My Cup runneth over

Here’s a crazy idea: We should use an event that rewards good design and innovative thinking with some good design and innovative thinking.

So yes, although I’d love to watch Larry Ellison arrive in his private jet only to be stuck on an Auckland motorway, we absolutely should fast track rail to the airport. Too expensive for central government, you say? Enjoy your tax cuts in the meantime.

America’s Cup racing runs on the power of wind (*Cough* and the power of money) so let’s play on the theme: I want Len Lye kinetic sculptures on the waterfront and how about a kite festival on Bastion Point? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest the clean energy thing could be extended to our entire national supply? Imagine the positive press: 2021 and the host of the America’s Cup is no longer burning coal!

Then let’s quickly move the Auckland Port and open up all that waterfront land for a game-changing, world-leading, Darling-Harbour-eat-our-dust, fan zone. I want amazing restaurants, glitzy retail, vendors hawking ice cream, and massive screens for all. We could get Stardome to develop a huge display where visitors can master celestial navigation just as Maori navigators did, and down by the waterfront a real-life sailing timeline with a progression of decommissioned vessels for the kids to scramble over. “Waka to Whitbread to AC45s: The Aotearoa Story.”

I had the great pleasure once of strolling around New York with the city’s chief urban designer. He was a humble man with a clean vision. And the key, he said, to a great city, is to consider every single detail in your city from a pedestrian’s perspective. Not the perspective of cars or high rises or of Larry Ellison’s helicopter. This designer would walk around like a film director, holding his hands up in front of his face to match the limits of pedestrians’ peripheral vision. Public transport, he said, should never be more than a short walk away.

Maybe the first country to give women the vote could be the first in America’s Cup history to mandate mixed-gender crews? Would the racing be any less exciting?

I know what you’re saying. Fat chance. These ideas don’t have a shot.

Maybe only millionaires can enter the cup, but at least dreams are free. And whether you like sailing or not, the 36th America’s Cup is an opportunity to make a better New Zealand.