In 1965, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones arrived in Invercargill, New Zealand’s southernmost city. Jagger famously described Invercargill as “the arsehole of the world”. He later tried to fob it off by saying he was having a bad day and attempted to blame Keith Richards for it.
If you google “arsehole of the world” you will be shocked by what comes up. The most shocking thing of all is that Invercargill still carries this tagline. It is a memorable insult that has been hard to shake.
As Jagger suspected, New Zealand has never been good at cities and many, like Invercargill, were laid out in perfect grids that ignored local topography and maintained the air of a temporary camp in their spartan layout. A number of these were drawn up in Europe, where large, dense populations were able to fill large spaces easily. Invercargill was given wide, grand streets that would be a statement of power somewhere like Edinburgh. For a small, thinly spread population in a remote southern corner of the Pacific, the result was something close to desolation.
With the arrival of the automobile in the early-20th century, things only got worse. As urban designer Garth Falcon pointed out, it is a paradox that New Zealanders love the wide open spaces of nature, yet this is the very thing that kills our cities. We have too much space and too much opportunity to distance ourselves from each other. If our preference is for small towns, perhaps our problem is not the cities themselves, but our definition of them.
Defining exactly what is a city has been debated by archaeologists, economists and geographers for centuries. At various times, trade, specialisation and big buildings have been bandied around as the measure of city-ness. The British Empire defined a city as a settlement with a cathedral, a notion that probably says more about the power of religion. In 1954, the New Zealand government attempted to clear up this confusion with the introduction of the Municipal Corporations Act, which defined all boroughs and cities as urban and all counties as rural.
To achieve borough status, the population had to reach 1000. A city was defined as a borough with a population of at least 20,000. These days, no city in the Western world would define itself by so low a population threshold, and New Zealand raised its bar to 50,000 in 1989.
Definition by numbers takes no account of the density required to make a city (even Eden Park can hold 50,000). And holding to this definition has not been helped by several small towns clinging to their city status despite the law change, seeing it as a boost to their image. It is the New Zealand colonial spirit of optimism at its best.
Byline blitz
All this numerical branding has led to other, more poetic versions of this idea of defining a city. Christchurch pounced on the power of the picturesque and has long been known as the Garden City. Auckland is known as the City of Sails. But when the use of bylines became fashionable in the early 1990s, this idea took off with entertaining results. “Hamilton: More Than You Would Expect” did little to discourage mirth from Aucklanders. In Ashburton, the “Whatever It Takes” byline at the northern entrance was vandalised with some piercing critique that read “Ashburton: Whatever”.
Despite this optimistic accounting and overselling, defining a city by population size means these places can still call themselves cities when in fact they are large provincial towns. Our instincts tell us they are not cities; they lack the unlimited social possibilities and unpredictability of truly metropolitan spaces.
When I explained this to a friend, he was miffed to have his hometown cast from city status. He challenged me to define a city, and as usual I came up with a half-baked theory.
To test if you are in a city, walk down the main street of the central business district, making eye contact and saying hello to 10 random strangers. If you meet anyone you know, you are not in a city. If eight of the 10 return your eye contact and say hello back, you are not in a city. If nine of the 10 do not return your gaze, or say hello, you are in a city. (The one person who barks at you is only recognising you as a kindred spirit.)
I have tried this strategy in some of New Zealand’s major cities and it seems under this definition, none of them qualifies. I have also discovered that there seem to be a lot of barking people in Auckland’s Queen St.
British sociologist Richard Sennett describes a utopian vision of the city as “a place where strangers meet and where new ideas are formed in public space”. Others see the city as unsustainable by its definition.
Historian Ian Angus refers to the concept of fossil capitalism as the foundation of the city, hypothesising that the swift economic growth that started in the 18th century and spawned the modern city was not the result of intellect or trade but a short-term discovery of cheap, seemingly unlimited fossil fuel. Under this theory, a city is like a child’s bouncy castle: turn off the energy source and the whole thing dissipates like a mirage in front of your eyes.
Most of the theories of what makes a city, including my half-baked definition, fall flat. It is like trying to put a jersey on a cat: it slips and slithers and reappears behind you just when you thought you had it.
True cities are messy affairs; they are dense, out of control and high as a kite on fossil fuel. They are not defined by a number or slogan, nor are they planned like a vegetable patch. They are cosmopolitan, and not a collection of religious or racial enclaves eyeing each other over the invisible walls of clustered suburbia. They are the home of freethinking and busy public spaces. They are not found in the surreptitious private space of a mall or an automobile.
The essence of urbanity
If New Zealand appears not to have a city by any definition, we do have plenty of provincial towns. We do them by the dozen and they work in their own funny way through the will of the people and not by good design or definition of form. We may even call them cities but will defend them to the death when they are threatened by the incendiary remarks of visiting celebrities.
The Rolling Stones have never been invited back to Invercargill to play a gig and it is unlikely Mick Jagger has taken a late-life interest in urban design. Despite this, somewhere along Invercargill’s wide and empty streets there is the essence of New Zealand’s version of urbanity: wandering around in too much space, proud as punch and friendly as hell. Invercargill is the southernmost town at the bottom of the world in a country that should stop pretending it has cities and get comfortable with its small-town dominion.
