My latest purchase from Amazon.com is a book by Allan B. Jacobs, called Great Streets. The book looks at a wide variety of different streets around the world, from great boulevards to tiny cul-de-sacs, and analyses exactly what seems to make some of them “work”, and others not. Further to that, he looks what what makes some of these streets truly great.
Here’s the book’s cover:Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book (which I am only partway through so far) is the criteria that Allan Jacobs puts together for determining what makes a great street. It’s worth quoting:
First and foremost, a great street should help make a community: should facilitate people acting and interacting to achieve in concert what they might achieve alone. Accordingly, streets that are accessible to all, easy to find and easy to get to, would be better than those that are not. The best streets will be those where it is possible to see other people and to meet them; all kinds of people, not just of one class or colour or age. The criterion would work at many geographic scales, from citywide to neighbourhood, which open the possibility of types of great streets. Great neighbourhood streets would be the foci for people of a smaller geographic area than of a city, conceivably an area as small as the street itself. A great street should be a most desirable place to be, to spend time, to live, to play, to work, at the same time that it markedly contributes to what a city should be. Street are settings for activities that bring people together.
A great street is physically comfortable and safe. A great street might be cooler, more shady than another street on a hot summer day and therefore more pleasant to be on.There would be no sudden, unexpected gusts of wind off buildings. If there are many people there should not be so many as to make it difficult or uncomfortable to walk; it should not provoke a sense of confinement. Physical safety is another matter, and it can mean many things: but the general concern is relatively straightforward. One shouldn’t have to worry about being hit by a car or truck or about tripping on the pavement or about some other physical thing built into the street being unsafe…
…The best streets encourage participation. People stop to talk or maybe they sit and watch, as passive participants, taking in what the street has to offer. Demonstrations are possible. For over 15 years on the main street of Curitiba, Brazil, a long. long strip of paper has been paid on the pavement every Saturday morning, held down by wooden sticks every metre or so, thereby creating hundreds of individual white paper surfaces. Children that come are offered a brush and paint, and they do pictures as parents and friends watch. Social or economic status is not a requirement for joining in, only desire. Participation in the life of a street involves the ability of people who occupy buildings (including houses and stores) to add something to the street, individually or collectively, to be part of it. That contribution can take the form of sign or flower or awnings or colour, or in altering the buildings themselves. Responsibility, including maintenance, comes with participation.
The best streets are those than can be remembered. They leave strong, long-continuing positive impressions. Thinking of a city, including one’s own, one might well think of a particular street and have a desire to be there, such a street is memorable.
What I find great about this passage is that it recognises and highlights the need for streets to be considered as places in their own right, not just corridors to get from A to B. Unfortunately in Auckland we tend to give very little priority to viewing our streets as places, even in the case of what should be Auckland’s very own “great street”: Queen Street. Queen Street has a lot going for it, but at least in my view just fails to reach the heights of being a great street – largely because there’s a four-lane highway down the middle of it.
Creating great streets is clearly something that sits right at the intersection of land-use planning and transportation planning. We are effectively designing the street, which is in the transportation corridor, but we are designing them not just with the movement of people and vehicles through them in mind, but also in such a way that can make them great places in and of themselves. Because, after all most public space in a city is comprised of the street.
Which leads me to the question of who, in the new Auckland Super City structure, would be in charge of helping to create “great streets”? The Transport CCO, which is simply required to focus on transporting people around the city and is unlikely to employ an urban designer; or the Auckland Council who might have urban designers coming out of their ears – but won’t have the legal power to do anything within the street area? Yet again we see reasons to not split off transport matters from land-use planning.
Last night I went to an interesting workshop, run by Auckland City Council, to help discuss important matters that should be included in a future District Plan for the Mt Albert area. This is all part of the Future Planning Framework that was supposed to inform the next generation District Plan for the isthmus area of Auckland City – until the whole Super City thing killed off that idea. Nevertheless, Auckland City Council continue to plough forwards with their work on this, I suppose hoping that the new council will pick up on the work that has been done and carry it forward into the new District Plan for the whole region that will need to be prepared eventually.
Anyway, the workshop was quite interesting, broken into three tables: transport, housing and main street. I tended to flit between the transport group and the housing group, as I was there for work reasons so couldn’t solely focus on my transport interests – although it was tempting given the number of ARTA staff there! Focusing on transport matters (as, after all, this is a transport blog) I tried to point out to a number of people that Mt Albert actually has a heck of a lot going for it: there’s a railway station in the middle of the town centre, there’s a strong CBD-focused bus route along New North Road and there’s also a pretty strong cross-town route – in the form of Carrington Road and Mt Albert Road. Sure, the bus frequencies on the cross-town route aren’t particularly flash, but hopefully over time that will be improved as ARTA (and their undemocratic successor) get around to putting bus lanes along Mt Albert Road and Carrington Road and creating a property “Quality Transit Network” along that route.
As shown in the map below, in terms of transport accessibility, you can’t do much better than Mt Albert: Yet something doesn’t work here. The Mt Albert shops are a place one tends to avoid, rather than be particularly drawn to. The general quality of the shops seems surprisingly low when you consider that the residential areas surrounding them are quite highly gentrified, particularly to the east. The train station is reasonably well used, with around 1,500 passengers a day boarding and alighting (making it the fourth busiest Western Line station after New Lynn, Henderson and Newmarket), but considering Unitec is located fairly nearby, I would think that the patronage is slightly disappointing.
In the future, as our cross-town routes (hopefully) get better supported, and as integrated ticketing encourages people to make multi-leg journeys a bit more, Mt Albert could become a critically important transfer point in the Auckland transport network. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen unless significant improvements are made to the finer details of how this transport interchange will work, and also vast improvements to the Mt Albert train station and its site surrounds are made. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the station, but trust me it’s pretty dire – possibly the ugliest station left in Auckland at the moment. ARTA have some plans for a quick-fix upgrade, but really in the longer term I think that Mt Albert’s strategic location means that something extra is needed. If we get the train station upgrade right then hopefully it will have significant wider benefits for the whole town centre too.
An idea that I had, along with a number of other people at the workshop, was that we really need something that will help link the railway station with New North Road better, will help stitch together the two-sides of Mt Albert (split by the railway line) and will help “open up” the rear of the shops along New North Road to the train station. Another matter to consider was the need for the Woodward Ave level crossing (to the southwest of the map above) to be grade separated for safety reasons at some point in the future. This is likely to mean that the railway track will be lowered. If the tracks are to be lowered, then there’s the potential to do something similar to what is happening at New Lynn at the moment, with the line being put into a trench. On top of the trench, at least as it passes through what would be Mt Albert station, you could could a big public square – which would act as the heart of Mt Albert and have shops opening out onto it. There would be plenty of links between the square and the surrounding street network (so that it doesn’t end up hidden like the Newmarket Station Square). Possibly something like this: An upgrade like this would clearly link together the two sides of Mt Albert to a far greater extent. The new roading link would provide better access to the shopping area for those who live on the northwestern side of the tracks, and would probably make that area more suitable to the kind of intensification Auckland City Council envisages for the area (up to 3-4 level townhouses and apartments). Opening up the back of the shops that are squeezed between the railway line and New North Road would also improve their economic viability and performance, while the public square itself would provide a great focal point for the community – and would be reasonably safe and secure because of the proximity of the new road link, Carrington Road and the various other access points.
Of course this is all just a bit of a dream, but what it shows me is that it’s stupid trying to plan transport upgrades (like the Mt Albert station) without co-ordinating them with other land-use improvements or townscape upgrades. As I have said many times before, we need closer co-operation and integration between land-use and transport planning. It seems pretty crazy that instead we will be splitting them into two completely separate agencies.
I must say I completely disagree with Mr Swney here. Building more parking buildings just encourages people to drive into the city rather than catch public transport. So it puts cars onto the road rather than taking them off it. Let’s have a look at the area we are talking about: As you can see, the site just about sits on top of Britomart railway station. So it doesn’t exactly lack options for public transport. Most of Auckland’s bus routes pass through this area as well. So I think it’s really disappointing to see a parking building that’s completely unnecessary, will simply put another 1200 vehicles on the already congested roads of Auckland’s CBD and wastes a hugely critical site on Auckland’s waterfront.
Maybe we really need to introduce a parking levy on off-street parking spaces in the CBD to discourage this?
An excellent video by renowned author James Howard Kunstler on why public spaces should be inspired centres of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what there is in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.
Courtesy of “Going Solar“, here are a number of extracts from an address made by famous urban writer Jane Jacobs, to the New York Motor Bus Association in 1958. 52 years later, her words still seem incredibly appropriate.
I swing between being incredibly inspired and incredibly depressed by what Jane Jacobs writes. Inspired because she is just so extremely right, and it’s fantastic that someone has put into words exactly my feelings on what the problems are with urban planning and urban transport matters. But I feel depressed because she was saying all this 50 odd years ago, and what she said then is just as valid – if not more valid – today. I think that either she’s one of the most influential urban writers ever – because she was the first to raise many of the issues now preoccupying urban planners; or she has been completely uninfluential – because we’re still stuffing things up in exactly the same way we were 50 years ago.
I had an interesting meeting at work last week, where we laughed about the fact that urban planning has for so long been about “colouring in” maps – into one zone or another. Somewhat ironically, later on in the meeting we were back in the situation of colouring in maps, but I’ll leave that aside for now. While this post is mainly about urban planning, and how I think we generally do it exceedingly poorly, you can’t detach land-use planning from transportation matters, and the fact that we do urban planning so poorly certainly contributes to poor transportation outcomes as well (although it does not absolve us from getting transportation planning right, which is a pretty common excuse).
For a start, I think it’s important to look at what I think are the two greatest ironies of urban planning. The first comes from the history of urban planning, which developed in the late 19th century as something of an ‘urban code’ to help avoid terrible situations where you had polluting factories next to houses. The irony is that, 125 or so years later, we’re still obsessing about strongly separating business uses from residential uses – even though there’s barely any heavy industry left in cities like Auckland. Urban planning also sought to overcome the 19th century problem of over-crowding, by introducing rules which prevented or minimised the chance of over-crowding. Today, once again we have the irony of most of our planning rules dictating “minimum site areas” per residential unit along with a myriad of other rules that promote a tiny house in the middle of a giant section, and make life pretty difficult for anything else. This happens at the same time our regional planning documents are imploring higher urban densities – particularly in growth nodes. The irony is that we’re fighting 19th century battles against over-crowding and dirty industry in the 21st century when we actually need higher densities and more mixed-use developments.
The second irony is that, as we’ve planned more and more over the past 100 years or so, the outcomes seem to be worse and worse. Ask most urban planners what they think are the ‘better’ parts of Auckland and it’s highly likely you’ll be pointed to the older suburbs. The very same suburbs with under-width streets, houses supposedly too close together, houses definitely too close to the street, no off-street parking and so forth. It is a great irony that the harder we try to get good urban outcomes, the poorer the results seem to be. Once again, it doesn’t help that most of the planning rules seem to contradict the higher-order policies and objectives.
A lot of the problem, in my opinion comes down to the concept of zoning. The RMA was actually supposed to get rid of zoning – focusing on the environmental effects of an activity rather than providing a list of OK activities for each zone – as was previously the case under the repealed Town and Country Planning Act. However, each and every council couldn’t quite get their head around how to plan urban areas without zoning, and as a result we end up with a situation where we are stuck with zoning once again. Here’s a typical District Plan map (Manukau City Council in this example): The pink areas are business zoned land, the “off-white” is for residential uses, the yellow is schools, motorways and other designations while the green is for parks. The purple is a bit of a special zone for the Manukau Institute of Technology. The point is that each bit of land is clearly one thing or another – either zoned for business or residential or something else. Goodness knows the hoops one would have to jump through in order to do a mixed use development with shops on the ground floor, offices above that and then apartments above that again. You’d probably trigger about a million different resource consents.
Now I’m not just picking on Manukau City Council here – literally everyone’s just as bad. Auckland City Council has a “Business Mixed Use” zone, which certainly envisages residential developments within it – but somewhat strangely as part of the process of creating this zone, Auckland City Council made residential developments more difficult in other Business zones. And the mixed-use zone is reasonably sparse around the city.
Single-use developments, by which I mean massive tracts of housing without any shops or massive tracts of business activities without any housing, is one of the most tell-tale signs of auto-dependent urban sprawl. People are too far away from where they need to go, so therefore they drive instead of walking. Furthermore, the low densities that typify this kind of development can make it more difficult (but certainly not impossible) to provide high quality public transport, so therefore they drive even more. Because zoning clearly states that a piece of land is for either this use or that use (but very rarely both), fundamentally I think that zoning encourages urban sprawl and works against our higher-order policies that hope to create a more compact, less automobile-dependent, city.
But what alternatives are there? Clearly we want to impose restrictions on what can and cannot be built in certain parts of the city. Some of those 19th century problems that we obsess over still have the potential to be problematic – like skyscrapers being built in the middle of otherwise low-rise suburbia (yes I’m looking at you Herne Bay towers), heritage housing being destroyed, inadequate open space being provided, sunlight being blocked and so forth. We probably also don’t really want trucking companies locating next door to too many people’s houses if we can avoid it too.
My idea is that we can still have something resembling a “zone” – but instead of saying “residential goes here” it might say “this is a growth area” or “this is a traditional town centre so be a bit careful” or “this is an area of heritage residential housing so be very careful what you do”. A key difference between this and the existing zoning system is that these zones could overlap. You could have one edge of your “standard housing area” overlap with your “business area” or a growth node – which would allow higher development densities. The outcome might be something like this (I’ve used Kingsland as an example as it has a range of uses). The area in yellow is generally heritage housing, the areas in red are town centres (Kingsland in the middle and Morningside to the west) and the area in green is generally light-industrial with plenty of development potential for higher densities. Something like this would reflect the range of (sometimes contradictory) aims that we might have for Kingsland: that we want to keep its distinctive heritage housing, we want to make it a vibrant shopping area (and retain an architectural cohesiveness to the town centre) but also we want to provide for some serious intensification as it’s an inner-city suburb with excellent public transport connections.
You could probably apply further layers on here – potentially breaking down your heritage housing area into sub-areas of higher and lower significance, or your growth areas into higher and lower intensities. Another useful thing is that the roads fall within the “zone”, which means that developments to the road network could be required to fit in with their surroundings to a greater extent. Perhaps the most interesting areas are those where two different areas intersect, so you end up with areas of the town centre that are within the green “growth area” – which might have more potential for large-scale redevelopment than parts of the town centre outside those areas. You could also potentially have growth areas coinciding with heritage housing areas – which would mean that whether redevelopment is appropriate would probably be decided on more of a “site by site” basis.
Obviously a council would be far more in depth when coming up with exact boundaries of the different “zones” (for want of a better word). However, the concept of being able to overlay various different “sought outcomes”, allowing a much finer grain of different development types – as an area might be allocated for either business or residential – is likely to lead to far better urban outcomes in my opinion. It’s a step forwards from the 1960s thinking of two-dimensional zoning in my opinion.
Last weekend I did a post about a Herald article on possible changes to policies that currently restrict urban sprawl in the Auckland region. Now ARC councillor Joel Cayford has done a lengthy blog post illustrating his take on the matter. It’s well worth a read. Some good extracts:
Like many large Western cities enthralled by the American Post War motorcar and motorway miracle, Auckland has battled with the consequences (eg escalating travel demands and congestion), and struggled to plan its way out of the trap we all find ourselves in. My research suggests that Vancouver – while I agree it’s not perfect – found itself in the same trap around 20 years ago – and after adopting a growth strategy – has managed to change the direction of its development to one which more strongly supports compact development over the taking of rural land for edge urban development. But it has been hard, and there is always that temptation and pressure from those seeking the quick returns of new subdivision.
A few years ago I was invited by Connal Townsend to attend an informal meeting of the Property Council. I was asked to share my ideas and thoughts about the Growth Strategy and Public Transport investment. A number of major players in Auckland’s property development industry were present. Some were very direct in their criticisms of Councils when attempts were made to progress “brownfield” redevelopment within existing urban environment. “Too hard”, was the catch- phrase. “Not worth the candle”.
But probably the most honest was the comment, “Joel, if you ask me to choose between buying an investment block just outside the MUL, or buying a CBD block for redevelopment, I’m going to buy the rural block everytime. You guys are going to fold….”
Around the same time I found myself sitting next to back-bencher Phil Heatley in a plane. He spoke of the frustration of being in Parliament all those years, but without the ability to influence anything. I talked about Auckland and its development. He made no secret of his distaste of the MUL, but he seemed very uniformed about Auckland issues. He left me with the clear impression that: “the MUL would be gone by lunchtime, when National gets into Government.”
I accept that Auckland’s planning has needed change and improvement, to provide stronger incentives around compact development and urban regeneration projects, as well as lining up the funding institutions to assist where holding costs become a major stumbling block. It was never enough just to have a tight strangle hold on the metropolitan urban limit.
Councils have been reluctant to rezone urban land to allow for greater densities and building heights. The rhetoric of “dog boxes” and “rabbit hutch apartments” has been enough to make local communities take fright, and take to the streets to stop any change in their neighbourhoods. NIMBY’ism can be a very powerful thing. But it also stands in the way of a city region fighting to provide the range of housing types and sizes and environments, to meet the very diverse needs of Auckland’s cosmopolitan community.
These failures and problems are among those that led to calls for Auckland’s local governance to be strengthened, so that its plans and strategies could be actually implemented. Then there was a change of Government. And the reins of change have been seized by those with rather different priorities. The recession has added urgency to Central Government’s determination to deliver short-term growth and productivity. Public funded infrastructure is a big part of its program to generate jobs and keep unemployment from getting above 7% (but it is).
And now we have Nelson’s very own Dr Nick Smith (Minister of Environment), working with Whangarei’s Phil Heatley (Minister of Housing), and pushing a very strong pro development, pro growth, pro “affordable housing”, program, which appears to have at its heart the goal of doing away with Auckland’s Metropolitan Urban Limit.
I certainly think that councils have to assume a lot of the blame here for making “brownfields” development so difficult that we’ve ended up effectively choking off housing supply in both the ways it can occur – through the urban limits and through making intensification so damned difficult developers seem to want to avoid it if at all possible.
Councillor Cayford also comments on a few key quotes from the article that were made by Nick Smith and Phil Heatley:
Smith: “Smith linked restrictive zoning and consent laws to NZ’s poor productivity and economic growth…”
(My Comment: In fact the major cost drag on Auckland’s economy is the sheer energy and time cost of transport. A full 13% of Auckland’s GDP is expended in transport. This compares very unfavourably with modern Asian cities (6%), and European cities (8%). Smith is really only speaking about the gold rush that comes from new land being released. Developers love that gold rush profit, but for a long time afterwards those who buy into it pay excessively for transport and other costs. I suspect Smith is only interested in short term gains – not long term development. Smith has never understood Auckland.)
Heatley: “our drive comes from the fact that property proces have increased hugely … locked out first time buyers… the biggest propertion has been the land cost, not the cost of building…”
(My Comment: This is the classic case of Heatley wanting to externalise infrastructure costs. Land costs today – because of developer levies – now include some of the related infrastructure costs – roading, 3 waters. For North Shore these “land development costs” can be up round $30,000/housing unit. And even thenm this figure does not adequately cover the full costs of new infrastructure. BTW these developer levies are much less for a new lot built in the heart of existing urban setting.)
In an ironic way, this part of the debate shows why it’s a bit disappointing the recession depressing oil demand so significantly, thereby resulting in petrol prices dropping dramatically from the $2.20 a litre they were in the middle of July 2008. One would probably look rather silly promoting urban sprawl with petrol north of $2.50 a litre – for example.
His blog post also includes a pretty useful table, showing the arguments for and against sprawl/intensification:It seems to me as though “the provision of affordable housing” is certainly the strongest argument for removing, or at least changing, the metropolitan urban limits. However, it is debatable whether that would do much more than create a bunch of cheap houses on the very edge of the city. It is also debatable whether that’s the only thing we can do to improve housing affordability. I tend to think that we have a whole toolbox of options to improve housing affordability. Like how about making Housing New Zealand a requiring authority, how about allowing Housing New Zealand to develop more dwellings for the market, how about making the provision of affordable housing a matter of national importance under section 6 of the RMA, how about changing District Plans to allow for intensification easier, how about providing more effective incentives to encourage intensification… the list goes on. Maybe some sensible extension of the MUL should form a part of that toolbox, but I doubt it’s the big bang solution many hope it will be.
Furthermore, if someone’s housing is cheaper than it was before but their transport costs have gone up by the same amount, are they really any better off?
It must be pretty frustrating being one of the mayors in Auckland. Back late last year everyone pretty much agreed that none of the proposed options for Queens Wharf were really what we needed, and that a bit more thought and time would need to go into working out what we wanted to do with this utterly critical piece of Auckland’s waterfront. This is what was said back in early November 2009:
Plans for a development at Queen’s Wharf before the 2011 Rugby World Cup have been put on hold.
The winner of a design competition for the project was supposed to decided today, but Auckland Mayor John Banks and the Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee were not impressed with the entries.
They have decided instead to “go away and have a cup of tea” to consider what might be done to the area.
Mr Banks said yesterday he was considering canning the upgrade, concerned the city would inherit another mediocre development if the Queens Wharf upgrade proceeded.
“One of the options could be to do next to nothing,” Mr Banks said.
Mr Lee had already described the designs as “lacklustre, underwhelming and mediocre”.
Despite most regional and local politicians saying that we shouldn’t rush what happens at Queens Wharf, more recently plans emerged for an even more expensive option.
A few other more temporary options were thrown about too, but many of the same issues raised in November last year were still swirling around – do we really need a cruise ship on Queens Wharf? Do we really want to hurry what we do with such an important site? Should be put a bit more thought into keeping the historic sheds? Do we really want to spend that much money now?
All this seems to have come to a head today, with a mayoral forum leading to a decision by Auckland’s local leaders to not champion any expensive redevelopment of Queens Wharf for now. Here’s the relevant article:
John Key’s hopes for a Rugby World Cup “party central” on Auckland’s Queens Wharf have been quashed by Auckland’s city councils, who have announced they will not pay for grand developments on the site.
An Auckland mayoral forum this morning rejected a $100 million development for Queens Wharf, which was bought by the Government and the Auckland Regional Council for $40 million last August to turn into a centrepiece for next year’s World Cup.
Auckland ratepayers were expected to foot the bill for building on the site, with a $97 million development including a cruise ship terminal said to be preferred by the Government.
But that plan was rejected, and three other, cheaper plans for temporary structures also put on hold until a masterplan for the waterfront was developed, said Auckland City mayor John Banks.
“We don’t have to get terribly excited about what will be on Queens Wharf … there may be some party on Queens Wharf but there will be many parties all over New Zealand and all over Auckland.”
It would seem like the sensible thing to do now would be a pretty “cheap and cheerful” upgrade of the existing wharf, keeping the sheds and opening the place up for public use – although not necessarily as a “party central” for the World Cup. I suppose that in some respects the Queens Wharf situation has highlighted the need for a strong voice for Auckland, that the Super City should provide, and working out what to do with Queens Wharf certainly seems like a task for the new Auckland Council, not a quick-fix solution foisted on Auckland by the government.
A number of commenters on my post yesterday noted with great concern the potential effects of the latest Waterview Connection alignment on the viability of the Avondale-Southdown Railway Corridor. I figure that it’s probably worth exploring that matter in a little bit more detail, as I can impart a little bit of my knowledge of planning matters to help us analyse the situation.
The Avondale-Southdown railway corridor is a bit infamous in many respects, as it has been designated since around 1947 I think, yet today we find ourselves not really being any closer to constructing in than we were back in 1947. As the name indicates, it’s a railway line that runs from near Avondale to Southdown, which is an industrial area near Penrose. It appears in the 1946 transport plan for Auckland, which is included below:Primarily this line is likely to be justified in terms of how it would improve shifting freight between Northland – via the North Auckland Line (the Western Line) – and the industrial hub of Auckland around Southdown/Penrose/Westfield. At the moment all freight trains heading north need to pass through Newmarket and the inner part of the Western Line – which obvious means plenty of potential conflicts with passenger services. As passenger service levels increase in the future it is likely to become more and more difficult for freight to find an appropriate ‘window’ to operate in, particularly through busy junctions like Newmarket. This is where the Avondale-Southdown line would come in handy.
Furthermore, if there are other future network expansions, like rail to the airport or the CBD Rail Tunnel, then the Avondale-Southdown line might be a useful part of this network. We could run trains from New Lynn to Manukau City via the Airport, or potentially trains doing a big circuit of the CBD via the inner-Western line, the Eastern Line and the Avondale-Southdown Line. In other words, while construction of this line may not be one of the top priorities for Auckland at the moment, it’s certainly conceivable that it might be useful and necessary in the future.
Now, turning to the contentious area around the western end of the proposed line, we can see from the Auckland City Council planning map below, just to the south of Hendon Ave there is a shaded area which is noted as G08-05. This is the area designated as the Avondale-Southdown railway line. If we compare this designation with the most recent alignment of the Waterview Connection, shown below, it’s clear that there’s significant potential for some conflict. In fact, I think it’s fair to assume that under both the May 2009 alignment at the December 2009 alignment there would have been conflicts with parts of the Avondale-Southdown rail designation. Under this most recent alignment the “Proposed Rail Line” seems to shift northwards, to sit relatively closely to the southern side of Hendon Ave. Now of course the map above is just a diagram, and perhaps with a more detailed map we could learn more, but certainly the ‘proposed rail line’ appears to generally be in a different location to where the current rail designation is. Put simply, the motorway has taken its designation, so it has had to move northwards.
There are a few worrying factors relating to this. The first factor is that it seems as though KiwiRail/Ontrack will have to redesignate their corridor. This involves a fairly complicated process under the Resource Management Act, something similar to the process by which one applies for a resource consent. This means that the new designation’s environmental effects would have to be analysed, its benefits weighed up against those effects, and so forth. Furthermore, it could be challenged in the environment court and potentially declined by that court. So basically KiwiRail has to go through a complicated process to resolve a problem that has not in any way been caused by them.
The second factor to consider is that because Kiwirail/Ontrack “got there first” with their designation, in order for NZTA to “take” their designation, or slap another designation on top of theirs (yes, there are designations on top of designations, and it an get complicated), KiwiRail/Ontrack would have to give their approval. This is outlined in section 177 of the RMA, which I have included below:
To simplify the legalistic language used above, sub-section 1 says that the latter authority wanting to designate (NZTA in this situation) needs the permission of the earlier designating authority (KiwiRail) for this to proceed. Sub-section 2 limits the reasons for which KiwiRail could decline such permission, but the fact that building a motorway in the rail designation would clearly “prevent or hinder” constructing a railway line there means that I think KiwiRail absolutely would have the jurisdiction to tell NZTA to bugger off, for want of a better term.
I can’t see that happening though, as I doubt KiwiRail would have the guts to stand up for their own designation. Which means a heck of a lot of work for them in sorting out a new designation to the north, through a whole bunch of houses.
The “urban sprawl” versus “compact city” debate has long been a great interest of mine. In fact I wrote my Master’s thesis on the topic – “From Urban Sprawl to Compact City? An analysis of Auckland’s growth management strategies“. There’s a lengthy article in the NZ Herald today on the topic, and on the proposed legislative changes seem to be directing Auckland away from its focus on intensification (the ‘compact city’ approach) and more back towards sprawl, or greenfields development. Here are some interesting extracts:
A suite of reforms planned by the Government will make it easier for Hugh Green and others sitting on rural land encircling Auckland to convert them into houses – gobbling up more countryside.
The reform package will apply nationally but is aimed at smashing through the roadblocks which thwart development of our most populous city.
It’s arcane sounding stuff – reforms to the Resource Management Act, spatial plans, relaxing the metropolitan limits … But the new planning framework will affect where people will live, how we’ll get around and the type of housing we live in: Separate house and garden or higher density apartments? Motorways or public transport? Good or bad urban design?
If the Government gets it right, it will be easier to get projects off the ground, from houses to new motorways and public transport.
But casualties along the way could include environmental damage, higher infrastructure costs, even worse traffic congestion, community input and social problems if low cost housing is concentrated on the outskirts.
Environment Minister Nick Smith has appointed two advisory panels to recommend changes to the Resource Management Act. Coupled with a further reform bill on Auckland’s governance, the changes will shape the planning rulebook which the single Auckland council will work from.
Announcing the panels – one will look at urban design, the other infrastructure – Smith linked restrictive zoning and consent laws to New Zealand’s poor productivity and economic growth.
High on the hit list is the use of metropolitan urban limits to contain growth. The Government blames these lines on a map – residential land on one side, rural on the other – for pushing up house prices inside the boundaries. It believes making more land available will drive down the cost of land and make houses more affordable.
That’s a major change to the policy of urban containment agreed to by Auckland councils in 1999. The Regional Growth Strategy was supposed to guide the city’s development for 50 years. It attempts to limit sprawl by housing 70 per cent of population growth within the urban limits. The aim was to limit the environmental costs of sprawl and preserve open space while building a more efficient city which supported public transport.
But the strategy demanded more intensive housing – apartments and units – than New Zealanders accustomed to a house-and-garden lifestyle are used to. And successive Governments have been slow to fund the much-needed public transport investments.
One of the central themes of my thesis was that while sprawl is certainly very bad from a sustainability perspective, it certainly appears to have many individual benefits – you get a large house on a fairly large piece of land, and so on and so forth. Essentially we end up with a collective action problem, that individually sprawl is attractive, but when everyone lives in sprawl situations we all lose out – through traffic congestion, auto-dependency (although as Paul Mees suggests this is largely due to poor transport policy too), the loss of countryside around our cities, highly inefficient infrastructure expenditure due to low densities and generally a lack of vibrant, interesting communities. When I visit Auckland’s newer suburbs they exhibit a sense of soullessness that you just don’t get in higher density, more mixed-use areas.
So it’s certainly understandable why Auckland has chosen to head down the path of becoming a ‘compact city’ over the past decade, and certainly the city has sprawled more slowly. The problem is that, for a number of reasons, this hasn’t been counter-balanced by the required number of additional houses being built within the existing urban area. In some areas there has been community opposition to intensification, on other occasions I think that intensification has been stymied by District Planning documents that are completely and utterly inadequate and out of date (Auckland City Council’s District Plan is the most striking example of this). There has also probably been a lack of incentives for intensification, with many “development contributions” being levied on a per-unit basis – hardly encouraging developers to use their land most efficiently. There have also been more direct problems, like the collapse of finance companies making it difficult for developers to fund their projects, or the difficulties associated with amalgamating sufficient areas of land within existing cities to actually construct a decent-sized development of apartments, town-houses or terraced housing. Our transport policies, which continue to promote sprawl through motorway building, rather than promoting intensification through projects like the CBD Rail Tunnel, have also contributed to the problem.
The combination of choking off sprawl through the urban limits, while also not sufficiently providing for intensification, has meant that Auckland has built an insufficient number of houses over the past decade – with the result being a dramatic rise in property prices. So Housing Minister Phil Heatley is quite justified when he is saying this:
Housing minister Phil Heatley: “Our drive comes from the fact that property prices have increased hugely in the last five years and locked out first home buyers. And the biggest proportion has been the land cost, not the cost of building.”
Certainly if you look at the value of most properties in Auckland – particularly standalone dwellings – around 70% or more is in the land. But really, that’s not surprising because generally each dwelling has so much land. If you have an inner-suburban area that’s attractive to live in, and there’s a single house with 800 square metres or so of land around it, of course it’s the land which is going to be so valuable. The fact that the land value is so high is probably a pretty good indicator that the land is being used inefficiently, and perhaps there should be two or three dwellings on the site. Now that might not always be an appropriate outcome – for heritage, amenity and various other reasons, but I don’t think we should be surprised that land-value is such a high proportion of a site’s value. It’s sending a message that generally we should probably be building to higher densities to make better use of the land and bring the proportion of value back down to something more reasonable – 50% perhaps?
The article points out that it might not all be bad news though:
The reforms will require councils to produce a Spatial Plan (in Auckland’s case, replacing the Regional Growth Strategy) as the blueprint for the timing and location of development including housing, industry, commerce and infrastructure such as roading.Terms of reference for the urban advisory panel include housing affordability, urban design, the urban limits, infrastructure funding, and spatial and structure plans. The infrastructure panel will look at streamlining the process of designating land for public works such as roading – or alternatives to designations.Smith says development levies – where councils charge developers for the cost of extending services such as roading and water supplies – are another focus. “Set them too high and it affects affordability. Set too low you provide an artificial subsidy from existing ratepayers.”
Environmental Defence Society chairman Gary Taylor says the behind the scenes work represents both an opportunity and a threat. “It’s an opportunity to collapse this cumbersome hierarchy of planning instruments that we have in Auckland into a more coherent, simple, user-friendly, effective set of instruments.
“We could go from cumbersome complexity to simple effectiveness. At the moment we have a national policy statement, regional policy statement, regional plan, regional coastal plan and district plans – it’s enormously complicated.
“The threat is that whatever is done creates a regime in which urban sprawl is let loose. That would be a disaster for the environment and would add cost to our urban growth. The urban area would lose form, shape and attractiveness – that would be a third world outcome for Auckland.”
In some cases an extension of the urban limits might well be justified, and hopefully this Spatial Plan will provide a robust mechanism for working out where it makes sense to do just that. I must say I’ve always wondered why Flat Bush is within the MUL – considering it’s nowhere near any motorway or railway line – whereas the area around Waitakere township, Taupaki, north Westgate and Kumeu/Huapai is outside the limits – when they have a railway line, have pretty good access to both State Highway 16 and State Highway 18 and so forth. So there’s certainly some fine-tuning that could happen here. I certainly agree with Gary Taylor though that if sprawl is simply let loose the outcomes will be pretty terrible. You’ll end up with random leap-frog development that is not properly integrated with infrastructure development and will not necessarily avoid areas of environmental sensitivity.
Once again, I think it comes down to how you do it. It should also be pointed out that while extending urban limits may improve housing affordability, a lot of the ‘gain’ is likely to be offset by other costs which will increase. Sprawling, low-density cities tend to spend a much greater proportion of their wealth on transport than more compact and mixed-use cities. Also, providing infrastructure to urban sprawl is more expensive because the infrastructure is simply used less efficiently. At a basic level, it’s cheaper to lay one big fat pipe than 50 skinny pipes. This is pointed out below:
ARC planning chairman Paul Walbran says he’s all for making red tape easier. “There are numerous examples where getting consent is much harder than it needs to be. But that shouldn’t be a Trojan horse for getting more rabbit hutch apartments and that sort of thing.
“A coherent spatial plan is certainly a must if we’re going to get the kind of Auckland we need.”
But he says the proposition that pushing out the urban limits will lead to cheaper housing is a fallacy. “The overall cost of living will substantially rise. The further out the city sprawls the more extensive its infrastructure has to be and the less efficient it is. The cost of transport rises substantially – that’s well documented everywhere.
“Metropolitan limits are a nice simple tool that keep growth in a city coordinated – keeping an adequate supply of land saves ad hoc development that’s disconnected and takes people a lot longer to get to and from. It’s all about wanting an efficient liveable city that works. One that doesn’t stuff up its environment.”
It seems the government isn’t convinced though.
But Smith and Heatley clearly don’t buy the arguments which underpin the regional growth strategy and the compact city approach.
“There’s a bit of naivety in policy thinking around metropolitan urban limits in assuming you can drive urban intensification against community wishes,” says Smith.
Communities in Auckland and Nelson have reacted negatively to intensive housing applications, he says. Planners have made flawed assumptions about the extent of intensification, grossly over-estimating the number of new housing units that could be provided.
“All that happens is that you drive up section prices with quite major flow-on economic impacts for both housing affordability and the property bubble which has been quite damaging to the economy over the last decade.
“It’s true we need some intensification but you need to be realistic in a democratic society about the degree of central planning edicts that you can get away with.”
I do think we need to look at reasons why there has been opposition to intensification. A lot of what has been built has been crap (which ironically is because most intensification has been built within business zones, due to the lack of provision for intensification in residential zones) and the ‘leaky-buildings’ crisis hasn’t helped. I also think that many architects, planners and developers simply don’t quite “get” how to build decent intensification. In a place like Auckland why does intensification have to so often be rubbish apartments? Why do we build so few terraced houses, even though that’s the type of intensification that is most likely to fit in with the New Zealand culture?
The last portion of the article provides a bit of relief for those, like me, worried that the reforms will result in a sprawlfest:
GETTING THE RIGHT MIX: THE VISION FOR AUCKLAND
Will it mean urban Auckland sprawls from Orewa to Pukekohe, from Kumeu to Clevedon?
It won’t be as crude as simply rubbing out the boundary lines to allow a fire sale of rural land, Government ministers promise.
“We see the metropolitan urban limits as sensibly constraining development in some parts of Auckland but in other areas it’s nonsense and we want to have a look at that,” says Housing Minister Phil Heatley.
Environment Minister Nick Smith is similarly equivocal. “We’re not necessarily opposed to metropolitan urban limits but if we’re going to have them we need to be realistic … Our cities need to be able to accommodate a growing population.”
The Regional Growth Strategy calls for about 70 per cent of population growth to be accommodated within the city limits and 30 per cent beyond – in satellite towns, lifestyle blocks and on greenfield sites.
But Smith won’t be drawn on how the mix might look in future, the extent to which boundaries will be loosened – and where.
“I can’t say how things will shift – it’s too early in the process to identify that. These issues are hugely complex. At central Government level it’s about getting the framework and the incentives right. We want these technical groups to kick the tyres on some of the assumptions which have been previously made and to take on board the sort of analysis that’s been done by Motu Research and provide a path forward.
“Nor does the Government intend to dictate what that balance will be. We would rather provide a new framework in which Auckland’s council can make those decisions.”
Heatley says the move to spatial planning will help the new council to better guide Auckland’s development.
“This is not about slash and burn. We want to sensibly zone areas for residential land supply.”We need to identify which areas are suitable for development and which are not. And it’s very important the local community has a say.”
Does this spell doom for the compact city – where people live in apartments or terraced housing within easy reach of public transport or can walk to work?
The Government says no. A combination of unified planning rules, streamlined RMA processes and urban design guidelines should make it easier for developers to progress intensive housing proposals which are more warmly received by locals, says Smith.
He tips a move away from the adversarial approach to resource consent applications, of “a more collaborative approach between developers and councils with better urban design guidelines” leading to a streamlined consenting process. Communities will still get a say, he says.
Heatley says the Government hasn’t picked camps in the let-it-sprawl vs compact city debate. “We think we should approach it from two directions.”
The advisory panels’ focus on easing the consent process will make it easier to build on land already zoned for housing and to increase density.
Spatial planning will ensure councils zone enough land for future building work. “There really needs to be 10 years’ forward supply.”
Heatley rejects ARC research that predicts Auckland has 15 years’ supply left before it needs to find additional space for housing. “We have never accepted the ARC’s sums in the way they calculate how much land is available. They often include large sections when the owners have no intention of subdividing.”
“Councils need to provide more residential [housing] and to plan for it, rather than [having] a mindset of ‘how do we restrict it?”‘
Smith is critical of planners and policymakers who believe New Zealanders can be persuaded to change their preference for a separate house and garden lifestyle.
“There’s a bit of naivety among some of the planning community that they can somehow impose on our suburbs their view of the world and if only they had greater legal power they could deal with the opposition of those communities.”
One could also say there’s a naivety amongst politicians to not change anything, in the face of looming environmental (climate change) and resource (peak oil) crises over the next few decades.
As an aside, does anyone else get the feeling that the ARC, and everything it has done on land-use and transport matters, seems to be particularly in the firing line lately?
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book (which I am only partway through so far) is the criteria that Allan Jacobs puts together for determining what makes a great street. It’s worth quoting:
Primarily this line is likely to be justified in terms of how it would improve shifting freight between Northland – via the North Auckland Line (the Western Line) – and the industrial hub of Auckland around Southdown/Penrose/Westfield. At the moment all freight trains heading north need to pass through Newmarket and the inner part of the Western Line – which obvious means plenty of potential conflicts with passenger services. As passenger service levels increase in the future it is likely to become more and more difficult for freight to find an appropriate ‘window’ to operate in, particularly through busy junctions like Newmarket. This is where the Avondale-Southdown line would come in handy.
In fact, I think it’s fair to assume that under both the May 2009 alignment at the December 2009 alignment there would have been conflicts with parts of the Avondale-Southdown rail designation. Under this most recent alignment the “Proposed Rail Line” seems to shift northwards, to sit relatively closely to the southern side of Hendon Ave. Now of course the map above is just a diagram, and perhaps with a more detailed map we could learn more, but certainly the ‘proposed rail line’ appears to generally be in a different location to where the current rail designation is. Put simply, the motorway has taken its designation, so it has had to move northwards.
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