La Rambla of the South Seas: The Queen St we could have

La Rambla in Barcelona. If they're going to take our sailing trophy, why don't we take their street? Photo / supplied

OPINION

It's a broad pedestrian boulevard, lined with trees and full of people. It used to be lined with shops but these days the shops have mainly given way to cafes, hawkers and souvenir kiosks. The alleys that lead off the boulevard are full of shops, however, and so are the streets that run parallel to it.

It's the city's premier shopping destination, the centre of its booming tourism, one of the great streets of the world. Welcome to La Rambla in Barcelona.

You know, if Barcelona is going to take our America's Cup, why don't we take their main street? We could turn Queen St into La Rambla, Pasifika styles.

We really could. Tāmaki Makaurau, like Barcelona, capital of the Catalans, has an enormously rich and vibrant local culture. We'd want, as the Catalans have done, to place that culture closer to the heart of things than now. But we could do that. This city was founded on the goodwill of Ngāti Whātua and there's a lot of giving back to be done.

You mightn't know it to look, just now, but Queen St shares many things with La Rambla. Both curve gently to the sea, with a large and often busy public square at one end, historic wharves and a beautiful harbour at the other. Queen St is tree-lined, too, although there could be more.

We have some lovely buildings: the Ferry Building, the Waitematā Railway Station (the new name, soon to be made official, of the old Britomart Station), the Dilworth, Smith & Caughey, the Civic, the town hall, several commercial buildings too. Again, there should be more, but Queen St is not bereft.

There's such potential in this old street. Photo / Alex Burton

A block away, High St has the makings of a very fine shopping precinct, with Freyberg Square at its heart. Britomart and Commercial Bay are already very fine; Fort St and Federal St could easily become so.

La Rambla is broad, with service lanes to each side, but Queen St doesn't have room for that. If we want crowds, we can't have cars, at least not all the time on all parts of the street.

The essential difference between La Rambla and Queen St is what Barcelona does to encourage people. Photo / supplied

The centre of Barcelona is full of apartments, but 40,000 people live in central Auckland so that's true here too. Anyone who still thinks of the area as "the CBD" has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the inner city.

In both cities, the locals do most of their shopping in the suburbs. But as Barcelona shows, that doesn't have to mean death for the city centre.

Both Queen St and La Rambla compete with other parts of town that are more cool, more edgy, less defined by tourists fresh off the boats. That doesn't have to mean death, either.

Oh, and they're both port cities facing a climate crisis. Fail to confront that and we really could be in trouble.

So how do we do it? How do we renew the heart of Tāmaki Makaurau, the city embraced by thousands?

Maybe it's about thinking differently.

There's a corrosive small-town mentality that all too easily gets in the way. If you want to buy something or see someone, the right thing to do is to ride your horse into town and hitch it to the rail outside the shop. But Auckland is not Taihape. We have couriers, car park buildings, ride shares and taxis, footpaths, cycle lanes and far more public transport than many seem to realise.

Except for the lucky flukes, it hasn't been possible to park outside the shop in central Auckland for decades. But many retailers, landlords, council staff, media and other citizens insist on a transport system that pretends you can.

There's no right to drive wherever and whenever you want. It stunts the city when we think like that.

One bit of giving back to mana whenua we could do is to daylight the Waihorotiu. That's the stream that ran down the Queen St valley, full of eels, the trees bristling with birds, until it became a sewer and was bricked up. It's still there, underground, still flowing to the sea.

La Rambla, as it happens, was also built over a stream that became a sewer. There are a hundred ways to make Waihorotiu splendid once again and the artist Chris Dews has rather splendidly imagined one of them.

Waihorotiu Restoration: Artist Chris Dews' concept of the stream under Queen St brought back to life. Photo / Chris Dews

Daylighting the stream would do something else. It would give the inner city a Big Idea. An imaginatively realised, bravely unique thing. You need a Big Idea, if restoration and renewal are ever going to work.

It won't just happen. Queen St won't revive unless political leaders and community and business leaders are determined to make it so. Unless the rest of us support them to do it.

There are things to learn from La Rambla. One is that although there are luxury stores in those alleyways, the atmosphere suggests a market. It's lively and informal, with outdoor stalls, hawkers, street entertainers, fountains and public art. They're what bring the crowds.

There's a view among some of the Queen St decision-makers that it must never become a market. What nonsense. La Rambla shows that posh thrives on populist. Queen St will not bounce back until the landlords fill the shops and, if they have to pay the shopkeepers to open, they should just do it. Go on, you guys, do it together, you'll have fun and so will we.

Queen St also needs the offices above the shops to be busy. If business tenants are going to leave the inner city, the spaces they leave behind should be converted to apartments – and schools and other public spaces. Council and the Government need the regulations and, above all, the can-do enabling attitude to help this happen.

Another lesson from La Rambla: It's not an obscure little side street. It's the main street. The council has focused on quality makeovers for relatively inconspicuous streets – think O'Connell St and Jean Batten Place – but it's Queen St that needs it most.

The biggest La Rambla lesson of all is that it's pointless lowering your ambitions in search of consensus. You end up with mediocre solutions that annoy everyone: witness Queen St today. Far better to aim really high: make something magnificent and it will be a winner.

The current Queen St upgrades will be finished sometime this year and they will help. But they'll be a stopgap. Queen St needs a Sydney Opera House solution: planning should start now to daylight that stream.

And because we know council has no money, the landlords, who are currently watching the value of their properties go down the toilet, should step up to help pay for it.

Almost every time I write about something another city has done, there are critics who say it couldn't happen here because it's harder for us. We have a bad case of reverse exceptionalism. We can't do what they did because our problems are bigger than theirs.

Sometimes, it seems there is no end to the nonsense. Our problems are no different. Amsterdam, city of bicycles, was gridlocked with traffic in the early 1970s. Until very recently, so was Paris, and Times Square in New York, Oxford St in London, George St in Sydney. These cities prosper because they changed.

Just another day in downtown ... Amsterdam, 1970s. Photo / supplied