Nigel Cook: Planners making a hash of inner city

The mayoral taskforce on urban design is a welcome addition to the push for a better-looking Auckland.

Until now, Auckland's city councillors were like a group who had bought a sheep farm intending to convert to dairying while the council staff thought it was okay to use the same paddocks and were busy arguing about how to get the cows into the woolshed.

Bureaucratic resistance is common when a government changes. British Cabinet minister Richard Crossman said in his diaries that a new minister had six months to impose his ideas. After that he was a creature of his department. The new city council has not long to go.

Mayor Dick Hubbard's initiative follows a number of good moves such as urban design panels and the council-organised urban design seminars aimed at bringing council staff up to speed on design for higher densities. The need is ongoing, as the awful developments on Nelson and Union Sts show. It is easy to do a lot better.

One of the major problems of central Auckland's growth is that the planners and the planning rules are aimed at a commercial, not a residential, city. The people who created those rules - mainly the council planners - are trained to produce a commercial city.

They were taught largely by people who were suspicious of the modern city and believed the Resource Management Act was the solution to all urban problems.

But now in this new century we are trying to create a city centre that has a dense residential population, and we are making a hash of it.

One of the major tasks is to change the commercial city into a more urban and people-friendly environment and to retrain the council officers in that new direction.

There is no sign that the council has in place the appropriate planning structures to develop the type of high-density needed. They are proud that the inner-city population has reached 9000.

But far too many apartments are aimed at Asian students and are a slum landlord's delight. Others appear to be second homes for edge-city commuters or simply investments.

The council is aiming for a population of 30,000. This is far too low. Wellington, a city half the size, already has 27,000 people living in the centre. Melbourne has 65,000 and Vancouver is approaching 100,000. Auckland could also house 100,000 between Newmarket and Ponsonby Rd, with 50,000 of them within the motorway ring.

This larger area is central Auckland. It is the natural, non-suburban, inner-city district. We should aim at over, say, 20 years to fill it with high-density housing.

Any development must show it is contributing its share of the desired density. The area could then easily sustain its own dense network of public transport.

So this would be the first task for the mayor's new group; to come up with good architecture that accomplishes this.

The other important thing - after high-residential density - that makes a pleasant, vibrant and safe inner city is simply the way buildings meet the footpath.

Street after street in Auckland is lined with blank walls, parking buildings and corporate entrances. People shun these places or hurry past them.

The city used to be a web of them. Most were destroyed in the great building destruction during Cath Tizard's mayoralty in the 1980s. Parking buildings finished them off.

Our inner-city streets are the tattered remnants of an urban public amenity. Walk along Fort St to see a new and appalling addition to this dismal list.

Only High St survived, and that was because its multiple small sites took developers a long time to make into a large plot. But this had been done by 1987 and only the sharemarket crash saved the street.

Auckland's city centre has only two interactive shopping streets, Queen St and High St. A successful city such as Wellington, on the other hand, has a whole network of small streets that cater for a full range of rental and urban activities. High St has less vitality now that the city council has finished doing it up than it had in the late 1990s, when it was rather down at heel.

It has become a bit boring, but that is the effect of success, and the high rents that come as a result.

These streets - most of the inner city - are dead areas. They blight all the areas around them. It does not matter how much the council titivates a street with paving and new lights if the buildings at street level are not occupied. If they are occupied by shops, homes or entertainment, they come alive.

Everything gains, spreading vitality without loss away from the two or three high-rental shopping streets and into the whole central city. People feel they are part of a whole, big, living thing that has great variety. This is exciting and is why people want to come to live in the centre.

Other cities treasure these little streets. In Melbourne a developer has to show he has provided for public or residential use at street level, and is held to that use.

As far as the Auckland council is concerned, it seems the owner of the land has been allowed to do what is most convenient. But you cannot make a good city by filling up buildings at street level with carparks and their wide, blank entrances.

And the vibrant street is not just the glass beside the pedestrian. It is also the verandah overhead and the pavement. The mayor's design group should insist that all developments have verandas - and that includes heritage buildings.

In Auckland's climate verandas are the most civilising thing in the city. They make it possible to enjoy the street in the changeable weather. Far too many streets have lost them.

The pavement is important, too. Some people say that the dark, gloomy paving in High St has done as much as the high rents to make that street boring. The red paving in Queen St, on the other hand, is cheerful and special. And it comes from islands in the gulf. It represents the place where Auckland is, rather than being imported from China.

Finally, if the design group wants models, it should choose appropriate ones. Auckland is still on its way to a final shape. To choose rules from some wildly different place, such as Edinburgh or Curitiba, is like looking at a horse carriage or a bus before choosing a new car.

If overseas models for good buildings are needed, why not go to similar cities that are successful, such as Vancouver, Melbourne or Wellington?

* Nigel Cook is a member of Urban Auckland, an architectural lobby group.