Elizabeth Aitken Rose: Saving heritage comes down to city ethos

The Turua St houses were zoned for business activity. Photo / Dean Purcell

Opinion

Developers are terrific. They make much of the built environment happen. They take risks and are entitled to profits that reflect this.

Like film producers, they are the shadowy characters in the background of popular consciousness. Architects and engineers are similar to directors and actors. They often get the credit for what we see; there is often no acknowledgment of the vision behind it.

No one should resent a rightful return to those who add such value to our cities, provide the infrastructure for our daily lives and even create structures and places that uplift our spirits.

Excitement over the loss of the St Heliers Turua St Art Deco homes raises many issues - recurring issues that are rarely resolved.

Quite apart from the new Auckland Council's attitude to an inherited pickle, is the problem our heritage frameworks encounter in preserving townscape. They focus on individual sites, which are only registered if they meet a host of criteria and the Historic Places Trust and/or local government has the inclination to research and establish their significance. Picturesque collectives of everyday pasts rarely qualify.

Even if sites are registered, the processes protecting the public good are stretched when the chips are down in the private property market because ill-resourced councils and the Historic Places Trust rely primarily on advocacy and are no match for privately funded legal tangles.

Furthermore the cost of preserving quaint neighbourhoods is not given priority in budget bids, where clamours for heart-transplants and sewerage works screech.

Preserving cultural landscapes can also be hazardous. This is exemplified by Auckland City introducing controls in 2005 to stop the demolition or modification of its pre-1940 residential areas which have plenty of character. Such blanket zoning overlooked the rich mix of housing styles in these neighbourhoods - not all deserved to remain. (Zoning is a vulgar development control tool - but cheap and certain.) Nostalgia-based policies such as this end up shutting out much-needed architectural innovation.

Character does have real estate charm for those that can afford it. Certainly cities wanting to attract people with high earning potential have built environments that reflect the past as well as the future. Even here tensions emerge.

The very people who seek out character-filled surrounds are often the first to adapt the ambience that first attracted them - a flat for the nanny here, a new garage for the fleet of SUVs there.

Auckland's inability to hang on to the best of its historical-built fabric also seems rooted in something particular to its civic psyche. The city has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that privileges the new - symbolising progress - and seemingly undervalues the reassurance of landscapes from earlier eras.

The St Heliers houses - zoned for "business activity" and without heritage protection - were inevitably at risk. As the draft District Plan lumbered through public submission processes, citizens were apparently unaware of potential outcomes and did not object at this stage.

But even if the houses had heritage protection, it is unlikely that they would have been saved with any integrity, given our ill-resourced heritage agencies, operating in a society venerating private property rights.

Although developers should be justly rewarded for creating value, should they benefit from values created through urban growth and change? At present, individual owners profit from these, not the community. The incentive is to redevelop sites at the expense of heritage. Our policies lack the necessary sophistication and determination to manage this fairly. Fundamental to saving heritage is an ethos encouraging necessary, timely and superior development in the right place, with appropriate returns to the people undertaking such work - without cost to city memory and aesthetics.

City officials might also have been more imaginative at the time the St Heliers redevelopment went through the resource consent processes and used principles embedded in the relevant District Plan rules for preserving streetscape character.

Granted these were oriented towards the preservation of traditional retail street fronts and not a patch of houses built in a period when a commercial area was the main street and not the block behind it. The plan, however, offered possibilities for negotiation.

Heritage is difficult. It is subjective and often privileges the elite and idiosyncratic.

Cities are also about change. Haussmann of Paris is now revered for his vision, however flawed it may have seemed at the time. Yet in Auckland we have seen neither the vision (that revisionists might later praise), nor the capacity to hang on to meaningful elements.

If heritage is an important urban value, then we need to balance development and conservation. If we want to preserve what we cherish this must be backed up with money. If we want a progressive city with vision we need to be open to renewal. And all of us must be constantly vigilant and not just as the wrecking ball strikes.

Elizabeth Aitken Rose is a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland.