A coming of age

how Auckland city can flourish from an angsty teenager into a young adult

Auckland is in the midst of a metamorphosis. The city is standing on the same precipice as many other where it’s considering how to balance social, economic, and environmental welfare set to reach 2.4 million by 2050. It presents a huge challenge for local urbanists, who are tasked with building slums. However, there is light streaming onto Auckland’s urban posterity. New forms of density are being erected, diverse transport modes are mobbing the streets, and a new culture is running through But, are Auckland’s past pains too broken to remedy?

Findlay Buchanan talks to the architects, the planners, and the urban progressives, who are helping to reshape Auckland City. The transformation of Auckland is hinged on multiple key components: the Auckland Plan 2050, the City Centre Masterplan, and the work of Panuku, among others. However, much of the debate has been centred on the Auckland Plan 2050 – a lofty document noted for its optimism in the face of increased pressure on housing and transport networks, widening enclaves of inequality, and an increasingly unpredictable environment. But, according to Auckland Council design champion Ludo Campbell-Reid, the city is set to capture real change.

In an interview with Idealog last year he proclaimed: “People have been dreaming about a better city for many, many years. It hasn’t been achieved in the past, it’s being achieved now. The runway has been built to get this to happen, different politicians, different sides of the political spectrum, and progressive private developers have come together to make it happen. There are currently more cranes in the Auckland skyline than any city in America.

“We’ve grown up as a city, and grown up cities do grown-up things, this is about being more efficient with the finite land available. It’s time to make some bold decisions, it’s called leadership.”

To do so, Auckland City will grapple three key challenges: high population growth, shared prosperity, and environmental degradation. All three of these are interconnected, and all will require creativity: to build flexibly with less space, to be resourceful, and to embrace practical new technologies. Mostly, the plan puts focus onto central Auckland city, which is currently in the throes of a pre-America's Cup frenzy while representing ‘one of the fastest growing residential areas in the country’. Here, we cast an eye on a few of these exciting developments that will feed growth in downtown Auckland.

There i s not a more exciting time to be working, the city i s on fire, this i s a city that i s becoming a young adult, not a j uvenile delinquent.

MORE MOVEMENT

A key part to the future of Auckland is mobility. It’s a topic that divides, as car bastions and hippie cyclists bash bonnets over what is needed to fix congestion. Some want more roads in the regions. Others demand cycle lanes, and a few have sipped the autonomous vehicle kool aid. The voices have only grown louder as more technologies contest the city space. Old transport modes – trams, trains, buses, cyclists, and pedestrians – have met new innovations – Lime scooters, Onzo bikes, Ubers and electric fleets – creating some disorderly mayhem in downtown Auckland. Subsequently, the regimented urban layout does not match the newfound diversity.

Campbell-Reid says, “If we look at cities, the majority of a city’s public realm, the space between buildings, is taken up by road space. In some cases it can be up to 70 percent of public space is given to the movement of vehicles as a priority. To me, this is very perplexing because streets in most cities operate at peak capacity for only five percent of the day. The interesting point about vehicles is they are parked most of the time – for example, the average European car is stationary for 92 percent of the day. So, we end up designing our streets to accommodate rush-hour traffic.”

The issue is that for years, Auckland city wasn’t designed for vibrancy, but for cars. It languishes in high rates in car ownership, heavy investment into roading, and negligible public transport networks. The effects have been widespread, from perennial traffic congestion, to ghastly air pollution levels, as well as a reported 64 deaths on Auckland roads last year. Nevertheless, sometimes real change dawns from bad situations.

On paper, there are many reasons to be positive about the city’s future. Firstly, it will pedestrianise Queen St by discouraging non-essential vehicles in the area, but supports those making non-discretionary trips for emergency services, deliveries, rubbish collections, existing businesses and residents, and mobility trips, who will find it easier to access the area without congestion. Additionally, it will offer a light rail tram service, which will run down the middle of Queen St.

Campbell-Reid says, “If you put light rail in the middle of Queen St, you basically create a pedestrian haven on that street. It will become a dramatically humanised street. It will feel like a transit mall, where trams run up the centre, and people will run and walk up the sides.”

The changes will spread onto the areas that touch Queen St, which will inadvertently become a dead-end for motorists. Then, according to Campbell-Reid, pedestrian friendly streets will spread throughout the city.

Campbell-Reid says, “You have the opportunity to take those streets back for the people as well because nobody will drive down those streets anymore. The bigger vision from my team is to create a pedestrian haven for the whole of the Queen St valley, which runs from Mayoral Dr right down to the waterfront.”

The benefits of pedestrian friendly streets are vast. Certainly, it can fix congestion and pollution levels, but it can also be a catalyst for social change. Open public spaces tend to invite diversity, where children and elderly can safely share the city space. For example, in the Spanish city of Pontevedra, since the expansion of its pedestrian space, crime rates have dropped significantly, while the rate of kids who roam the street has increased tenfold.

Alongside dedicated car-free zones, the council

There are currently more cranes i n the Auckland skyline than any city i n America.

plans to dig up and refurbish old public transport methods, to create equitable transport networks for those in the regions.

“We’ve been given a strong mandate from the mayor to do this for all of Auckland, not just downtown Auckland. There is often a sense that downtown Auckland gets a lot more attention. On one level this is because it is somewhat more promoted, or easily talked about. But in terms of spend, $27 billion of infrastructure investment is happening in the regions, but only $1 billion is happening in downtown Auckland.”

The light rail that will bustle down the centre of Auckland is not a new concept, but one that harks back to the 1950s, when Auckland had a dependable tram system with one of the highest rates of ridership. However, as cars invaded the city and service costs increased, tram networks were replaced with cheaper forms of public transport: buses. Now, Auckland’s growing bus system has struggled to keep up with the demand of city growth.

The new proposed light rail will run through the former route, plus replace some of Auckland’s busiest bus routes. It hopes to link the city centre with Māngere and the Auckland’s northwest within the next ten years. Moreover, the City Rail Link is also planned for 2024: a 3.5 km long double-track rail tunnel underneath Auckland's city centre between Britomart Transport Centre and Mount Eden Railway Station. The new proposed light rail will strengthen regional transport, provide accessibility into and out of the city centre and ease congestion, according to Campbell-Reid, who argues the government needs to start urgently.

Campbell-Reid says, “The key to light rail is that it will enable transit orientated living; specifically, along the corridor from the city centre to Mangere. This urban corridor is already expected to accommodate around 30 percent of Auckland’s population growth and 36 percent of Auckland’s employment growth over the next 30 years. This population, already the size of Hamilton, could access a rapid transit system within a five-minute walk.

“If you’re going to build a rapid transit system for Auckland, my advice is to start now and start building from the airport to Mangere first. Prior to the America’s Cup in 2020 we cannot accommodate the construction programme of this scale in the city centre at this time.”

These plans hope to provide access for everybody, ensuring inclusivity for those is deprived socio-economic areas, too, as well as the less-abled bodied.

SAFER STREETS

‘We can build all the buses and trains we want but if people aren’t feeling safe, they’re not going to use them’ are the words of Women in Urbanism member Rachel LeesGreen, which rings very true in Auckland city. Equitable transport is not simply limited to what we build, but how we design for diversity. It has been identified, for example, that fewer women feel safe to walk through the city space at night — or use shared transport methods — because they feel at risk of assault. Fellow member of Women in Urbanism, Sara Bekhit, argues this issue requires a cultural change.

“I think that our community needs to stand up against harassment. We need to be braver to speak about it, to acknowledge the fact that this happens. I also think a major problem is that it is really hard to report sexual assault, you have to navigate through multiple portals, to get to a webpage that tends

to lag and won’t work.

“Also, a lot of people don’t know that you can report harassment. To decrease or solve this issue, the first thing we need to acknowledge this as a problem, and stand up for it, because people turn a blind eye. That is where we start.”

But it could also be helped with re-considered urban design. For example, additional lighting can be implemented to allow women, children, or elderly to walk through the street safely at night, or sidewalks could be widened to allow ease of movement among pedestrians on narrow streets. Bekhit points to other examples of urban design schemes, such as building outside furniture made from recycled materials, or organising pop-up activations, to help the city to become a more vibrant and inclusive space.

“Our investments need to make more sense – women and people who have little transport choice take public transport more, designing more open spaces. Women and children being in the CBD, designing more spaces for them, so they are not constantly in danger. We need to start thinking of everyone, people with disabilities, elderly, women and children in the CBD, we need to create an eight to 80 community where eightyear-olds and 80-year-olds can co-exist in the same city with accessibility for everybody. For such a long time, that has been the case. We need to stop designing our cities in that manner.”

Fortunately, this philosophy aligns with the Council's, which has footed plans to roll out a series of small scale cheap and quick forms of tactical urbanism. Campbell-Reid muses, “We could do a tactile urbanism project in High St where we would say to the High St retailers let’s close the street traffic for a week, we will plant trees, we will provide seating, how about you put your tables and chairs out on the street, how about we roll out some fake grass in the middle of the street and do some fashion shows.

“Then we would do a review of the takings, how many people are coming, how much are people spending, so therefore we would start to convince them that the way their street is currently designed isn’t working for their business.”

“This gives seed to the longer-term vision,” he says, and claims altering the design of the street can also pay dividends for local retailers.

BUILD TALL, AND BUILD ATTRACTIVELY

A key challenge of our time is to navigate the perils of urban sprawl. According to

The Atlantic, the amount of urbanised land is set to triple to more than 1.1 million square metres globally by 2050. As New Zealand suffers from its own unique challenges in protecting our environment, learning to build attractively, resourcefully, and effectively with height is critical.

A key development that will alter the topography of Auckland, both physically and symbolically, is a new 10-storey hotel being built by Cheshire Architects. It’s named Hotel Britomart and will be located at the corner of Gore and Galway Sts. It shall offer panacea to the tall faceless buildings that currently stand in downtown Auckland.

Sadly, these glass monsters have been the blueprint for tall structures in downtown Auckland. By comparison, Hotel Britomart offers brick, irregularity, labour, and humanity. It is an ode to the history of the Waitematā, a chance for Cheshire Architects to build with scale and a new vision for tall buildings in Aotearoa.

‘Architectural delineator’ Nat Cheshire, who heads up Cheshire Architects beside his father, Pip, describes the strained state of tall buildings in downtown Auckland.

“The design-led studios whose small buildings we love have rarely been tested at building tall. Building towards the sky is done almost exclusively by really big offices and Australians. In comparison to their towers our little clay building is tiny. A decade ago we saw our similarly tiny moves in Britomart not just as projects in themselves, but as contributions to the systematic upheaval that

For over half a century Auckland has been swollen and diluted by i ts dormitory suburbs, i ts ghettoisation of i mported l abour, the destruction of public tram systems i n favour of private cars. It’s even madder now. What Auckland must do with the next half century i s build i nwards and upwards. The trick i s to provide our people with exhilarating models for that radical a reversal.

was changing the mechanics of development in our city.”

Cheshire is renowned for his hand in the reform of Britomart, turning the area from a sparse hovel into a mini-metropolis of retailers, restaurants, and other urbanities.

Again, he wants to transform the landscape, but this time into the sky.

“We have great faith in the epicentric power of small things made with full hearts and fierce focus. We hope now of our little hotel that it may prove similarly catalytic, provoking an organic contamination of our slippery, mirrorglass skyline.”

This systemic upheaval was not orchestrated by one mind, but by many integral figures. Namely, principal of Cheshire Architects, and the architect of the hotel, Daijan Tai, who “touched almost every space made in the precinct”.

Hotel Britomart embraces difference with its heaviness and irregularity. Notably it will be made of brick, a reaction to the glass curtain-wall towers of our city and our time. The exterior shows off an unorthodox constellation of windows, while the interiors are also designed by Cheshire Architects. Other features include five landing suites, three of which offer ‘generous outdoor sky gardens’ made in collaboration with Seattle’s Lucas Design Associates.

Cheshire speaks of the process: “It is made from tiny little sods of clay dug out of the ground and pressed into tiny thin long slender bricks. They are all different from each other, rough and mismatched, all of the things the glass is not.”

However, the building doesn’t stand in isolation, but joins the restoration of two heritage buildings, Masonic and Buckland, which are connected by a laneway. These additional developments work together to culminate layers and complexity to the precinct.

Furthermore, Hotel Britomart will bind the history of the Waitematā harbour into the building process. Thus, it's an embodiment of modern Britomart philosophy that ‘celebrates its history and embraces its future’.

“In Britomart it seems logical and exciting: you have all of this grainy, heavy history, where brick was piled upon the mud of a reclaimed foreshore,” Cheshire says. “There are a number of conversations you can have with that living history, but it felt to us most exciting to make a building that was an echo of that rough old language – an echo enervated by the freedoms and precision and proportion of the 21st century.”

Other companies grappling with this challenge have also come up with creative solutions. TallWood has combined old materials with new technologies to build tall with wood, new co-housing schemes have propped up, such as Cohaus, the urban co-housing development in Grey Lynn, plus prefabrication has gained a foothold to build faster and more effectively. And while Hotel Britomart is not a solution to housing, it could change our perception of tall buildings.

Cheshire says, “For over half a century Auckland has been swollen and diluted by its dormitory suburbs, its ghettoisation of imported labour, the destruction of public tram systems in favour of private cars. It’s even madder now. What Auckland must do with the next half century is build inwards and upwards. The trick is to provide our people with exhilarating models for that radical a reversal. We’re not saying a hotel building provides a model for our living differently. But if we can help this city imagine a version of itself that is both tall and worth being in love with, then that feels like a worthwhile little brick to lay in the foundations of our city’s future.”

A VISION FOR 2050

Although these are only a few of the many developments that are underway across the city, the diversity of groups tackling as complex a challenge as the future of Auckland’s urban landscape provides reason to be optimistic.

A combination of thoughtful architecture, new technologies, and progressive thinking could satiate the intensity of a growing population, among other new-world issues like climate change, home ownership and more.

As Campbell-Reid sums it up: “There is not a more exciting time to be working, the city is on fire, this is a city that is becoming a young adult, not a juvenile delinquent.”