For a long time Flat Bush has been a rather strange part of Auckland: a pretty massive residential area without any town centre at its heart. You can see the weirdness of the situation by looking at an aerial photo of the area: 
Seemingly random areas have been completed, other parts are surprisingly empty, the whole area just seems extremely strange when you’re out there. But finally, as reported in the Bob Dey Property Report, it seems that we’re going to see Flat Bush get a town centre – although oddly it seems like it’ll be called “Ormiston”. Here are some of the details:
Todd Property Group Ltd’s plans to develop the Ormiston – formerly Flat Bush – town centre have been approved and work on the ground should start in the first half of 2013.
The “illustrative masterplan” for the revised project, as Todd managing director Evan Davies described the design, was unveiled this morning. It shows a shift from a commercial area centred on the main east-west thoroughfare, Ormiston Rd, to a town centre with 2 important & walkable commercial streets, called Main St & Arbour Lane.
Main St would cut across Ormiston Rd and Arbour Lane, taking the commercial centre further north. Ormiston Rd would remain the main thoroughfare through the area, and would be the access road for several large retail outlets, with parking lots on the south of 2 of the big boxes and specialty stores between them & Arbour Lane.
Mr Davies said today: “What we’re aspiring to develop here is not simply a shopping or retail centre for Flat Bush but a town centre in the historical, traditional sense of those words, that genuinely provides a heart.”
It would have shops, other commercial activity, provision for live-work buildings, about $30 million of community facilities that would include a library and an aquatic centre and some medium-density residential development on the periphery of its 19ha.
Plans to develop the centre, at the heart of a residential area eventually intended to house about 40,000 people, has been going for about 15 years. The former Manukau City Council called for expressions of interest in 2006 and signed an agreement with Melview Developments Ltd (Nigel McKenna) to develop it in 2007.
Melview produced a masterplan in 2008 but the global financial crisis and the demise of Melview put paid to those plans. Mr McKenna was adjudicated bankrupt in April 2011 and Melview Developments was wound up in May 2011.
So quite a complicated history, and it seems as though the design is a step in the right direction away from what we’ve typically seen as “town centres” over the past few years (Albany, Botany, Westgate etc.). We also see a master-plan:
It’s twisted a bit so north is actually on the right of the picture. Compared to Albany, Botany and the original/currently developed parts of Westgate, the proposed design is vastly superior (the new Westgate development is an improvement on the past). We actually see shops fronting the street along Main Street and Arbour Lane, like a traditional town centre. Also, in most locations the surface parking is hidden behind shops that front the actual street, although there are a few exceptions to this rule which hopefully can be changed to ensure that all the surface parking gets hidden behind the shops, as putting parking out the front destroys the character of commercial areas almost like nothing else. The street network is highlighted a bit clearer in the image below, which also shows where the town centre fits within the broader area of Flat Bush (which I assume will keep its name rather than reverting to Ormiston):
It’s once you zoom out a bit that Flat Bush’s fundamental flaw gets highlighted – how on earth does it link in with high quality public transport? This flaw exists because Flat Bush is located on neither of the two main north-south arterials through southeast Auckland: Te Irirangi Drive and Chapel Road. They are shown in the map below, with the town centre area roughly highlighted in red: 
The logical place to have located the town centre was right around the intersection of Ormiston Road with either Chapel Road or Te Irirangi Drive, with high frequency public transport along either of those routes providing a fast connection with Botany in the north and Manukau in the south. But instead, those prime locations are given over to school playing fields, a park (which could have been relocated further east) and low density housing. Which means that public transport servicing Flat Bush for eternity will need to take annoying detours. This is something that really frustrates me as it shows that we still haven’t learnt from the mistakes of the last 60 or so years of developing the city.
We can only hope for more integrated land-use with transport better in the future but at this stage I’m not holding my breath.
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I like your two purple arrows, they highlight the problem nicely. What annoys me more than the fact that they are building the town away from the transport routes is that the whole Botany-Ormiston area was a greenfields development where they could easily have provided a rail or RTN corridor in the plans.
It seems to me the pro-PT stance of Auckland council may not be legitimate. How could they in this day and age continue to develop massive new suburban areas away from existing RTN routes, and not even make allowance for new routes to serve them? Even in 2012, with all that has been learned about transport requirements, the council remains completely car-centric when planning expansion of Auckland.
I think you’re dead right Geoff, and the weird thing is that it would have been so easy to get this right. It’s so blatantly obvious how to get this right too – just shift the town centre a few hundred metres (800-1000 I think) to the west and you’ve got it perfect.
But we stuffed it up, even though it was so easy to get right. That’s just weird.
The QTN route will service the town centre by detouring from Chapel onto Ormiston, then Stancombe, then back to Chapel. It would be more expensive in the short term to build a larger development closer to the Ormiston/Chapel intersection because of the existing stormwater infrastructure and stream channels. The TODD images show this better then the google maps screenshot with coloured arrows. If this detour can minimise QTN route delays, it should work just fine. Not as good as if the town centre were located directly on Chapel or Te Irirangi, but there are some constraints there. The real challenge will be to ensure that the development does not devolve into Albany town centre, which it well may.
Having looked at Flat Bush for an environmental planning paper, I think there’s definitely a need to synthesise the idea of land use-transport integration with the idea of low impact design and catchment planning. Flat Bush was considered well-designed from a low impact design point of view as it’s laid out to minimise stormwater runoff into the waterways (hence the vegetation pockets everywhere) and soforth…
Yet as pointed out above, it’s abysmal from the point of view of PT provision – it just doesn’t integrate into any arterials or transit routes at all. So while one set of environmental goals is achieved – cleaner waterways, less runoff etc – the area also breeds more auto-dependence, and all the consequent environmental effects. What you give to the environment on the one hand you take away with the other…
Reconciling the two approaches is pretty important I think – is any well-read planner aware of any work in this area???
I hope apartments are built in the area just below the town centre and remaining fringe areas around the park.
Should a spur route to the middle of flat bush town centre be protected to link up to this idea? http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/howick-botany-line.jpg
I think you could do it quite well utilizing some of the un developed areas.
http://imageshack.us/f/269/easternline.jpg
I think that land between Te Irirangi/Ormiston has been developed for some time now and too close to industrial areas. Location wise the town centre had to be there in order to surround it with the appropriate ammenities and to be close to all the large residential developments going on. But from a purely transport perspective, the whole thing is a mess. The roads barely cope as it is and we will end up with tens of thousands of more cars driving around trying to get to the motorway.
A frequent bus shuttling along ormiston rd (to say, Otahuhu) and connecting to a main corridor on Te Irirangi and/or Chapel would go a long way.
The wetlands park ring is a funny thing, it pretty much guarantees no one can walk to the town centre and will most likely drive (or perhaps bus or cycle).
Having the park land in fingers between residential zones would have been better, then the town centre could have extended naturally through a mixed use zone into the residential areas.
From the Manukau Council site: “Flat Bush’s cycling and walking network will follow the greenfinger areas that follow natural streams and gullies, and are overlooked by houses fronting onto them.”
Too late now, it’ll just have to have a shuttle bus running from Te Irirangi and doing a circuit of the centre & some of the burbs.
“It seems to me the pro-PT stance of Auckland council may not be legitimate.”
One thing people here sometimes don’t seem to understand is the planning durations, and the fact that decisions taken years or even decades ago define our planning today. Changing these things is like changing course of an oil tanker. SLOW.
In this particular case, the town centre was planned to be in that spot easily 10 years ago. Land was bought. Other land was sold. A park was established. A bridge was built as a feature entry*. Roads were built to serve the decided-on layout. Yes, as Matt L says, this is pretty wrong from a PT-viewpoint. But those mistakes were made long ago, and the current Council, even if interested in changing this mistake, would have faced very large costs and opposition to the change from those who had already invested into the old scheme and the relevant land. Who knows, there may even be legal agreements in place between Manukau City Council and the developer that had to be honoured.
This project reflects pre-PT planning in some key ways. Correct. Because it was planned before that was considered all that important. I’d be more interested how we can fix, or mitigate those mistakes.
*(Okay, even I don’t understand why such an expensive bridge right there in the middle of an empty field… surely a few very large culverts would have been fine for the local wetlands)
I know a few large culverts in Boston that lead to continual flooding in later years due the slow build up of sediment in them, resulting in very expensive subsequent work to daylight it all and build bridges. Going with bridges from the start is likely to be a better long term solution, and will hopefully reduce the chance of flooding.
I like the green linear parks shown on the Context Plan, assuming they will actually turn out to be green corridors across the suburb. They’d be good for footpaths and cycle tracks. Even better if the foot and cycle paths could pass under the intersecting roads.
Obi – I understand that is indeed the plan to have them not only as ecological stormwater drains, but also as green transport corridors (in fact, several of them are already in place, and make nice cycle routes). In some, but not most locations, these are grade-separated, I think.
Yes, they show the influence of landscapers on the plan. This is a species that have been admitted to have some influence- hey everyone likes a tree! You can see their work too with NZTA; lots of gardening around motorway megastructures. But sadly this is still in the ‘lipstick on a gorilla’ area; looks pretty, but still a gorilla. When urbanists are allowed some influence at the master planning stage we might then get places with real character and actual functionality….. Not to mention integration with viable and place saving PT, including cycling and of course walking (every PT user is also a walker).
Long since decided that as a transport engineer I have more influence on urban design than the average urban designer. So I try to do my best…
Exactly! Auckland post 1955 is entirely shaped by transport engineering decisions. The problem isn’t who makes the decision but if that person is only concerned with movement of machines and not quality of place, or even more about movement of people in other ways than just cars, then bingo you get the mess we’re in.
Form follows (transport) function.
one of the dumbest things about Flatbush was that they built a medium to high density settlement without so much as a superette to allow the residents to buy milk, bread and nappies without getting in their cars, instant car dependent neighbourhood!
Arguably, that is one of the easier things to fix.
not that dumb really if you think about it.