Editorial: Auckland tower a chance to provide new public space

Queen Elizabeth Square. Photo / Getty Images

The best thing that may be said about a 36-storey glass tower to rise on the site of Auckland's Downtown shopping centre is that it will provide tunnels for trains out of Britomart. Auckland Transport has agreed to pay the landowner $9 million for the tunnels' space and $10.7 million for the extra cost of building foundations that will straddle the tunnels.

Regardless of whether Auckland's City Rail Link eventuates precisely as planned, the tunnels are a sensible provision. Britomart station was designed for rail running through it, not terminating, and whatever path the tracks might take, it must start in tunnels under the Downtown site.

Other elements of the proposal presented by Precinct Properties to sharemarket investors will not be as widely welcomed. The $550 million skyscraper will put paid to any lingering hope that the site might be developed in a way that lets more of the central city look out to the harbour and opens Queen St to the waterfront.

But that prospect was never likely after the building now standing in the name of HSBC was erected on the northern side of the site. The solid wall it presents to the waterfront has been a disaster of urban design for four decades, blocking views of the harbour and taking sunlight from a large section of Queen Elizabeth Square.

The Auckland Council has given up trying to make a success of the shaded portion of the square. It has agreed to sell that section to Precinct for $27.2 million, allowing part of the proposed tower to stand where artistic features of various quality have tried and failed to bring life to the square over the years.

The sale has been criticised as a "privatisation" of public space but the area has defied all attempts to put it to public use. It is more important now to see the money used for public space in a more sunny place.

It is to be hoped the money is not going to buy the lane that Precinct's proposal provides between the HSBC building and the new tower. The lane is to give access from Britomart to Lower Albert St where the council intends to put the buses that now congregate in Lower Queen St. It is hard to see how Albert St will handle so much bus traffic in addition to its existing load, especially if the council extends the Downtown tunnels into Albert St with cut and cover excavations before the Government has committed finance for the underground rail link. But in any event, the city deserves much more than a lane between tower blocks in return for the loss of Queen Elizabeth Square.

If a similar area was purchased at the northwestern corner of the Downtown site, Lower Albert St could be the waterfront opening that Lower Queen St might have been before the disaster at its number 1 address. Alternatively the $27.2 million would go some way towards the $100 million that consultants have estimated it would cost the council to buy the HSBC building from Precinct Properties and demolish it.

The sale of part of the square has more than offset the amount paid for the rail tunnels but those have a different purpose. The money should be put towards another public space.