Sunday reading 5 February 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading. By the time you read this, I will be waking up in a tent on the Coromandel, hopefully having had a spectacular walk up to the Pinnacles.
This week, I want to start off with an article that a talented friend of mine, Oliver Chan, wrote on The Spinoff: “Restoring the house that Jack built: how the lessons of the past can help solve the housing crisis“:
The story begins with Jack.…
31 Comments Is Auckland too big?
[This was originally posted in unfinished form this morning. It has since been rewritten.] Is Auckland too big? Some people are asking that question.
For instance, in a Twitter exchange a while back Radio New Zealand producer Tim Watkin stated: @pv_reynolds Patrick I thought you wanted people off the roads here!…
A future for Auckland’s transport network
Lately I’ve been thinking about how to better join the dots between Auckland’s housing challenges and its transport challenges. We’re all familiar with the common stories about Auckland’s problems: Housing is too expensive, pricing young people out of the market and forcing low-income households into crowded or unhealthy accommodation.…
Sunday reading 22 January 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, I’d like to start off with a great bit of investigative journalism that Stuff produced at the end of last year: “Private business, public failure: Inside our prisons“. While it’s not directly related to transport or urban policy, it has a lot to say about how our society runs.…
The politics of Auckland
Elections last year in other English-speaking countries got me thinking about the urban implications of political geography. The US presidential election and the UK’s Brexit vote both featured large divides in voting patterns between big cities and rural areas and small towns.…
Sunday reading 8 January 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading. This is my first edition of the year. As I’ve been tramping over the holidays, it’s mainly composed of things I started reading back in December.
The best thing I’ve read in January – after striking a few days of wet weather on the track – is Tramping New Zealand’s guide to what to wear tramping: The theory is to have one set of clothes that is going to get wet during the day, either through precipitation, or perspiration, and one set that stays dry, to keep you cosy at night.…
Video of the day: Future of cities
Here’s an interesting short documentary on the future of cities – if you look closely, you can see a few shots of Auckland (and a few ideas on what we could do next):…
The height of trees and the height of buildings
Auckland is a very leafy city. The trees that our forebears planted have slowly grown to maturity, resulting in many streets and suburbs with an attractive amount of greenery.
The city’s street trees are especially valuable… where they have been allowed to survive traffic engineering standards.…
Bookstores, cities, and shared streets
For me, a new house or apartment doesn’t truly feel like home until I begin to fill it with books. Books serve as familiars and friends: re-reading an old favourite can bring me back to places, people, and feelings that I had filed away in my memory, while encountering a new book is like befriending an interesting stranger.…
Don’t buy the depreciating asset
The other week Australian planning expert Greg Vann came to Auckland to talk about his experience developing the South-East Queensland urban growth strategy, ShapingSEQ. A lot of what he had to say was transferrable to Auckland. While Queensland faces different environmental challenges that often result in different decisions about built form, Brisbane and Auckland are both mid-sized New World cities experiencing rapid growth.…
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