By popular demand: merch!
At last. Greater Auckland now has merchandise for y’all to enjoy!
We’ve launched a wee shopfront over at Digitees, where you can find just the thing for you and all the urbanists in your life (send one to your favourite elected member!).…
17 Comments Give Aucklanders a real say on our next harbour crossing
Why is the public not involved in the options for Auckland’s next harbour crossing? This is a critical issue for our city, so it shouldn’t be a state secret, let alone a single option imposed on us by fiat.
Getting this right is something we all have a stake in.…
ART for RTN’s sake
What to name the various parts of Auckland’s rapidly evolving transit scene has been a recent topic of discussion.
First was Jon Bridges’ riff on the soon-to-open City Rail Link: “our new beautiful subterranean train set deserves so much better” than the letters C, R, and L, he wrote, provoking a public outpouring of acronyms and nicknames.…
For the Avoidance of Diesel, and Doubt
Yet another (not unexpected) fossil-fuel supply crunch is here. It will continue to affect everything in our economy. And be painful. But it should also, at last, shift discussion and action much more strongly towards reducing our structural dependency on fossil fuels where we can.…
What Should We Do?
Or rather:
What We Should Do…
…about the maybe imminent – but always possible – imported liquid fuels crisis.
And by “we”, I mean the New Zealand Government, whose job this is.
First, and above all: we should think and act strategically, not just reactively.…
A Metro for Auckland?
The City Rail Link (CRL) is routinely described as transformational. An overused term for infrastructure projects, but one that is surely appropriate in this case – as you’d hope, given the size of the investment. $5.5b ought to get us something truly new, not just another lane and more traffic.…
Imagine, a city
This summary of where we’re at was originally presented at a City Vibes event run by The Urban Room on 9th December 2025, and like all our work, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans.…
Local control of transport: huge room for change?
The governance reforms of transport in Auckland are set to become law early next year. A great deal is changing, but to most people it likely feels all very abstract and distant. So, in this post I want to take a look at a tangible, practical example of the positive potential this law change could unleash.…
Accessing the Acropolis: Extend the City Link
Tāmaki/Auckland only has a few public institutions of national significance: the Art Gallery, the Museum, and Auckland University, each housed in nationally significant buildings. Plus only a few truly high quality landmark buildings of similar value: Waitematā Station, Customs House, Ferry Building, West Plaza, and the Sky Tower, say.…
Manchester: an urban renewal case study
I lived in the UK in the 1980s, so whenever anyone describes the Auckland city centre as “dilapidated” (as the Herald did in an recent editorial), I can’t help chuckling. While we do have very real problems, we have nothing like the complete physical ruin of whole areas and communities on the scale that was so widespread in post-industrial Thatcher’s Britain, especially in the north where the Industrial revolution began, like Manchester below.…
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