Editorial: Nature no guide for Queen St

Aucklanders and visitors to the city this summer have been following with frank amazement the saga of the Queen St trees. The plan to remove quite young, healthy exotics and replace them with cabbage trees seems to have struck most people as crass beyond belief.

So what are they to make of the latest clanger from the Auckland City Council's designers? According to Lesley Max, leader of the resistance, the council plans to strip Queen St's lowest section entirely of trees to signify that the area was reclaimed from the sea.

What next? Do they intend to "beautify" Queen Elizabeth Square with mudflats and mangroves? Would they like all buildings removed in the fullness of time to "keep faith with the original character" of the area? That seems to be the obsession that dominates all aesthetic considerations in civic design. The highest section of Queen St is to be given northern rata that might have grown near the ridge, and the stretch from Mayoral Drive down to Wellesley St is to get cabbage trees to reflect the street's former glory as the Horotiu Swamp.

In fact, the lowest blocks, below Shortland St, are to have their trees replaced with large planters to contain native plants that would be changed with the seasons. The citizens' uprising against this sort of nonsense has succeeded in gaining a tree-by-tree review of the first phases of the plan. That review must be extended to the entire scheme.

Fundamentally, the council should review the very principle that the original character of a locality should guide its redesign. Like it or not, the character of the Queen St valley and waterfront has been altered beyond recognition by a century and half of commercial development and there is no way of restoring the dubious splendour of the original creek and tidal zone except in some forlorn, token plots.

While there is general condemnation of the civic designers' cavalier attitude to existing trees, there is also near-universal agreement around the barbecues that Auckland's central area needs a facelift. And no part of it needs it as much as the street that was once unchallenged as the hub of the city's commercial life.

These days it struggles to retain not only commercial and retail pre-eminence against the likes of Newmarket and suburban centres but even its attractions for entertainment and nightlife. It is common to encounter Aucklanders who live, work and play in one part of the region and say they seldom see Queen St.

The faded glory of the "golden mile" can hardly be blamed on official neglect. The city council has put considerable public resources into developments such as The Edge entertainment district and the Britomart transport centre. Even the Auckland Regional Council continues to design the public transport of Greater Auckland to converge on the central city, though it knows that barely half the daily commuting population work there.

A city's need of an impressive centre transcends the centrifugal tendencies of modern urban life. No matter how appealing and self-contained some suburban communities can become, no matter how rarely many of their residents might venture "downtown", most want the city to boast a big and busy core.

The attempt to reinvigorate Queen St needs to be focused on its role as a hub of urban life. That is its character and it has little to do with whatever bucolic charms the valley might once have possessed before colonists found it suitable for concentrated settlement. Cabbage trees and swamp plants would be grossly out of place in Queen St even if their adoption did not threaten trees that have been growing there for decades. Few plants thrive below high buildings and those that survive should never be felled on a whim of civic design. Queen St needs all the greenery it can keep.