Whilst I like to think of myself as a “public transport advocate”, in my ‘day job’ I’m a planner. This has influenced the angle to which I view transportation matters, and as I have explained before, has really determined many of my opinions on transport. But leaving aside transport for a moment, it’s also interesting to think about why I got into planning, and where I wish land-use planning could be different – in much the same way that I wish transportation policies and priorities could be different.

I remember when I have a job interview for my very first job as a planner I got asked the question “why do you want to be a planner?” Quite an interesting question, and the answer I had to it was fairly simple: “to try and make Auckland a better city”. Having grown up here and had a rather unhealthy interest in the structure of the city from a fairly early age, it had generally always fascinated me what parts of the city I liked, what parts I disliked, and so forth. Interestingly enough, after reading a variety of planning books, writing a rather long thesis on the topic and having a great number of discussions, my opinions have rather changed over time (I used to be quite a big fan of McMansions).

As my knowledge of Auckland, and of urban planning, has improved over the last few years, a rather large question has continued to pop up in my mind. I did talk  about it to quite a big extent in my thesis, and it also shows up in many good books on urban planning. The question is this: “why is it that the more effort we seem to put into planning for good urban outcomes, the results seem to be ever-worse urban outcomes?” This “paradox” can also be described as “why do we keep building crap?” When all our urban planning textbooks talk about creating vibrant, mixed-use, interesting and sustainable neighbourhoods, why is it that Auckland’s most recent subdivisions look like this?:

If one was to look at Auckland and try to work out the most ‘interesting’ suburbs, the most vibrant places, the areas where it seems like people want to be, they really do seem to be parts of the city that were built a long time ago. Interestingly enough, they generally seem to be parts of the city that were built before we started planning everything to the last detail, parts of the city built before the Resource Management Act or even before the Town and Country Planning Act (the legislation which preceded the RMA). In fact, if one was to appear rather uncharitable, it could be argued that all this planning has just made things worse.

And yet this is not for lack of trying. In fact, planners try incredibly hard to attempt to ensure that things don’t turn out badly (note this is different to trying to make things turn out well). I was recently peripherally involved in the final details of the Long Bay Structure Plan, on Auckland’s North Shore. This structure plan, which is basically a chapter of the District Plan, runs to well over 100 pages in length, and has an interim environment court decision that is 357 pages in length. Now clearly it’s too early to tell whether this structure plan will result in a development that is interesting, vibrant and so forth (as well as ensuring its adverse environmental effects are as minimal as possible), but on recent trends one would imagine it will end up being another soulless “anywhere-ville” like most of the rest of Auckland that has been built in the last 20-30 years (with the worst bit being that things seem to be getting worse, not better). But that’s not really the point. The point is that we genuinely do try really hard to come up with good outcomes, but for some reason we seem to fail abysmally over and over again.

I suppose an easy comeback to what I have been saying so far is “just because you don’t like what has been built recently, doesn’t mean that other people don’t like it”. And I guess that’s true to some extent – as obviously people buy houses in Flat Bush, Dannemora, Wattle Downs, Wainoni and all those other suburbs I just described as soulless. But my response to that argument would be that it’s not only me that’s saying this stuff – it’s mainstream planning literature, it’s seemingly what every planner around says, and so forth. Furthermore, it’s not like people have just started saying this stuff recently. Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is one of the most well-known and respected planning texts of the 20th century (published in 1961 originally) says this (talking about what planners have done to ‘improve’ cities):

…look at what we’ve built with the first several billion. Low-income projects that become worse centres of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centres that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centres that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering places than others. Commercial centres that are lackluster imitations of standardised suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Clearly there are some differences between 1960s USA and 2009 Auckland, but I find it fascinating that for nearly 50 years now it has been clear in the minds of planners that what we’re doing isn’t working. Fortunately Auckland has escaped the worst of the ‘urban-blight’ that has affected the inner parts of many American cities, but I think in other ways we have gone through something quite similar – the massive building of urban areas that haven’t really turned out to be particularly good neighbourhoods. And yet we still plan them. And yet we still build them. What’s going on?

In my thesis, I looked at this paradox in terms of an urban sprawl versus urban intensification debate. Auckland’s planners have been concerned about the city’s sprawl for many decades now, and since 1999’s Regional Growth Strategy have had a specific strategy to ‘work towards’ as an alternative to the sprawl development that has dominated Auckland’s growth over the years. And yet sprawl still happens, with the only thing holding it back being the Metropolitan Urban Limits, which themselves are probably greatly under threat because of the effect they have on house prices (unsurprisingly, if you cut back on the supply of land for housing, but don’t make it easy enough for people to intensify, house prices will go up as housing supply goes down). The reason for this paradox, I suggested, was a sort of “collective action problem” where sprawl was individually nice for each of us – the big house, the big garage and so forth – but collectively messed things up, through congestion, high servicing costs and the loss of countryside.

Perhaps that is somewhat the case. However, when driving around Flat Bush it is a little hard to believe that even individually what has been created is some sort of excellent outcome. In other words, it’s a bit hard to believe that people would enjoy living a million miles from anywhere with incredibly poor transport connections, not having a dairy or any other shop within a 20, let along 5, minute walk from home and having the only green space nearby being a stormwater pond. I mean really, is the picture below likely to be anyone’s ‘paradise’:

House prices tend to indicate that creating a ‘sense of community’ and being within walking distance of a range of amenities does count for something, with the higher prices in Auckland’s inner areas not just being the result of a shorter commute to work. So if people want to live in interesting, vibrant and varied suburbs with destinations within walking distance, if our planning strategies and plans also favour such outcomes, what’s going wrong here? Once again I return to the basic question – why are we continuing to build crap neighbourhoods?

I have a few more ideas myself about the answer(s) to this question, and they very much involve transportation matters. But I’m curious to hear what others think.

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27 comments

  1. It’s a cycle people can’t break out of. Everyone grew up with a big back yard, so everyone wants a big back yard. And if everyone has a big back yard then we are all living in almost rural suburban isolation.

    In NZ i thought it would be miserable to live somewhere with population density such that you are all living on top of each other and no one has a backyard.

    Having lived in london for a few years i now think it will be miserable when i move back to NZ and have no quality of life beyond my back yard and holidays away from the city. Not taking part in activities because it’s too difficult to get from one side of auckland to the other, stuck bumper to bumper for hours, no decent amenities near by etc etc.

    There’s a happy medium to be had, i have lived in london mostly in zone 2, and most places have had outside space, either a backyard or a roof terrace.

  2. Ironically, there is even pressure to open up the urban boundaries because it’s claimed there isn’t enough free land within Auckland’s urban limits for future population growth, a mind-booglingly stupid claim.

  3. One of the problems I see is that in the inner surnurbs which gennerally have better PT links and so are prime candidates for development there are mainly old villas etc. The locals don’t want these removed due to the character they give to the area which means intensification is limited. This leaves us in the situation that if we leave it as is it pushes development out to more rural areas and if we do remove them and develop we risk destroying the character and soul of area

  4. It’s plainly obvious from your photos that the proliferation of the automobile and its culture is the single most significant event to shape planning since world war II. Look at the wide canopy of pavement dedicated to motor vehicles and the prominence of garage’s dwarfing every home. You can barely find the front door. The percentage of space or design, dedicated to actual human scale or interaction is miniscule. Why would anyone want to walk, breathe or bicycle in any kind of sustainable activity in these areas when the design is so plainly dedicated to four-wheel fossil fuel consumers?

  5. “In the inner suburbs … there are mainly old villas etc. The locals don’t want these removed due to the character they give to the area which means intensification is limited.”

    I daresay the solution may be to allow the removal of villas on the main public transport corridors, still leaving most character villas intact in the neighbouring streets.

  6. dan carter – yes I agree 100%. Our supposed love of sprawl is potentially something of an addiction in a similar manner to how auto-dependency can be seen in the same light. I think that there is also quite a strong “anti-urban” sentiment among New Zealanders, and in sprawl people are trying to escape the city, while still benefitting fom having some proximity to jobs. Once people visit truly vibrant cities overseas I think there is often a realisation that the city can be something to embrace, rather than something to hide from. Unfortunately I find most planning rules and regulations stem from the “city as something to avoid” argument. Hopefully as more people take OE’s (yet hopefully also find their way back here) this will change.

    Dan Packard – ah yes, the car. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Planning for the car is fundamentally at odds with planning vibrant and interesting places in my opinion.

    Matt and Brent – there is certainly a tension between heritage goals and intensification goals. My day job is being a heritage planner, so I deal with that tension all the time. A couple of things to keep in mind, firstly that it is usually the “old stuff” that makes places interesting, beautiful and vibrant. Secondly, the quote from Jane Jacobs above suggests that getting rid of ‘old stuff’ can often lead to worse outcomes. I think we have plenty of opportunity to reuse our heritage building in a more intensive manner and to redevelop areas without such high heritage value. There will be tradeoffs though, I accept that.

    Great discussion points so far!

  7. Dan Carter, there is nothing wrong with back yards per se. People get so hung up on the misguided issue of residential density they seem blinded to the influence of anything else. Apart from the fact that residential land occupies only around a third of the urbanised are in a city like Auckland (shouldn’t we worry about the other two thirds first?), it is perfectly possible to have a vibrant and sustainable city without having everyone live in apartments. As far as I am concerned sprawl is not just about low density, it is about inward looking houses disconnected from the environment, unwalkable curvilinear road networks with a hierarchy of roads that make cycling difficult and bus services almost impossible, it is about a lack of rapid transit and a focus on high speed arterials and motorways, it is about ‘local’ services, shops and schools that can only be accessed by driving for ten minutes to a strip mall. I have lived in such neighbourhoods (both in Auckland and Melbourne) in a full sized family home on a large section that nevertheless were handy to bus and train links, had easily walkable leafy streets, shops cafes and other services within a minute or two stroll and were not split by motorways nor trapped by a sucession of culs-de-sac.

    Medium and high density have their place, particularly in intensification around existing transport nodes to allow growth that improves existing transport links without additional expenditure on infrastructure. But backyards have their place too, this must be realised. There is a large sector of the populace that love houses with land and will chose them, if we say this is the problem and backyards must be avoided then that is basically writing off the ability to do anything: “We need to get rid of backyards, but people want backyards, so there is nothing we can do”. The real solution for Auckland includes building new sustainable and efficient suburbs, improving existing suburbs as well as intensification and dense development.

    Dan Packard, I agree with you there. The say Aucklanders have a love affair with the car (along with Melburnians and just about any other Australasian city…), but to me it is a best an arranged marriage, a forced relationship which people make the best of and perhaps go a long way to justify to themselves. Auckland has spent the last 60 years following an almost entirely car based transport and land use policy and has got exactly what it was after, a city where basically everyone has to drive everywhere to do anything at anytime, a city where the very fabric of the urban environment favours car travel to the expense of anything else.

    Matt, one legacy of older development patterns is a ring of light industrial around the CBD and some centres, and along rail lines and major roads. There is a lot of potential there for re-development exactly where it counts. Personally I don’t think there is much need to touch the old villa suburbs, they are perhaps the best example of lively and sustainable residential zones anywhere in Auckland. Certainly if you wanted to live carfree in Auckland you’d have to consider somewhere like Grey Lynn or Sandringham with their good transport links, walkable road network, local shops and services etc. Why don’t we worry about the old industrial areas and the post-WWII suburbs before going and demolishing that which works best at the moment.

  8. Nick, yes I agree completely that there is plenty of potential redevelopment opportunities in the “light-industry” areas around the inner suburbs. The corridors along Great North Road, New North Road, Khyber Pass Road, Dominion Road and Great South Road hardly have huge amounts of heritage housing to protect.

    I also agree that it’s possible to provide more a more sustainable urban form, yet at the same time keep a backyard. Terraced housing is horribly under-utilised in Auckland, which is surprising as it can achieve the best of both worlds (fairly high densities yet also providing each house with a yard).

  9. I think it is possible to have both if the planning is done right. I live in a newish neighbourhood that would be a similar layout to this (just with smaller houses) and yet I am only a 2 min walk from a decent park, 5 min walk from a train station, 5 min walk from a primary school and there are 3 highschools within a 20 min walk. The only thing I am lacking is nearby shops, the closest is about a 10 – 15 min walk away.

    I think that if Auckland had of got its act together sooner we could have instisted on better planning including the requirement to add public transport in(in the form of rail). This would also have had the side affect of pushing development costs up which would have also made it more viable to intensify exsiting areas rather than more greenfields developments like what happened.

  10. I think a big problem at the moment is that it is just too difficult to make an “intensification” project stack up. Even though our planning strategies want intensification, our planning rules make that far more difficult than building sprawl. Furthermore, because a lot of the higher-density stuff we’ve built so far has been pretty rubbish, people have a strong tendency to simply oppose anything near “high density”. That makes things doubly hard to get through a consenting process.

    And then we have problems about acquiring enough land parcels within an urban environment to embark on a large project. So inevitably we don’t actually end up with much intensification, which puts pressure on the MUL and on house prices, which in Auckland are pretty much back to record highs.

  11. Thanks Jon. I sway between being somewhat embarrassed about it and then being surprised at how good it is. I think the literature review and the analysis of the regional strategies are its strongest points, later chapters are a bit weaker.

    I tend to still agree with most of what I said back then, although I would probably write it quite a bit differently these days.

  12. I also always get the impression that Labour and National are basically full of people who have never lived abroad and therefore continue to think that the status quo is basically what is considered modern planning. But like you say jarbury as more people and the next generation of politicians alike spend time overseas I hope the planning ideals in NZ begin to change.

  13. Although NZ politicians have generally not lived abroad, I would’ve thought they’d have at least visited other countries? After all, the Big OE is a Kiwi right of passage. There’s no excuse for perpetuating the status quo, really.

    JArbury, your point about “old” things making an area more attractive is very true; my half-formed idea concentrated on preserving most *residential* buildings with historic appeal, but the same applies to commercial buildings, which naturally tend to be found along the major corridors. Redeveloping inner-city light-industrial areas is the way to go; here in Brisbane, there are already plans to do just that, in West End and Bowen Hills. In addition, there’s a successful example already, namely South Bank – redeveloped for Expo in the ’80s, then again for South Bank Parklands, which includes medium-rise apartments.

  14. The perfect place for this would be in Newton/Mt Eden around where the proposed station would be if the CBD tunnel is built. much of the light industrial land will need to be brought and demolished to make way for the tunnel entrance and station. When its rebuilt it could be a shining example, if done right of course.

  15. Looked at the new Newmarket station area yesterday. Sad to see the Kingdon St station go, but interested to see the amount of residential development around the new station. All the old vacant area around the rail is now taken up with three and four level mixed use development. Also interested to see the number of bicycles on the balconies of the apartments.
    Mixed use, intensification around a transport node, alternative methods of transport, – someone is is putting the theory into practice.

  16. Dan, you will be happy to know that the recent changes to the Auckland City District Plan for Newmarket requires new development to provide bike parking (based on GFA).

    Jarbury,

    As a working planner myself I think the main problems are:

    – The RMA. This is weak legislation that only benefits planning consultants and lawyers who fuel the consent process which is nothing more than a money making exercise for Councils. While you might start with a urban plan, by the time all the resource consents have been granted you would only have 50% adherance to the plan across the city. Why should people break the rules if they can comply with them by re-designing?

    – Poor quality of District Plans and the thinking of the planner’s preparing them.

    1. I am currently the planner for the Historic Places Trust. So I generally fight to save old buildings, archaeological sites and so forth.

      Although most of my job is making submissions that developers should get archaeological assessments done for subdivisions.

  17. Scott, while I’m generally a fan of the RMA (I think it’s quite a flexible piece of legislation that could be really good, if only District Plans were better) I do think it has a few fundamental flaws:

    1) It’s too legalistic. This makes everything very expensive, with lawyers & consultants being the main winners.
    2) There’s probably a bit too much “grey”. If council doesn’t want something happening, then it shouldn’t happen. This works both ways though, and things that are obviously going to happen (like offices in residential zones) shouldn’t be non-complying activities (like they are in the isthmus plan).
    3) District Plans should be reviewed more often, although perhaps more “bit by bit”, rather than having each plan review being an utterly giant task.
    4) District Plans should be more visual, and about “what we want”, rather than millions of pages of text about what we don’t want (the new Mangere Town Centre Plan is a good example of hopefully where we’re heading).

    Those are my thoughts anyway.

  18. I am probably biased because I work with a Town & Country era District Plan that has been “rolled over” into the RMA framework. Suffice to say its a real dog, still controls “uses” rather than “effects”. I do agree with you in that regard that making controls that target a particular effect or negative outcome, rather than trying to anticipate and control every landuse, is a worthy exercise. The problem is that while the RMA introduces the effects based regime, it has also introduce the requirement for more rules and legalities as you say. The biggest problem is the “permitted baseline” that is set up and reduces planner’s assessment to niggling around the edges of a development. To me the best way to improve planning outcomes is to go for a system like they have in the UK. Have a set of “permitted standards”. If you don’t want to meet those then you need a planning consent. That would allow District Plans to become more design and guideline focussed and give planner’s a lot more discretion to assess and improve designs, rather than ticking off development controls. Maybe have a chat to Rodney Hide about this next time you see him 😉

  19. Hopefully we will start to see some of these changes happening in the “urban” workstream of Phase II of the RMA reforms. There’s a very good argument that the RMA is a very “rural” piece of legislation, suited to rural areas where what you do want to do is minimise adverse effects on the environment. In a city, what you actually want to do is make positive effects on the environment – to make things better, rather than just stop things from getting worse.

    That seems to be a bit of a fundamental flaw.

    And yes, Auckland City’s District Plan is the worst. Waitakere’s is quite good once you figure it out.

  20. Until architects and planners begin to respect Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” for the work of groundbreaking genius it is… then you will keep on designing and building crap.

    Oddly enough Alexander’s ideas have gained far more currency in other fields, such as software design, than among the ‘built environment’ design community. While I am sure there are many design folk who have at least some passing familiarity with his work, and may even incorporate elements of it from time to time… unless and until there is a complete revolution that puts “A Pattern Language” at the center of thinking, you continue to obtain the same unsatisfying outcomes.

  21. The ‘dead tree’ version is a rather large item. Googling the term “A Pattern Language” has lots of interesting hits. Google Books has a limited version.

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