Paving paradise
The Grey Urbanist Ro Cambridge greyurbanist.com
When I first settled in Nelson and admitted I was from Auckland, Nelsonians of slightly longer tenure would sneer and mutter imprecations about New Zealand’s biggest city. The overweening smart-arsedness of Aucklanders! The traffic! The pollution! The ugliness! The crime! The overcrowding! The avariciousness of the northern high-rise metropolis which robbed tax dollars from the deserving provinces! I’d smile through gritted teeth and resist the impulse to defend the city which had been my home for 40 years.
Surprisingly often, when I asked Auckland’s most vehement critics when they had last set foot in Gomorrah, I would discover they’d never even been there.
But, Dear Reader, I’m in Auckland right now and I must confess that I may have joined the disparagers, the haters and the critics.
I have not begun to hate Auckland because Auckland is any more unlovable, or unliveable than any other big city.
Auckland is just another city, struggling with the same challenges which cities all over the world are facing in the 21st century: how to meet the complex and often competing needs of a rapidly increasing population for shelter, transport, health services, clean air and water, waste disposal, social connection, green spaces. I’m aware that Auckland today, could be Nelson tomorrow.
No, I have begun to hate Auckland for how frankly it reveals what humans are doing to the world – and what the world we have wrought, is doing to us.
All the money, technology, and creativity which big cities apply to urban issues seem eternally insufficient, making the unbearable and untenable aspects of urban life only infinitesimally more bearable and tenable.
Those who live in Auckland’s long-established, wealthier suburbs (light traffic, well-paved treelined streets, gracious well-maintained homes – none of them more than two storeys high) have a place to retreat from the hurly-burly that is Auckland.
Those who live outside these privileged enclaves must endure the brutal realities of big city life.
Trains, buses, cars and trucks tear through their neighbourhoods – or idle in them bumper to bumper, for hours each day. Their footpaths are torn up by road works. Parks and other community amenities can’t be reached on foot.
The most accessible refuge these residents may have, and this is almost too awful to contemplate, is the soulless, commercial confines of the suburban mall.
Such grim thoughts assailed me during a trip to Auckland’s Sylvia Park Shopping Centre with a friend and her two Japanese home-stay students who were eager ‘‘to go shopping’’.
Sylvia Park is already the largest mall in New Zealand, but when current development is complete it will contain 5000 car parking spaces and 90,000 square metres of retail space.
Whoever wrote the copy for the mall’s website, ‘‘We’re all about the environment. Wanna know what’s timeless, classic, beautiful and always on trend? Our beautiful country, New Zealand!’’ has not walked the mean streets just beyond the mall.
My friend and I have. After we had parked the car and escorted our Japanese charges into the mall, agreed on a rendezvous time and place, my friend and I set off for a walk.
This involved negotiating broken pavements and kerbs in streets without a single tree, passing substandard houses or sections full of gravel and weeds awaiting the developer.
We met a lone pukeko picking its way along the hot footpath, far from any hedge or tree that might protect it (or us) from the onslaught of the traffic thundering by.
With relief we turned into a tiny park of native trees. The park’s minuscule dimensions only served to give its green cool a terrible poignancy. Where the park met a railway line and a motorway, someone had dumped piles of plastic car bumpers. ‘‘We are investigating this illegal dumping,’’ said a sticker affixed by Auckland Council. ‘‘BAD NEWS,’’ said the spray-painted graffiti on a concrete bench.
Hoping for visual relief we tried an alternative return route to the mall. We took a promising footpath, but it terminated abruptly and without warning on a motorway flyover. Marooned high in the air, we could see and almost touch the mall, though it was still a 20-minute walk away, along chain link fences and over a bridge, the end of which had been sawn off to allow the construction of a parking building.
We arrived back at the mall, sweaty, dishevelled and jittery. The Japanese students were waiting unperturbedly in the cool depths of the mall. Near them a middle-aged Chinese man slept peacefully under the plastic blossoms of a fake cherry tree. Seeing him there, oblivious to the bright lights and thronging crowds, I thought of the prophetic lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song Big Yellow Taxi:
‘‘Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone / They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot / They took all the trees / And put ’em in a tree museum / And they charged the people / A dollar and a half to seem ’em.’’
I’m aware that Auckland today, could be Nelson tomorrow.