Dialogue: Taking the city's pulse to help diagnose its ailments

Next week, the Sustainable Auckland Congress will examine how to make Auckland a more pleasant and profitable place. JIM SALINGER* says it is an opportunity to set goals for improving the quality of life.

Sparkling, clean waters in Auckland's harbours, teeming with fish and shellfish. It's what we had not so very long ago.

In the 1950s, the white sandy beaches around Pakuranga, Birkenhead and Pt Chevalier were packed with swimmers.

In the 1960s North Shore residents could still catch fair-sized snapper off the rocks, dig up tuatuas on the beach or forage for an oyster entree around rocky outcrops.

Now the inner-harbour beaches ooze with mud, shellfish are questionable because of pollution and even the still-golden North Shore beaches are regularly closed after heavy rain because of raw sewage overflow.

Any growing city expects growing pains, and Auckland has already spent more than a decade beginning to fix past problems and planning ways of improving quality of life as the city continues to expand.

The recent Knowledge Wave conference showed the wealth of information and options we have at our fingertips to make Auckland a more pleasant and profitable place to live.

Now the technical and business experts want to pool all that information and come up with concrete ways of improving and tracking Auckland's ongoing quality of life.

The Sustainable Auckland Congress, to be held in the Aotea Centre for four days from next Tuesday, brings together scientists, engineers, planners, architects and representatives from business, youth and community groups.

We want Auckland to be a successful, competitive city, with a high quality of life. To help to achieve that goal, the congress will amalgamate all available measurements and standards into a sustainability index so we can track progress and identify problems before they become major. An action plan will identify medium and long-term goals.

In the case of our beaches, for example, a medium-term goal might be perhaps to achieve a pristine Waitemata Harbour by 2020, according to set measurements.

There are many other areas where a sustainability index would give us an ongoing picture of the city's quality of life. These include public health, water and air quality, transport, population and regional gross domestic product, to name some.

As an example of public health, let's take the growth of meningococcal disease. This disease in the Auckland region, from being almost absent before 1990, reached epidemic proportions in the 1990s, peaking at 170 infants in 1998.

A long-term goal is to reduce this below 70 a year by 2007 and eliminate it in the next two to three decades.

Researchers have discovered that meningococcal disease is most prevalent in South Auckland and jumps during very cold conditions in winter. A solution might be to provide better insulation and heating in houses of at-risk communities.

And what of our air quality? The tangata whenua and early Pakeha settlers of the area breathed clean air with magnificent visibility and azure blue skies. But in the late 20th century more and more often yellow-brown horizons of smog are starting to appear.

What do we want? Clear air, of course. Options here might include introducing emissions testing and emissions-control devices on our cars.

We could, of course, move to cars powered by clean technology, such as fuel cells, or move towards public transport systems in a big way.

Transport has been an issue as long as Auckland has been New Zealand's largest centre. Not being blessed as the centre of government - which meant the development of public transport was subsidised in Wellington in the 1930s and 1940s - successive regional governments have struggled with the issue.

Depending on the time of day, it can take more than an hour to commute from the North Shore or Manukau City to central Auckland.

Sir Dove-Myer Robinson late last century wanted to implement a rapid-rail system. The Auckland Regional Council has estimated that traffic congestion costs the region $750 million a year. It has developed a regional land transport strategy.

An initial target must be to reduce travelling time and to improve access around the region. Options might include some form of rapid-rail system, improving transport corridors, or introducing teleworking and the dispersal of workplaces around the region. For this to be successful we need a vision, commitment and action plan now.

Auckland's population has grown from a small town in 1850 to just over 50,000 by 1901 and 200,000 in 1936.

Growth accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s and the population reached a million-plus in 1996.

The plan in the Auckland Regional Council growth strategy is to have about a doubling of population to 1.96 million by 2050, with growth within existing metropolitan areas in quality, compact, urban environments.

The challenge for this growth will be to double our population yet improve the ongoing quality of life.

By integrating all available knowledge, and setting up a dialogue between the city's varied sectors, our chances of achieving this aim will be much higher.

Overseas cities are starting to use the sustainability index to measure progress towards various social, economic and environmental targets for the future.

At this congress we will be taking a sustainability assessment of where Auckland is now.

It will be like a medical checkup. We will then develop where we want to be in 10 and 20 years and practical ways of measuring this.

As a group of Aucklanders, we are proud of our city. We want Auckland to stand tall as an outstanding city in the blue Pacific - economically, socially and environmentally for us and for our children.

* Dr Jim Salinger, who will chair the congress, is a Companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand.