Manukau: Will a makeover be

After a strange birth, and awkward upbringing, the Manukau City centre is now getting some muchneeded love and attention. reports.

Half a century after it was born in a South Auckland paddock, Manukau is finally having some love lavished on it, amid calls for faster progress. Ōtara-Papatoetoe local board chair Apulu Reece Autagavaia fears South Auckland could go the way of similar cities overseas, unless Auckland Council more quickly pushes attention its way.

A former lawyer, the Manukau bornand-raised Autagavaia is frustrated with the leadership of Auckland Council, under Wayne Brown.

“With this current mayor, the cost-cutting means he doesn't really care where assets came from. He just wants to balance the books,” Autagavaia says.

“We seem to be always offering or putting things on the table but it's not reciprocal, and in that there's a danger that Manukau City itself will fail, and so will wider South Auckland, if that attention is not given.”

By “fail”, he points to overseas examples where neglected communities see real anti-social behaviour and social unrest. Los Angeles with its 1990s race riots lies at the end of that road.

“Maybe it's my younger generation, we want things done immediately. The transformation has been quite slow.”

Aware of the issues Autagavaia raises, urban regeneration organisation Eke Panuku has been adding softer edges to the south.

The region has had its growing pains, says Richard Davison, south and west Auckland priority location director at Eke Panuku.

Manukau has got good bones, Davison says; it simply needs meat added.

Most cities have a reason for being: they’re on a harbour, a river, a lake, an intersection or a major transport route.

Not Manukau: its mall was built in 1972 by Fletcher Construction on donated farmland. A retail blob not quite on the motorway, not right near the airport, just there.

Home to the Rainbow’s End fun park, if defined as Ōtāhuhu south to Papakura, it would be our third-biggest city by population, its 369,500 residents just 20,000 shy of Christchurch.

Manukau was called the “Face of the Future” by mayors Sir Barry Curtis and Len Brown, who had it pinned as a leading city for Aotearoa, but that dream was never realised.

It’s now a forgotten city, simply part of Auckland, squeezed between two motorways and Auckland International Airport.

A growing part though; Papakura is the fastest-growing Auckland suburb, while the central city suburbs lose population.

“I’m talking about bringing amenity and community and identity because it has all of the other hard things, such as infrastructure,” he says, talking specifically about the city centre near the mall.

“We’re there bringing those softer elements to a more refined and sophisticated centre, which is not easy,” he says. “Things that bring people a bit of a smile.”

Council-controlled Eke Panuku buys, manages and sells property on behalf of Auckland Council and its CCOs. It does not develop the sites directly, instead using council land holdings to raise money which is then reinvested in community identity and amenity.

Manukau is a business centre with a large industrial catchment, home to some of the country’s largest industrial and light manufacturing producers, oil terminals, a supermarket distribution centre and car dealers. Eke Panuku is adding items such as trees, cycleways, a bus station, toilets, cleaner creeks, parks, cafes and events to make Manukau a place people want to stay and invest.

“One of our primary objectives as well as job creation is to bring in people. When you bring people you move on from being a functional place, to a place people want to live in,” says Davison.

“That in itself is our absolute and ultimate goal, a permanent residential population, where Manukau [the city centre] is a thriving heart for the southern part of Auckland.