Tony Watkins: Triumph for makers of soulless city spaces

High achievers learn the art of turning negative energy into positive energy. It's not a new idea. Ancient self-defence techniques often used an enemy's energy to bring about their downfall.

Confronting a punch with a punch means taking the full force of the blow. If, on the other hand, you catch the punch and take it further, you carry the energy past you along with the protagonist as you move them off-balance.

We have recently seen the technique used with spectacular success.

The building industry has been responsible for constructing a great number of leaky homes. None of the buildings were built by owner-builders. A naive person would have concluded that legislation should have been introduced to encourage more owner-building. The opposite has happened.

The negative energy of the leaky-homes failure of the building industry has been very skilfully used to strengthen the iron grip of the industry. The knee-jerk 2004 Building Act has introduced draconian control over owner-builders, who had nothing to do with the problem. The innocent have carried the cost of the systemic failure.

Those not familiar with the techniques of turning failure into success must be wondering how it all happened. How did we end up with a Building Act that does not even mention the art of building?

With similar skill both the Auckland City Council and the Manukau City Council have turned their systemic urban design failures into triumphs.

In Manukau, the economic temptation presented by open space that had been set aside to protect the flightpath to Mangere International Airport was too much. The green space success of a past generation of far-sighted designers was turned into a failure.

The city is unique for having been built under the flightpath of an international airport. But this astonishing urban design failure has now been skilfully turned into a success, with planners working away beneath the roar of 747s to control the lives of people who would never have been so stupid.

In Auckland City, the railway land abutting Quay St presented the greatest urban design opportunity of the past 100 years. It was the perfect situation to show what could be achieved by contemporary urban design. The Auckland City Council amalgamated the titles and there were no obstacles to what might have been achieved. Maori became part of the mix.

The result is a theme park that draws together in one shambolic place the most wonderful examples of urban mediocrity. It is all there - a car sales yard, a fried-chicken outlet, a video store, a burger-bar, mini-storage, petrol pumps, a car wash, tacky suburban shops out of the 1960s, and even badly oriented slum dwellings. A railway line weaves a drunken path through the middle of it all. With no planning whatsoever, it could not have been worse.

A naive observer might conclude that after an urban design failure of this magnitude the Auckland City Council might hang its head in shame and let someone else have a go. Even the casual observer knows that beautiful cities are the result of a very different planning process.

Not so. The negative energy of urban design failure has been skilfully used to create the mirage that the city council is the urban design champion to lead us out of the wilderness it has created.

The recently announced rate increase is being used to pay for more controls over the people who have shown themselves, in contrast to the council, to be competent urban designers. Performance-based funding would suggest a rate reduction was more appropriate.

The culture of negative bureaucratic control has triumphed over positive human creativity, while those who put performance ahead of promises must be left wondering where they went wrong.

Declaring 2005 to be the Year of the Built Environment has provided another opportunity to turn failure into success. Soulless cities and soulless architecture are the inevitable result of a cult of materialism that sees cities and buildings as objects. There is a difference between a house and a home. There is a big difference between a city to look at and a city to live in.

The failure of materialism is all around us, but so are the temptations. Architectural magazines are crowded with beautiful objects while there is seldom a person to be seen. Materialistic urban design assumes that the objects come first and the people come later. Materialists want more roads while only those who realise there is more to life than restlessness ask about the joy of the journey.

Using the Year of the Built Environment to celebrate the object misses the point that the object is the problem, not the solution. When architects design better objects they are imprisoning people, not setting them free. The process of making architecture is more important than the resulting product. That process is too important to be left to architects.

When architecture becomes a process of producing ever better objects, people become disempowered. Cities will only become friendly places once again, and places where we feel we belong, when we begin empowering people, rather than asking them to answer surveys.

Meanwhile, successful architects are busy turning our built environment failure into a business success. Protocols and task forces are little more than avoidance techniques. The architectural failure of the material object has been turned into a triumphant success for materialism.

Those who reap the rewards and go to Italy to enjoy their holidays in the wonderful vernacular hill towns must weep at what we are doing to ourselves. Once we all knew how to build. The recently passed Architects Act makes architecture a business, not a profession.

As a nation obsessed with success, rather than happiness, it is important to recognise that failure is not a problem for successful people. On the contrary, it can become a valuable source of energy.

We are fortunate to live in times when there is a great deal of negative energy just waiting to be turned into positive energy. When times were tough and there really were problems, everyone was so busy doing something about them that no one had time to complain.

As our society has become more affluent, and people have become disempowered, everyone has begun to complain about everything. Particularly urban design.

Individuals and institutions have shown us the way. We now need only to become successful communities. It may not be as difficult as everyone imagines. Problem-solving is an inefficient and expensive waste of resources. A change of attitude offers a cheap alternative.

* Tony Watkins is a co-director of the International Union of Architects' sustainability work programme.