The malls eating Auckland

Glenfield's Westfield Shopping Centre will be dwarfed by the new development planned for Sylvia Park. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Moneylenders and Two Dollar shops rub shoulders with banks and shops with no names in Panmure, where racks of cheap clothing line the footpath. Once a bustling town centre with the full range of department stores and specialty shops, the strip has struggled since the late-1960s, when one of Auckland's earliest shopping malls went up at Pakuranga.

These days, it caters for a multi-ethnic community but rejuvenation is around the corner. Panmure is first in line, as city planners set out to fight sprawl by concentrating growth around established town centres. The strip could be redeveloped with three- and four-storey buildings - retail at street level, offices upstairs and apartments on top enjoying views of Panmure lagoon and Mt Wellington. Nearby, townhouses and terraced apartments will spring up on old industrial land, and residents will be able to catch the train from a new railway station.

Just one cloud is on the horizon. While Auckland City Council goes through the planning hoops to rebuild Panmure, along the road it has approved plans for a new "town centre" at Mt Wellington. Earthworks are under way for what will become the country's biggest shopping mall and office park - Sylvia Park.

The council is even encouraging Sylvia Park's developers, Kiwi Income Property Trust, to include traditional town centre facilities, such as a library, meeting rooms and police station, and crowd-pulling cinemas and cafes. "The timing is crazy," says Barbara Mackay of Progressive Panmure, the local business association. "People only have so much money to spend but we're building more retail centres."

Out on the edge of town, the same opposing forces are at work. The regional growth strategy, the 1999 masterplan signed by Auckland local bodies, promised established centres would be remodelled as "liveable communities" with a "sense of place and identity". People would live and work close to and within easy reach of improved public transport.

But as politicians and planners continue to talk about concentrating growth around established town centres such as Henderson, New Lynn and Avondale, Waitakere City Council has asked the Auckland Regional Council to extend the city limits. It wants to build a new town centre at Westgate, at the end of the northwestern motorway. AMP Property wants the urban boundary stretched even further to include a mall.

On the North Shore, the Albany Town Centre will soon lure shoppers up the northern motorway with a huge new Westfield mall. AMP and Westfield are also expanding their Manukau City centres. Instead of liveable communities we're getting destination shopping - sprawl by another name.

Curiously, it's all allowed for in the growth strategy. While most population growth was expected to be housed around existing centres, the grand plan earmarked Albany, Westgate and Sylvia Park as future "mixed-use" employment centres.

But their retail components are coming on stream ahead of housing and offices. The demands of retailers are shaping Auckland's growth.

They are not entirely to blame. AMP Property general manager Stephen Costley says councils have been too slow to release nearby land for housing.

The city's sprawling new suburbs are disorienting. In Botany, you could be in Albany or Westgate. The dominant landscape features are big box megacentres, all garish colours and signage, and football field-sized carparks.

For retailers, more floorspace means they can dizzy consumers with more choices. Retailing consultant Mark Tansley, of Marketplace New Zealand, says 90 per cent of retail floor space growth in the past decade has been large format.

The new malls will be several steps up from existing ones. Sylvia Park will have nearly 60,000sq m of retail; Albany will eventually have nearly 70,000sq m, almost twice as big as St Lukes.

Tansley says there is no sign yet of Auckland's retail supply reaching saturation point and the Australians who dominate our mall industry - Westfield, AMP and the Commonwealth Bank-run Kiwi Income Property Trust - are banking that our infatuation will last.

They argue only 15 per cent of New Zealanders' retail spending is in malls compared with 25 per cent in Australia. But the national figures are misleading. A 2002 report found in Auckland, home to 11 major malls, 26 per cent of retail spending was in malls and large-format stores.

And worried main streets cite a 1999 survey which found Auckland had 30 per cent more retailing per head of population than Sydney.

Increasing wealth, rather than population growth, guides retail development, says Tansley, and Auckland has had a steady stream of both in the past decade. "We may think we are oversupplied, but we aren't. There is still significant potential out there."

Tansley maintains the growth masterplan doesn't allow enough space for future large-format retailing, which sends a shudder through established strip shopping centres.

"The big problem is they suck the life out of the local shops," says Auckland University Professor of Architecture John Hunt. "They commit people to making long journeys. The flipside is these bigger facilities offer more - people are attracted to them. It's the one-stop shop, writ large."

Malls pose an almost insoluble aesthetic problem, says Hunt, convener of Auckland City's urban design panel. "The mall is a big blank box of some kind with an internal environment, although it can be ameliorated with urban design."

He would rather we used a town centre model, built around a main street. "We aren't doing that. We're following the American model. We have big chunks of land being bought by a single purchaser to do what they want."

Councils and developers are doing their best to inject better urban design into the new megamalls. Sylvia Park and Albany are, in fact, billed as town centres. But are they?

Both are a departure from the enclosed, concrete-bunker malls such as St Lukes, which turn their backs to the neighbourhood. They will have features associated with town centres, such as community facilities, movie theatres, medical centres and restaurants.

But they will still be malls, says urban design consultant Mike Cullen. Both lack the crucial residential component that make town centres part of a community.

"Albany is a shopping mall with a few other things grafted on the edge," says Cullen. "The council is trying its best to get some intensive [housing] development but it will be a fairly utilitarian environment provided by the Westfield box."

The Albany Town Centre, a "city within a city" spread over 100ha of green fields, was modified last year after locals slammed it as bland, boring, lacking a soul, dangerous for pedestrians and daunting for the scale and distance between buildings. But it's too late to stop the centrepiece - the 70,000sq m mall.

Sydney-based Cullen says Auckland is embracing megamalls as they face a backlash overseas. "In Australia, we have malls of 130,000sq m. They are ugly blots on the landscape. We've got failing strip centres and town centres all around them."

As a result, state governments are introducing policies to rein in malls and encourage developments focused around main streets. In Britain, planning rules discourage malls on the outskirts. Mall opponents here believe more regulation is justified.

Critics level broader criticisms at the mall. Warren Snow managed the Tindall Foundation, the charitable agency of the Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, until he saw the impact of big-box retailing on smaller centres. His group Envision New Zealand helps main streets to fight back. He says malls take profits and jobs out of local communities.

"These are fake town centres - they are not built around a residential area. It's car focused and it's taking us away from creating a sustainable city."

Paul Keane, director of Retail Consulting Group, says shoppers are unlikely to find retailers at Sylvia Park they can't already visit at Botany or Newmarket. But the development will undoubtedly affect established centres such as Newmarket and Manukau City Centre.

"In the 1950s we would shop at the local dairy or butcher or bookshop and we were satisfied. All that's changed with technology and cars. There's a need for more in the mind of the consumer. The life of a shopping centre effectively is five years. You have to keep changing or the consumer gets very bored."

On the North Shore, shopping centres such as Glenfield, Mairangi Bay and Browns Bay are already struggling with the advent of megacentres at Wairau Park and Albany, losing hardware and specialty stores.

Browns Bay Business Association head Mark Sweeney says a bus station in the new Albany Town Centre will be a further blow. To counter the effects of Albany, the council is promising to reorient the shopping strip to face the beach reserve and encourage open-air cafes. But Sweeney expects the retailing mix to narrow further. "People only have so many dollars to spend."

A long-time Devonport resident sums it up: "When I was a kid I could get everything at the local shops. Then I had to go to Takapuna, then to Wairau Park. Now it's Albany."

But it won't stop as long as population and household wealth continue to rise, say the analysts.

The strange thing is, consumers say they would prefer to buy locally if town centres met their needs. "We should be putting traditional town centres first," says Karen Remetis of the Town Centre Development Group, which works to revitalise local strips. She says town centre rejuvenation is lagging because of a lack of council leadership.

"The issue should be about getting town centres to a position where they are organised to provide the goods and services their community needs." Even Remetis concedes main streets can't provide everything - there is a place for large format.

Waitakere City deputy mayor Carolynne Stone says its bid to extend the urban boundary at Westgate for a greenfields town centre is driven by Waitakere's "desperate shortage" of commercial land.

Stone says the planned development north of the Westgate megacentre will be a true town centre - a main street with shops and offices surrounded by high-density residential. The council is working with the megacentre developers, IMF Westland, but Stone says AMP's mall proposal is not necessarily incompatible.

Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee is wary about dismissing the request ahead of a hearing. But he questions the environmental and infrastructure costs.

"It would be more sustainable for Waitakere to focus development around the rail corridor and already-developed areas rather than pushing out into a rural area which has some value for horticulture."

"We need to manage better and lead things better than responding to what your friendly mall operator or investor has come up with."