Jim Hopkins: Only planners can make kumara a Public Enemy

In a perfect world this would have been written last week, when the annual obligation to make a few achievable Resolutions was still uppermost in people's minds.

Seven days ago, we were still in the draft stage, weighing up the options, still privately contemplating the best way to do a Queen St, so to speak, and turn over a new leaf.

Now it's done and dusted; yesterday's news. The Resolutions have all been made and filed and need only to be broken for the timeless cycle to be complete.

So this might be a trifle out of date and after the event but, then again, better late than never, as the undertaker said to the actress.

Besides, things have changed in the last few days. A week ago, everything seemed crystal clear. The year 2006 beckoned like some four-lane highway heading straight for a new dawn.

The only thing needed to reach this dream destination was a great Resolution and, fortunately, one was to hand: "This year, I'm going to be a Life Coach!" Let's face it, Life Coaches have a great life. They get to say impressive things like, "There's no I in me," and "Don't work in your business, work on running away."

They write best sellers like Feel The Fear And Get Somebody Else To Do It In Case It Really Is Dangerous. They get adoringly interviewed by not-so-bright young things on daytime TV. They whiz to resorts hither and yon to preach to the disconcerted. They have reserved seats in the Koru Lounge.

Which made becoming a Life Coach an irresistible prospect. Until last Thursday's Harold arrived.

On this very page in the article "Urban chainsaw massacre", was a revelation-in-waiting, an epiphany in print, a transformational nugget that instantly rendered Life Coaching obsolete.

As of now, there's a new Resolution: "This year, I'm going to talk like a Planner!"

They've got it made, those guys! They get to influence Mayors (which anecdotal evidence suggests isn't very difficult); they get to tell everybody else what to do; they get to work tirelessly on "visions" and "drafts" and "revitalisation plans" to revitalise those parts of the city they've already planned but aren't vital enough, and they do it all in a language no one understands.

One quote made all this crystal-clear, one brilliantly articulated statement from the Auckland City Biodiversity Strategy: "The more introduced species that contribute to species richness the lower the net biodiversity. This is because every place occupied by an alien plant or animal is displacing the former localised genetic forms, species and ecosystem food webs, with generally common worldwide types."

That's an utterly sublime way of saying, "Things change!"

And also a profoundly impressive way of burying contradictions. Like the fact that "alien" plants and animals can apparently "contribute to species richness" but simultaneously "lower the net biodiversity".

Huh? Oh, that's right. It's because the "aliens" displace "former localised genetic forms ... with generally common worldwide types."

Unless, of course, they're uncommon types.

However, let's accept the premise, if only to note that it would make the kumara Public Enemy No 1. Not in terms of magnitude, necessarily, but certainly in terms of arrival.

So, while our dedicated biodiversifists are anguishing over the menace of exotic trees in the city, they might like to consider the erection of a statue to The Unknown Legume so cruelly displaced by this "alien" produce. No need for a Draft Vision Strategy about where to put it, either. Aotea Square would be the ideal site.

Which leads inevitably to another advantage of Planning as a lifestyle. It's endlessly self-perpetuating.

Municipal Planners (and architects) keep on designing things that need to be redesigned.

It would be hard to conceive of three places in Auckland more perfectly squandered than those occupied by the City Council building, the Aotea Centre and its desolate Square. Redeemed only by the untidy chaos of the market occupying the vacuum.

Honestly, there's a lifetime's work "revitalising" those places. And the neat thing is, you don't have to know anything to do it. Well, nothing actual, you understand.

You don't have to know what E is or MC2, for that matter.

Everything in Planning is a theory. Garden Cities, Radiant Cities, Green Belts, Buffer Zones, Nodes, Modules and Amenity are all just somebody's bright idea. Or not so bright idea.

And only the Planners are allowed to decide which is what. Because they've got the language.

Instead of saying, "That's awful", they say, "The proposal could adversely impact the integrated urban amenity fabric of the built environment by violating the spatial precepts of the Inner City Design Palette and contradicting the vision of the Council's Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan".

And everyone believes them!

Well, not everyone. Not always. Which may explain why there's been a barkdown over the Queen St trees.

But fear not! That just means more work. Another Plan. More consultation. Extra "revitalisation".

And then it'll be 2007. And we can all have a holiday in one of those magical 2000-year-old Mediterranean villages that no Planner ever touched.

Does that explain the new Resolution?