Dialogue: We must plan for new types of housing

By NIGEL COOK*

By 2050, Auckland's population is expected to be double what it is now. The city is going to change more rapidly than ever. We need to be open to new ways of building a city if we are to keep the best part of our suburbs and develop the rest to take the estimated growth.

The old method - never-ending suburban growth - will cost too much and use too much land and certainly won't suit most of the people who will live here.

The city we have been building for the past 150 years has evolved into three monocultures. One, mainly to the south, for industry; one around the port, for commerce; and in between and around everything else a third, the sprawl of suburbia. That, of course, means three-bedroom houses.

This is a hopelessly inefficient way to make a city, and our transport woes are the symptom of that. Technically, notwithstanding all the talk, we have a small transport problem.

What we have is a land-use problem - the three monocultures. If we could modify those, we would be much closer to a transport solution.

To give the Auckland City Council planners their due, they were trying to solve that problem when they blundered into proposing six-storey apartments in a low-income area in Panmure. This, however, was the wrong housing in the wrong place and for the wrong people.

Building a city out of one kind of house (and car) was fine for at least the past 50 years when most of us lived in family groups.

But this is no longer true. We have to plan for new types of dwellings to suit singles and couples, both old and young. They are going to make up more than half the property-owners in years to come.

We need to plan and build a whole range of new housing types that, although they are common in the rest of the developed world, are hardly used in Auckland. Among these will be tall blocks of apartments because in some places, and for many people, they are the ideal way of living.

There are, however, three groups for which they are not adequate - families, low-income renters and the infirm.

Tall apartment buildings have had a bad press lately.

Partly this is just the suspicion of dealing with something new.

Auckland is unusual for a city of this size in having very few tall apartment buildings. But also it is the result of the British experience with multistorey housing.

This was, for years, a disaster. Built under a Tory Government to house the working class, they rapidly turned into slums. Many were badly built and could not be repaired. In groups they formed towering, horrible, monuments to a failed social strategy.

But the public attitude to them has been transformed over the past decade. The worst have been demolished. The rest are being renovated and, in the way of things, are becoming some of the trendiest places to live for the young, new-age, affluent city dwellers.

There is no reason the same should not be the case in Auckland. Contrary to what has been said lately, they are a good way to house people provided they live in them as a matter of choice.

Properly located so they do not fill the view from other houses, they provide the occupiers with a sense of expansive freedom as well as wonderful views across the city.

Instead of imposing high density on places such as Panmure, the city should set out to return dwellings to the inner-city. Between, say, Ponsonby ridge and Newmarket there are many sites where tall apartments could be built without disturbing other people's views.

This would add to the vitality of the commercial centre and help to repair the damage of the past 50 years.

We could aim for an eventual population of 100,000 in the area.

As a comparison, Wellington has about 35,000 in its inner-city.

An obvious place for this kind of development would have been the top of Symonds St. But there the council has allowed a developer to waste one of the most precious sites in central Auckland. Two-storey maisonettes get in each other's way and serve to hide that wonderful view down wooded Grafton Gully and on out to the harbour and the gulf.

Nothing is made of the great panoramas to the south and north and the whole thing, instead of being an ornament to the city, is just a depressing mistake.

But this waste - too-low densities - of valuable land is going on all the time around central Auckland.

The railway land south from Newmarket along Great South Rd or the old Henderson Pollard site are two more examples where properly spaced tall apartments mixed with dense two to three-storey housing could have given wide-open views as well as the intimacy of properly planned garden maisonettes.

This could have been done with a minimum of intrusion on other home-owners.

Our population grew up in houses with gardens and many today need at least a tiny piece of land to feel comfortable. But those who set our city limits should be in the business of thinking 20 years ahead and planning for that.

For a generation coming into the market, a garden is a waste of time and space. They will happily live up high with the long views over the landscape.

We should be planning and building for their future.

All this is a matter for the politicians. But they cannot lead if given bad advice by the planners.

And we cannot expect the real estate industry to lead, either. It follows the market and people do not ask for what doesn't exist.

The developers, naturally, stick to what they know will sell and will simply keep on building the same thing until all the land is used up, unless persuaded otherwise.

So we are going to have to do a lot better than we are now if we are to make a successful, efficient city that has double the present population, and do it without eating up the farmlands around us.

* Nigel Cook is a founding member of the Institute of Architects' urban issues group.

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