Dialogue: City of carparks and lost chances

By SANDY BURGHAM

If it's good enough for Garth George to write about Auckland City despite being ineligible to enter the write-about-your-city competition, it's good enough for me.

Gee, I am tossing up whether my favourite corner of the city is that nice carpark they erected in the spot where His Majesty's Theatre used to be, or that free turning lane in Symonds St, where for many years stood an old hotel that must have held many city secrets and stories.

At heart, I have always been a fairly typical Aucklander who loves the rest of New Zealand but just could never imagine living anywhere but Auckland. But a short trip to Wellington over Easter has illuminated why Wellingtonians don't sell up and come to live in our great city.

Having spent some time there in the 80s when it wasn't as cool, I could never understand why people bothered living in the capital. The weather was awful, there were few internal-access garages and the street life seemed to be a sea of anorak-wearing public-serving commuters.

But now I get it. While we have been deliberating over a will we/won't we Britomart decision, Wellingtonians have been hard at work ensuring that their city is interesting and unique. While Auckland congratulates itself on its brainwave to restore the Civic and the Town Hall, Wellington assumes its many historic building as living history, respecting them, restoring them and ensuring they are accessible to all.

We spent a Monday evening wandering around Cuba St, a lively, inner-city area that didn't feel like the Gaza Strip. The next day was reserved for Te Papa and an exploration of the harbour foreshore. This has been thoughtfully laid out as a true community space so tourists, youth and a variety of commercial interests can all share, enjoy and use it. While I am delighted that our own Viaduct Basin has been beautified and opened to the public, in comparison it is simply an inner-city playground for rich yachties.

My uncle, an ex-Aucklander who defected to Wellington years ago, tells me that in his day Queen St was alive and pumping. It's a sad indictment when Wellington's Courtenay Place, traditionally a dive, is now more enticing than our main strip, a characterless stretch of drab buildings most of which seem to be last-minute creations of those outrageous developers of the 80s.

Some of us remember when Auckland's inner city was an adventure - when His Majesty's Arcade was a trove of bohemian interest. And when Swanson St, cutting from Queen to Albert, was a fun and happening little lane.

But we nostalgics are outnumbered by the mindless masses that follow the various councils' lead in embracing shopping malls. Who are these people with no taste who have taken it upon themselves to decide on our behalf that we need soulless malls that run for miles and now confusingly all have the same name? These hideous monuments to the last part of the previous millennium will never make history nor our city eclectic and colourful. They are destined to become white elephants we will one day despair of. Alternatively they could get so big that in the future they all join up to create a world similar to that imagined in the 70s movie Logan's Run, a gigantic bubble housing a bland and clinical community in which everyone dressed the same and had no need to go outside.

Thus my favourite aspect of Auckland is anywhere that there is still strip shopping. K Rd, of course, is the king of strip shopping, with Dominion Rd slugging it out with Ponsonby Rd for second place. Newmarket ranks poorly, beaten even by Panmure, as it feels like a mall with the lid taken off it. And if the mega mall being discussed goes ahead, Newmarket will fall off my scorecard altogether.

Like many of my fellow Aucklanders who love to travel, I revel in foreign cities whose nooks and neighbourhoods have been allowed to grow organically, every year adding layers to their history. But this will never happen in Auckland where we seem to have no sense of history and a strange love of the new.

No wonder we were struggling with adopting the well-intentioned efforts to develop a unifying symbol of Auckland. Even if the hand signal itself was a bit, well, naff, I congratulate the efforts to at least try to inject some character into our city, which has become as disappointing as a beautiful woman with no personality.