region which we have argued for some time may be the best level at which to plan for regional economic development in a globalising world (see, for example, our report to the Metropolitan Auckland Project in 2006). 

Taken as a whole, the northern North Island has substantial fertile grasslands, horticulture and arable land, forestry, and associated processing industries.  It has a wide range of mineral deposits.  It has good energy resources with high levels of current and potential renewable energy.  Its marine resources are extensive.  It has specialist concentrations in research, scientific expertise, and education that when considered jointly are of international substance and offer the potential to substantially lift the value of New Zealand’s exports and expertise.

The fortunes of the ports of the northern North Island -- Auckland, Tauranga, and Whangarei -- are connected by ownership links and by a degree of complementarity in their respective trades.  As internal transport costs increase and as shipping companies rationalise international movements the regions’ (and country’s) interests might be best served by more collaboration among them.

And this might be the catch cry for relationships among the councils of the region: more collaboration.  Because if we really believe the rhetoric about globalisation and world cities, New Zealand will only succeed if it digs deep into what are ultimately finite physical, human, and capital resources.  Administrative boundaries should not define or constrain the definition of a region within which we identify how public policy and investment might best support economic development. 

Decentralisation is happening

Sure, Auckland remains dominant in the area, as it is in New Zealand, and it will remain so.  It accounted for around two thirds of its jobs in 2010, and 60% of job growth over the past decade. 

However, the 6% difference between these two numbers hints at a degree of decentralisation.  This is confirmed in relative gains (or losses) in employment between 2000 and 2010. The three other regions had better growth rates than Auckland.  The best performing urban areas within the northern North Island were Tauranga, Hamilton, and the urbanised area of South Auckland (Manukau and Papakura).

	All Employment		Manufacturing
	Number	%	Number	%
Auckland Region	92,590	18%	-10,500	-13%
Auckland City	30,350	11%	-8,160	-24%
Manukau City & Papakura District	31,380	29%	180	1%
Waitakere & North Shore Cities	23,330	22%	-2,230	-13%
Rest of Auckland	7530	25%	-290	-6%
Northland	10,170	24%	170	3%
Whangarei	5,910	25%	210	0
Rest of Northland	4,260	22%	-40	0
Waikato	29,130	22%	100	1%
Hamilton	16,560	29%	-100	-1%
Rest of Waikato	12,570	17%	200	2%
Bay of Plenty	5,480	22%	-800	-6%
Tauranga	12,970	37%	140	3%
Rotorua	2,110	8%	-420	-12%
Rest of Bay of Plenty	5,480	22%	-520	-12%
Northern North Island	152,450	20%	-11,030	-9%
Northern North Island Excluding Auckland	59,860	23%	-530	-1%

Source: Business Statistics, Statistics New Zealand

And as manufacturing slipped into the negative under the pressure of cheap imports and then global recession, Auckland led the way down.  The figures in the table include the negative impact of the post 2007 recession: until 2007 manufacturing was growing everywhere but Auckland City, led by the Waikato with 16% growth as Auckland Region stopped growing.

Working together

If it wants to tackle economic matters, Auckland can ill-afford an inward focus.  If it wants to micro-manage land use, it may also pay to look hard at the opportunities that the wider region offers.  And if liveablity is how we define Auckland’s place in the world, it cannot afford to exclude from the portfolio the qualities of the smaller centres, their rural settings, mountains, and coastal hinterlands.

By avoiding being locked into an administrative construct with only limited relationship with what drives Auckland’s growth the Mayor can play a leadership role in economic development that can make a difference.  But it’s time to lead the city beyond “better because we are bigger” and reflect on what it really means to be connected in today’s world, starting at home. 

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Dushko's banana - here is the image rferred to in the comments below:

Desperately Seeking Submissions

The clock is running

Auckland Council issued a discussion document yesterday seeking public input into the Auckland Plan.  It sets out “ideas and initial proposals” and a series of questions.  It asks for responses by the end of May.  There will also be consultation after the plan is drafted in June. 

I’m not going to say anything about the merits of the ideas in the Document – but you might care to look at the New Zealand Herald’s initial take on it here. But I do have some thoughts on the nature of engagement with the people for whom the plan is being prepared.  Seeking submissions in response to a discussion document follows a familiar but not especially encouraging path.

Getting the public to endorse our plans

Growth management strategies are intended to promote the quality of life.  They are justified on the grounds of enhancing liveablity and strengthening communities.  Such high-sounding outcomes sit among other laudable objectives: reducing vehicle emissions and fuel consumption, improving housing affordability, increasing opportunities for walking and cycling, promoting public health, improving urban efficiency, and protecting agricultural land.

It’s hard to disagree with such outcomes.  It must be comforting for the public to read that they are all there for the taking if people will embrace policies aimed at increasing urban densities.

After all, what citizens would endorse a plan that included among its outcomes higher costs for overloaded infrastructure?  Or a lower quality of life, increased congestion, and concentrated pollution?  Or reduced mobility and congestion making it harder to get to work; or urban form that increases the prevalence of heart attacks or diabetes?

In other words, the authors of discussion documents almost inevitably contain the debate and shape its outcomes with the options and questions they present.  So when the document indicates that, say, Option B – usually the compact one –will deliver the goodies, why not just tick the box and be done with it?

The Preference Paradox

But then, why don’t all those people who ticked it go and live in smaller dwellings, closer together, and walk or catch the bus to the shops, the movies, or work if that’s what Option B is all about?  Unfortunately, while the majority might say “Yes, that’s how it should be done” only a minority translate that into their personal behaviour.

Of course, that’s a bit on an over-simplification.  Whether the favoured growth management tools of the last twenty years  – which are usually about making the city more compact – can deliver on the outcomes claimed for them is a moot point, not one I am going to go into here. 

However, there is an interesting paradox at work which frustrates those planning outcomes: what people say is not necessarily reflected in what they do[1].  And as long as people resist the rules that they seemed to support in submissions, then those rules will not even be tested.

NIMBYism is the reality

So what is it that goes wrong?  Well, we shouldn’t be surprised by a tendency to behave in ways which prioritises personal or family benefits over collective community benefits.  We are also familiar with NIMBYism – resistance to change in one’s own backyard, change which we are nevertheless happy to see others wear.  Or perhaps people tick the box in expectation that the better public transport Option B promises means that with more people taking the train they will be able to drive to work quicker.

Why don’t planners take the reality of apparently contradictory behaviours into account when they write plans or draft options?  Or why not plan for real behaviour?  Or find ways to encourage the adoption of more “socially responsible” behaviour?  Pricing comes to mind as an option, along with education. 

(To be fair, planners and policy makers do promote education as one of the tools in the toolbox, but usually adopted somewhat half-heartedly and almost always after regulation).

Are planners disengaged?

The answer may be that planners are just not very good at identifying with the community.  Planning is intrinsically patronising.  As planners, we favour prescription based on principles that are no more than abstractions or feel-good statements in the minds of the people we address them to. 

Engaging with the public in planning is frequently too structured and calculated to offer true insight into how communities work, their spontaneity, emotionalism, irrationality, inconsistency, diversity.  This shows in discussion documents which encapsulate and simplify planners’ views of how the world should work.  That’s not surprising; by definition planners premeditate, calculate, extrapolate, and prescribe.  We seek generalisations to make sense of disorder.  We dismiss the outliers and focus on the averages.  We try to reduce the chaos and dismiss the exceptions. 

That’s not to knock what planners try to do.  It is important to see and respond to patterns, distill movements , and paint the big picture.  But let’s not be surprised when the formulaic plans, the orderly maps, and the rational rules that we impose on our disorderly society don’t produce the results we hoped for.  When we get down to implementing our plans, we better have listened very carefully to what people are saying and not just to how they react to what we say.

Just occasionally we may have to think like the communities we work for; decide when to accept apparent disorder and when some bottom lines are needed; when can we allow for individualism and diversity and when collective needs (including environmental needs) should prevail.

Seeking submissions: the end point of engaging the community

This is all a long-winded way of saying that seeking submissions on options is a highly constrained if not distorted way of engaging with the community on development matters.  It will not reveal people’s preferences.  It is no basis for understanding behaviour.  And it will not tell us how people, households, and businesses will respond to our plans.

Submission-based engagement constrains dialogue, limits public input, and stifles creativity.  It plays to the articulate, active, and informed.  Responses are self-selecting, often self-serving, and unrepresentative. 

At the very best, submissions can be used to check that our draft plans reflect what the community has already said it wants or could live with.  But first those questions have to be asked.  People need to be listened to before they are quizzed.  And seeking open-ended information from communities requires entirely different methods of engagement from submission-seeking if planners (and the politicians who employ them) are going to win the trust and occasionally the compliance of the communities they serve.  

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[1]               Of course, that goes for the planners and policy-makers, too, many of whom live on or beyond the city edge (or enjoy coastal second homes) while prescribing intensification for the average citizen.

Here we go again ...

Too many committees?

Former Auckland City Councillor Aaron Bhatnagar complained in the New Zealand Herald today (23 March 2011) about the proliferation of committees in the new Auckland Council.  He said that this was slowing down decision-making.  This is quite the opposite of what was meant to happen when our eight councils were rolled into one super city.  And none of it is necessarily empowering local communities.

Sure, Mr Bhatnagar had a political point to make, blaming the Mayor and his use of the newly boosted mayoral executive powers for the proliferation of committees.  But it may just be that a city this large, with many issues and diverse communities, cannot easily carve its way through a morass of complicated decisions that impact differently on different communities and interests. Large cities elsewhere usually have state jurisdictions to share some of the responsibilities, or else very large, semi-autonomous departments (and that creates its own set of problems, which we might address another time).

Auckland did have a way of working before which, apart from disagreement between regional and local politicians about how different areas might develop and some natural rivalry among areas, worked pretty well.  After all, the city was seen by the Mercer survey as one of the most liveable in the world and, despite a lagging economy it remains the first port of call for a burgeoning New Zealand migrant community.

But this proliferation of committees is just what I expected from a misdirected view that bigger is better in local governance.  What Mr Bhatnagar didn’t mention is the load that committees place on managers and staff in a bureaucracy.  So much for carving out middle management.  The logic of bureaucracy is that equity and even handedness demand internal checks and balances.  Communications among the parts is critical to consistency.  Unfortunately, and inevitably, the bigger the bureaucracy, the more internal arrangements come to dominate its behaviour and the less resources it can devote to working with external constituents. 

And when complexity means councils cannot make the hard decisions, or simply makes silly ones, then government takes over by default.  (Of course, there is no guarantee that will lead to better decisions - the remoteness from communities of centralised bureaucracies might have just the opposite effect). 

That’s why the Auckland council had better take seriously the government’s latest foray into its patch by way of its expectations for Auckland’s spatial plan and look carefully at the quality of its own decisions

Another day, another road show

But there’s more.  When councils cannot see the wood for the trees, what better to do than ask the Foreign Expert for the solution or run another summit?  Or both.  So today we have another talk summit aimed at boosting the Auckland economy by kick-starting the Auckland Plan.  It is to be addressed by the Prime Minister as well as the Mayor, just in case Aucklanders forget that the city’s ultimate design rests with central government. Its also got the usual smattering of international experts, including Mr Greg “One Plan” Clark from London.  

Less Talk, More Action?

Elsewhere in today’s Herald columnist Fran O’Sullivan calls for a stop to the talking up and instead to get down to the economic fundamentals.  She asks how we might attract offshore investors, how we can make more out of our visitors (especially for the Rugby World Cup – another silver bullet?), and how we will fund and deliver our infrastructure (and by implication, reduce our dependence on central government).  She raises a string of the other well-aired challenges - clusters, creative industries, centres of excellence, the regulatory and entrepreneurial environment. 

Perhaps the summit will deliver on all this stuff or, as she suggests, at least “pull the major stakeholders together ... another step forward in Auckland’s success”, but having seen a few too many summits in the past, I doubt it.

Making sound decisions

I think the time is over for talking up or talking down.  What Auckland needs is a few firmly founded decisions on what we need and can afford by way of infrastructure, how it might be funded and delivered, what plans and policies we really need in today’s over-regulated environment; in short, how we might just get back to the basics of an affordable, well-connected, and progressive city, one that that is easy to live in and easy to invest in. 

If decisions are well-founded – and that means being economically justified, realistically priced, and acceptable to the wider community  – it should not take round after round of committee meetings and summits to progress them. 

Keep it Fuzzy

If Auckland wants to take control of its own destiny, it should not waste too much time on the detail of the spatial plan.  Sure, sketch a possible map of the future but keep the boundaries fuzzy because we really don’t know what the future will bring.  Sure, decide on what the environmental and social bottom lines are – what we definitely don’t want by way of development, and where – and set a few standards to protect and promote our physical and social environments.  (After all, that’s what the Resource Management Act promotes).  These things should help our decision-making, and where decisions are strongly contested or not definitive, well, we have processes for working those things through, too.  Better to do so than ignore real conflict, or confusion of means and ends, or accept ambiguous (or unexpected) outcomes just to be seeing as doing Something Big.

But no straitjackets, please.  Just a series of well informed, decisions in which the benefits clearly outweigh the costs.  Where we don’t know, maybe its best not to take a decision at all until we do.  Let’s rely less on rhetoric and catchphrases (and imitating overseas precedents) to deal with complexity, and concentrate on the realities of the here and now, on what we can realistically achieve. 

New Zealand’s Changing Settlement Pattern

Redrawing the population map
The Christchurch earthquakes not only raise questions about the design of our cities.  They also remind me of some wider questions about New Zealand’s settlement dynamics.

In 2008 I examined Census data from 1986 to 2006 which suggested that there was a change going on in New Zealand’s population geography.  Among other things:

... expectations founded on “the drift north”, slow growth in the south, structural disadvantages facing Wellington, rural depopulation, and the primacy of Auckland have had their day.   

In particular,

 “the resurgence of the second tier and provincial cities, the revitalisation of the rural periphery around the major urban areas, and the burgeoning of lifestyle settlements, both in the shadow of the metropolitan areas and beyond, are new facets of New Zealand’s population geography. ...

And

“this movement is likely to boost small towns and secondary cities ... rural areas and coastal settlements.  It will be sustained by increasingly dispersed employment, supporting a combination of new investment in rural areas, in consumer production and services in non-urban areas, by businesses seeking the lower costs and increased employment stability associated with smaller centres and lifestyle localities, and new investment in the primary sector”.

While these changes are unlikely to fundamentally change Auckland’s primacy they will have a significant impact on our secondary centres, our townships, and rural settlements.  They are consistent with what is happening in other developed nations as they too move beyond the limitations of industry-driven growth focused on large urban centres.

Update 2010 – what areas are growing?
It seems timely to see what has happened since 2006.  Statistics New Zealand has published June population and February employment estimates for New Zealand’s local authorities through to 2010.  Let’s look at what they tell us. 

First, I ranked areas according to population growth rate over the four years.  Figure 1 plots the 25 fastest growing areas.  The squares (and redline) show rates of growth (the right hand axis).  The blue bars show the population gained (the left hand axis).

Auckland continues to dominate, although even here change is evident.  Auckland accounted for over three quarters of New Zealand's growth between 1996 and 2001.  But since then it has dropped to under 50%.  This is still a dominant share, but its fall reflects growing numbers of Auckland residents moving to other parts of New Zealand.

Figure 1: 25 Fastest Population Growth Rates, Local Council Areas 2006-2010

The most interesting things to emerge from this update, though, are the more rapid growth of South Island localities, the resurgence of some of the secondary centres previously battered by rural restructuring, and the rapid rates of growth on the urban periphery (Waimakariri and Selwyn near Christchurch, Kapiti Coast near Wellington, and, not shown, Rodney and Franklin in Auckland). 

In the North Island growth in the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato regions continues to lead the way, although as noted in the Bay of Plenty Times recently this has been threatened in Tauranga by high housing costs, leading to a potential rethink of the Smart Growth Strategy there. Hopefully Hamilton will heed this warning before it too plunges down the path of rationing land and thereby lifting the price of living and doing business there.

Employment Growth
Repeating the exercise for employment reveals even more interesting trends which could reinforce emerging shifts in New Zealand’s population map.  First, the recession hit Auckland hard, with the city-region failing to record any net gain in jobs in 2010 compared with 2006.  The North Shore and Manukau recorded growth – although both under 2% – while the old Auckland City dropped around 7,070 jobs (-2.3%), reminding us of the fallacy of relying on agglomeration as the panacea for tardy economic performance.  (This was discussed in more detail in my posting of 3 December 2010).

  Figure 2: Fastest Employment Growth Rates, Local Council Areas 2006-2010

Of the major cities only Wellington features among the fastest growing areas, and its gains were driven almost entirely by the expansion of the public sector, something hardly likely to persist.  Like Auckland, Hamilton, Dunedin and Christchurch took significant knocks to employment.

New Plymouth performed well on the back of boosts to farming and energy development, and gains in manufacturing.  Other secondary centres like Nelson, Palmerston North, Napier and Hastings, although not in the top 25, at least managed some growth.

Again, though, the performance of rural areas, the South Island, and small towns stands out. 

Overall, there is not a lot of obvious alignment between where jobs expanded and population grew. I suspect that we will see more significant shifts in New Zealand’s population map.

To confront or accept change?
The changing map of population and employment reminds us of our dependence on the rural economy generally, and indicates the growing attractiveness of secondary cities, small towns, and the urban edge.  Restrictive land use policies in our main urban centres of growth may be beginning to bite, so that people – and businesses – are moving out.  Not en masse, but enough to make a difference, especially to the areas they move to, and perhaps lowering the long term growth prospects of the metropolitan centres. 

(Another interpretation is that the changes simply reflect people’s preferences, or that they still follow job opportunities.  Whatever the cause, If this movement becomes stronger we won’t need policies to contain our cities for much longer!)

The events in Christchurch will shake this picture up further.  We can expect continuing dispersal of population one way or the other, to small towns, provincial cities, and beyond. 

On a positive note the trend to small centres could offer a potentially new and reinvigorated future for New Zealand focused on the natural qualities of the country and the intimacy, community, and creativity of small places, while allowing our larger cities to mature without the pressure of unrelenting growth. 

It may be time for the planners to think more about how we might cope with a new pattern of settlement rather than desperately trying to reinforce the old one.  It no longer makes sense to project the past into the future, and applying planning policies developed in the 1980s to the challenges of the 2020s.

Renewing planning in the aftermath of Christchurch

Planning and civic renewal

In my last blog I suggested that in the steps of Kobe the renewal of Christchurch should see the strengthening and practical expression of civic spirit.  No doubt that is easier said than done, but building on the identity that is Christchurch leans more today on the character of its people than the shape of its buildings.  The citizens of Christchurch need to play a prominent role in reshaping their city.

But for them to do so requires a range of options to be considered. 

I note the initiative being taken already by some the city’s leading architects, urban designers, and engineers to begin work on urban design principles and long-term scenarios that might underpin the renewal of Christchurch. Hopefully, they will draw in the development sector, too, and draw deeply on their knowledge of local communities.  Such an initiative contributes to our hope that civil society will line up with central and local government to play its full part in the city's recovery.

A decentralised city?

I would like to throw one idea into the mix to be considered, that of a decentralised city.  I am not sure quite what shape this might take, but know that it would be a city held together by identity and civic spirit rather than relying on the contiguity and ever increasing density that seems to inform modern planning lore.

A decentralised city might be one with a number of nodes, sensibly sited, well-connected by wide, multi-modal, corridors that can accommodate a range of activities and transport options.  Each centre in a city of centres would have its own sustaining civic hub of commerce and community.  

A decentralised city can build on the existing frame of centres, suburbs and settlements, and may see the emergence of new ones in the hinterland, defined perhaps by community and capacity, quality of landscape, and integrity of landform and geology. 

What might it mean for Christchurch?

In urbanism, big is not necessarily better.  The national and international response to the tragedy of Christchurch demonstrates that its being well-connected that is essential.  Centralised is not necessary for efficiency, and as communications technology advances, decentralised is not necessarily counter-productive.

Indeed, the break-up and distribution of large business entities, many operating from small centres, is a growing international trend providing a further rationale for decentralisation.

A future for the centre

This is not to walk away from Christchurch’s city centre, a place with a rich past and a positive future, although how that will shape up is hard to know at the moment.  It is no longer simply a precinct of architecture in touch with the past in the way it has been, but it can be a living memorial to both the city’s pioneers and to the people who followed, a salute to Samaritans and survivors, symbolic of enterprise and spirit. 

The people of Christchurch may need to work out new ways of renewal at the centre, but its future need not be the hard-edged, high rise one of cities elsewhere.

Changing paradigms

Engineers and architects are bound to play important, innovative roles in the renewal of Christchurch, its infrastructure and built form.  In urban design and planning it may now be time to get over a fixation with boosting density, with filling the inner city with apartments, and with promoting the idea that the more employees we can cram into a square kilometre the better.  None of these things is particularly helpful in times of disruption.

And while the experts work through new infrastructure options for Christchurch and Canterbury, other places in New Zealand – our flood prone, shaky isles -- might also explore low rise options, and local solutions to utility services.  It may be timely to temper the quest for large, integrated land use and infrastructure plans and utility systems with options that provide a little more reassurance of something will survive in times of emergency. In New Zealand -- as elsewhere -- blind adherence to high rise as a means of managing resources might have had its day.

Maybe the new Christchurch will demonstrate resilience in more ways than one, finding green solutions for infrastructure, including package sewage plants, distributed water supplies, perhaps even supplementing the grid with electricity generated locally.  Building on its foundation of engineering, architecture, communications, and IT expertise, Christchurch could reassert itself as a pioneering community with a firm fix on the future.

Rethinking planning

Exploring decentralisation is just one planning option for rethinking Christchurch and exploring how to preserve its intrinsic qualities while providing for a secure, prosperous, but inevitably different future.  There are bound to be others.  They all need to be aired, debated, and tested in terms of costs, citizen’s preferences, and the resilience (and opportunities) they might offer in adverse times. 

Perhaps the future for Christchurch will emerge bit-by-bit from such a process, rather than as some blue print rolled out by planners over the existing cityscape.  Maybe we won’t even recognise what is planned until we look back on the next ten to twenty years of renewal and progress.

If nothing else, planning should now put the need for resilience ahead of the conceit that we can regulate for certainty when we look to the future of our cities.  It is time to move away from ever more restrictive rules intended to impose the planners’ preoccupation with rigidly fixing urban form to unstable landscapes and changing communities.

This is not our first natural disaster.  It won’t be our last.  But it must be heeded.  For the people who think that they can plan to eliminate uncertainty, whether it is for national infrastructure or a local apartment precinct, this is a wake-up call. In these times planning is a profession that must move beyond making rules for modernity and look to its own renewal or else, as the dust of Christchurch settles, resign itself to irrelevance.

Renewing Christchurch

Making sense of it from a distance

After tragedy, life is transformed.  Existing plans, hopes and expectations are unhinged.  With loss, especially untimely loss, comes an unmapped corner on the path through life, leading to a future that can only look bleak by comparison with what went before. 

But for all sorts of reasons – friends, family, the will to survive, perhaps only instinct – you move on even through deep grief and despair.  Slowly, and despite a natural belief that maybe life doesn’t make that much sense any more, you learn to live a new one.  Time doesn’t really heal and the idea of closure is simply an attempt – usually by others – to distance tragedy that won't ever go away.  But we can learn to live with a new and sorrow-tinged reality.

As it is with individuals, so it must be with communities. 

Christchurch has turned a corner that was never seen, never planned.  The press is talking recovery, but these early days are the days of individuals plumbing the depths and a community sharing the despair.

It might feel too early to think about the future in this awful present.  But keeping moving is how we survive the grief. 

Kobe 1995

My attention was recently drawn to the way in which Kobe was rebuilt after the disastrous Hanshin earthquake of 1995.  The scale of the Kobe quake was unimaginable, even by Christchurch standards.

Kobe 1995 – Some figures

6,400 people killed, 15,000 injured

400,000 buildings damaged, 100,000 collapsed completely

200,000 housing units were partially or completely destroyed

85% of schools, many hospitals, and other major public facilities sustained heavy damage.

Widespread damage to water, gas, and sewer system, rail, road, and port facilities

845,000 households lost gas service for as long as 2.5 months

Restoration of water and wastewater systems to nearly 1.27 million households took as long as 4 months in some places

2,000 small and medium sized businesses failed

1995 Kobe Earthquake 10-year Retrospective Risk Management Solutions

Being told about others’ experiences doesn’t make your own grief easier. But it does tell you that life goes on. And it can offer lessons on how that might happen.

For example, rebuilding is inevitably long and slow.  Rushing into renewal is not an option.  Putting together lifelines is a drawn out process.  A city less vulnerable will take research, analysis, and thinking through. 

So the early urgency lies in providing a quality of temporary shelter and restoring fundamental services that may need to provide for years rather than months.

It is appropriate for a strong lead – and funding – for this to come from the very top given the enormity of this disaster, for the Cabinet and the government to work closely with the civic leaders of Christchurch through this time of rescue and restoration.

Among other things, we may just have to rewrite last year's National Infrastructure Plan even before the ink is dry, demonstrating statecraft by a capacity to rethink the country’s spending priorities and to focus now on the billions that must be directed towards Christchurch.

A time for civic renewal

David Edgington drew lessons from Kobe in his recent book Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity (March 2010).  Among other things, planners were challenged by local citizens who felt vulnerable and disempowered following the earthquake. They had to win back community trust through local consultation especially among those facing the complete transformation of their neighbourhoods.

What disaster and recovery can do is meld communities, creating new relationships between the people and the governors.  Civil life comes to the fore, with strong, inclusive government action supported by widespread volunteerism.

It seems appropriate for civic leaders to take a lead in looking beyond recovery to renewal in Christchurch.  But it is equally important that the long-term is not contained – or constrained – in a rushed-out plan. Let’s hope that the earthquake is not seized on by planners as an opportunity for a super-sized urban development project. 

The people of Christchurch will need to be consulted widely, to play an active part in decisions about how their future will be reshaped and their communities renewed.  And that should happen bit by bit, project by project, street by street, suburb by suburb.

Whatever comes out of Christchurch's renewal, let us hope that like Kobe it is inspired by a stronger sense of community, and a heightened level of trust between councils, their constituents, and the development sector.

A cruel blow to a beautiful city

Christchurch is reeling after the latest earthquake.  Most of us can just look on with the sense of helplessness that distance brings.  To see the centre of a modern city, one of ours, so devastated, its people so vulnerable and suffering is numbing.

Today, tomorrow, and for some time to come the search for survivors and the cleanup will go on.  We will hear stories of miraculous survival, heroism, and tragic loss.

And then, as the city looks once more to recovery and rebuilding, we might look for the lessons to be learned. 

We cannot resist the power of earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami, and the like.  But we can perhaps limit the devastation that accompanies them.

The implosion of many of Christchurch’s beautiful heritage buildings is a tragedy on its own, the wiping from the landscape of much of the City’s and nation’s history.  But seeing the collapse of more modern buildings is sobering. 

What are the lessons of architecture and engineering that might be drawn from this?  How much resistance can we realistically build into our structures?  Or should we be thinking less rigidly, and explore designs that deflect or reduce the impacts when buildings are faced with irresistible forces?  Should we think more about the survival of the people in and around buildings and less about the survival of the structures?  Are there innovations in design that offer refuge, protection, and escape even if walls crumble and floors collapse?

And what can urban designers and planners take from this devastation?  What does it tell us about the importance of space in the central city, of wide boulevards, generous parks, and civic squares?  About the need for more space, not less.  The centre of Christchurch is still relatively open, and perhaps that has saved some lives.  It was possible to take refuge in the streets, the squares, and the parks. 

This event must surely erode planners’ resistance to the decentralisation that is the mark of a prosperous, modern city, that makes it that little bit more liveable, and so much more resilient in the face of disaster?  Perhaps we should be thankful that a diminishing share of Christchurch’s people actually works in the CBD – today just 26% of the total.  And that not too many dwellings – and residents -- had been crammed into retrofitted buildings or high rise apartments assembled in inner city precincts.

We might also need to rethink infrastructure and network utilities in vulnerable settings.  Do the economies of scale associated with large, integrated networks and single source headworks for water supply and wastewater treatment offer the resilience and recovery that dispersed or local plant might do?  Do we have the redundancy built into our energy networks that permit selective shut off and rapid recovery?  How vulnerable are our communication networks, and how easily overloaded?  Where are our fuel supplies?  Are they safe, accessible in an emergency?

Are we overloading old networks with new demands?  What are the costs of building resilience into infrastructure and what are the gains in terms of recovery and continuity of service in the face of destructive forces?

This has been and will be a life changing event for many people – life shattering in far too many cases.

 Out of tragedy people look for blame and for meaning to ease the grief.  We need to acknowledge the former and try to get past it in the interests of the recovery and healing that the city and its citizens must go through. 

But we owe it to the victims of the Christchurch earthquake to look hard, deep, and wide at how might we better shape our cities to cope with the unexpected and the unwanted.

Hey, city planners, there is no silver bullet

Encarta: Silver bullet – a magical solution to a problem

Malling Queen St

Interesting article in Monday’s NZ Herald by Brian Rudman.  Making Queen Street into a pedestrian friendly mall won’t fix the tired hick town look, he says.  I agree.  And, as he also says, we have just finished spending $43+ million giving it a makeover, of sorts.  What did that achieve?  Are visitor numbers up?  Have landlords spruced up their facades?  Are retailers reporting more sales?  It’s still a canyon, admittedly with some new pavers and trees. 

But really, the idea that we can resuscitate the Golden Mile and create a place for promenading or a 1.5 km boulevard for shopping - or perhaps even both – is a nonsense.  It’s out of touch.  That’s not how we do it nowadays.  We can promenade in parks or on the water’s edge.  And we can shop in malls or the town centres  and villages that are beginning to breathe again, where we can park our cars and get so much more bought in a single visit.

Anyway, the city is no longer just about shopping.  It’s about recreation and entertainment, culture and  people, meeting and eating, looking and being looked at, and maybe a little indulgent retail therapy here and there.

Shooting up Main Street

There is no silver bullet for fixing up Main Street, or for making a gee whiz central city around it (along it?).  It’s nice to have the hired guns ride in to tell us how they cleaned up the last town or two.  Let’s give them a respectful hearing. But they don’t live here, and we don’t live there.  We don’t need to swallow the Next Big Idea lock stock and barrel.

Queen Street is no longer the heart of Auckland, although it’s still an important artery.  It is no longer what defines us or the city, and hasn’t been for a long time now.  It’s had its day, although it still has a useful role to play.

Hot Spotting

What might really make a difference to Auckland are the distinctive bits, the real hot spots.  We have a burgeoning civic and cultural centre stretching from the Art Gallery, through the Library (yes) the Town Hall, to Aotea Square, the Civic Theatre, and the Edge.  We could work on tying that lot together a bit better and pumping new life into it.  Make it easier to traverse.  Some street art and signage perhaps.  More activity.  An artists’ display area.  An ethnic foods precinct.  An artisans’ corner.  Let the people in and go with their ideas so that the centre never sleeps.  After all, this is the heart of our multi-culture.

And Karangahape Rd; there’s a place of character with its own distinctive subculture.  Perhaps it would be more so if we had alternative to the slog up Queens St by connecting our cultural hearth at Aotea Square with our other half via Myers Park and St Kevin’s Arcade.

And Quay St, another place where people could spend a lot more time as we open up the waterfront.  Especially if we don’t ruin it by turning Queens Wharf into an Occasional Event Centre. We have to think a bit more about how to get people across from the Britomart Transport Terminal, though, and take a more expansive view of where the people’s waterfront might begin and end and what we might do to get more of them there more of the time.  

And then there’s the Viaduct Basin.  We seem to have built it to hide it (shame that).  Let’s exploit that now, and keep it that way – Auckland’s little downtown secret and big surprise, a seafarers’ (and party goers’) delight, tucked just around the corner.  A centre of global yachting, and a destination out on its own. 

And we might even end up with something decent in the Beaumont Quarter (if we can keep its character).  And we’ve got Ponsonby Rd, Kelly Tarltons, and Mission Bay.  So Auckland’s already got the hot spots, although presumably could do with more.  (I often think we need to create a place for our kids in the city; where could we do that, and how?  And I don’t just mean movie theatres and internet cafes.

Streets doing what streets are meant to do

All Queen St does is join some of these spots together.  And that’s okay, although maybe it could be done with more panache.

The message is – think in nodes and links.  Because as the hot spots get hotter, more people will wander up and down the old dame, and other streets, between them.  Slick landlords or retailers on the corridors between the hot spots will be doing what they can to capture the passers by – and that is what will jazz the streets up.  

Look at what happened to Willis St, Manners St and even the newly funky Chews Lane in Wellington when the notion of the Golden Mile was finally put to rest in the capital.  And Wellington has plenty of hot spots – the government centre, Lambton Harbour and Queens Wharf, Courtney Place, Cuba Mall – each a hub of attraction and activity, jointly leading to a nice job of sprucing up, if not transforming, the links between them.

Get the hot spots humming 

So if we want to make Auckland something distictive let’s put our planning and design– and public money, if we must – into the hot spots; build on our strengths, and let the links look after themselves.  We don’t have to do it all at once.  We don’t need a Master Plan -- or even a roaming gun for hire -- to tell us what to do.  A series of small projects, a nudge here and there, and a vision of the central city as a series of places rather than as a map might help.  Urban design might say something about our pasts, our presents, and our futures.  That means its good to improvise and build as we go.  Its not a magical solutoin, but it could be fun.

If it means reducing cars in key parts of the city, that’s fine, too.  Just do it subtly.  Longer pedestrian phases on intersections is an easy start.  More shuttle buses would help.  Reducing lanes, increasing parking charges.  There are plenty of ways without throwing our money at more bricks and mortar.

Auckland – a city of hot spots.  And hopefully, in due course, some quirky byways between them.

But don’t pretend that the big ideas, the big hits will deliver.  Marshall your ammunition – pick your targets carefully, and pick them off as time, money, and inspiration allow.  But forget the silver bullet.