Transport CCO must do urban design

Reading today’s article about Jan Gehl got me thinking about how all the cool things he proposes might actually happen in the brave new world that is the Auckland super city. While a lot of people call Mr Gehl an architect, urban planner and so forth (inspired genius is what I tend to call him), what I think is probably the most appropriate job title for him is “public space urban designer”. In effect, he focuses on how public spaces can be adapted and altered to best improve urban environments for people to live, work and play in.

Urban design is a relatively new discipline, slotting some way between architecture and planning. Here’s how wikipedia describes it:

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has been linked to emergent disciplines such as landscape urbanism. However, with its increasing prominence in the activities of these disciplines, it is better conceptualised as a design practice that operates at the intersection of all three, and requires a good understanding of a range of others besides, such as urban economics, political economy and social theory.

Urban design theory deals primarily with the design and management of public space (i.e. the ‘public environment’, ‘public realm’ or ‘public domain’), and the way public places are experienced and used. Public space includes the totality of spaces used freely on a day-to-day basis by the general public, such as streets, plazas, parks and public infrastructure. Some aspects of privately owned spaces, such as building facades or domestic gardens, also contribute to public space and are therefore also considered by Urban design theory.

Because urban design is primarily concerned about the “public realm”, the spaces between buildings where people interact with each other, it is enormously related to transport – because after all most ‘public space’ is road-space. It is this strong connection between urban design and transport that Jan Gehl understands perhaps better than anyone else out there.

This is complicated territory, in that transport based urban design seeks to alter spaces that are usually considered to be more like urban corridors (for passing through) rather than urban rooms (for being in). Instead of altering these spaces in a way to improve their efficiency or throughput (like a traffic engineer would), an urban design approach to improving road-space would seek to improve the quality of being in that space. Often, but not always, improving the quality of that space will actually reduce the throughput or efficiency of that space – as measured by traditional transport engineering.

As a huge amount of the urban design that will be happening in Auckland in the future will be located within what are broadly called “roads”, I think it’s utterly essential that the future Auckland Transport CCO gets strongly involved in driving better urban design outcomes. It will be Auckland Transport that decides whether to expand upon the network of shared streets that Auckland City Council is about to create, it would be Auckland Transport’s decision to pedestrianise Quay Street and narrow Queen Street down to two lanes – as suggested by Jan Gehl. So while I’m very pleased to see that Auckland City Council urban design guru Ludo Campbell-Reid has a high-placed job within the new Auckland Council, I sincerely hope that the new Transport CCO gets down to the serious business of making sure that it hires a number of top-class urban designers and focuses on how to make Auckland a better place to be, not just an easier place to get around.

Surely we can eventually aim for great transport space like this – which nicely balances getting people through a space while not destroying that space: