Tracey Barnett: Great ideas worth stealing

Decades ago, the Japanese hit upon a great little idea. Trucks drove around neighbourhoods with speakers singing out "Got any old newspaper? We'll give you toilet paper in return!" You'd see housewives waving down the truck to get their recycled loo paper.

The idea must have latched on to the national psyche. Today for each ton of used train tickets generated by Tokyo's 54 per cent daily ridership [dream on Auckland], the Japanese remake 6000 rolls of toilet paper. There's a haiku just waiting to happen on toiletry using a Newmarket-Papakura return.

Free toilet paper won't morph Auckland's profile into a bust of urban progress but, like any Jafa with mochaccino grande-sized opinions, I belong to the Homer Simpson school of urban innovation. Whenever I see a great idea we should steal from another city, I slap my forehead and cry out, "Doh! Why don't we do that?" and call for more civic donuts.

Let's steal from Portland, Oregon. Once decidedly un-hip and sagging, Portland has transformed itself into a poster child of progress.

Their little gems worth stealing? They now require 1 per cent of all new building and renovation budgets to be allocated for public art.

What that means is even when a new parking garage is built, you might see giant multi-coloured salmon swimming up the facade.

To give their central square character, the city paved it with over 71,000 named bricks individuals can buy. To honour someone or when a new baby is born, friends can gift a brick with a name inscribed. You see people walking the area with their noses pointed at their toes and soon realise they are just looking for their brick.

Take note Vulcan Lane, no one has to debate blue stone pavers because there is a little piece of everyone in the streets. Vulcan Lane is a tiny shining example of what we all crave from our best urban moments in Sienna, Buenos Aires or the French Quarter in New Orleans - areas of a city designated for an intimate pedestrian-scale experience. Without cars. Blink and you miss it here in Auckland.

Neil Fraser of Johannesburg, one of four urban development experts from around the world who came here last week to study us, was trying to be polite when he made the ultimate understatement, "This isn't a particularly pedestrian-friendly city."

We can close streets around High St to join Vulcan Lane to foster more outdoor seating, cafes, and stall vendors. An intimate pedestrian experience has already begun there, make it grow.

Copy cities like Chicago that have also successfully captured their waterfront for an extensive pedestrian greenspace corridor. They created an active edge for their city that we could mimic by extending our pedestrian corridor from St Heliers to Westhaven.

Don't stop there. Make a pedestrian path (Kiwi clip-on?) across the Harbour Bridge like Sydney that would allow you to continue the journey towards Birkenhead or Devonport.

One gesture can spawn urban liveability bounty.

A few decades ago, Portland bit the bullet and moved an entire freeway off its waterfront and reclaimed a continuous green space.

Portland's efforts have translated into 12,000 bike commuters a day with paths radiating all over the city. On weekends the waterfront paths come alive.

Businesses have stepped up, providing shower stalls in office blocks. Bike parking is required in all new office buildings as in Copenhagen. Are you listening, transport planners?

If pedalling is not your thing, another great why-didn't-I-think-of that idea is Flexcar, a car-sharing service working in several US cities.

For a small yearly membership of about $120, a Ponsonbeenie could book their shared car any time, paying by the day, or by the hour. Cars are parked in various central neighbourhoods to which the city gives priority parking. When this works, everyone wins. Pooled money covers insurance and general costs.

Some ideas simply work because they make your Nana proud. Ireland came up with a no-brainer plan to slap a 25c tax on each plastic grocery bag. Miraculously 90 per cent of bags disappeared from landfills after a year. Recyclable cloth bags multiplied like rabbits overnight.

Ireland took the €9.6 million ($19.2 million) payoff generated in its inaugural year and stashed it into a green fund. What nice seed money to launch our green waterfront corridor.

In our back garden, look at the Pasifika Festival, already bursting at the seams with popularity. We could echo Paris' Nuit Blanche by extending it citywide, taking Polynesian music into the streets for one long night. Celebrate our own and showcase our culture internationally. More than a million people go to Paris for this event. Rome and Brussels have now caught on.

On the lips of any Auckland cafe-dweller worth his weight in parking tickets and road rage is the call to make this city have a more visionary profile. Maybe tackling urban innovation really just translates into mud-wrestling civic focus.

In true urban Obi-Wan wisdom, Neil Fraser said it best, "I came here to discuss how to make Auckland a world-class city but why do you want to be a world-class city? Why don't you want to be something special instead? Coming to a world-class city might interest me, but coming to the city with the largest Polynesian culture in the world - now that is special. There is so much richness here."

In cafes all over Auckland, you can hear the thump of palm to forehead, "Doh! Why don't we get that?"