Bulldozers and bulldust

Mayor Goff ’s words of assurance, “we are not going to send in the bulldozers” (Weekend Herald, July 3), show that he does not know his city. This is already happening in pockets all over Auckland.

The ugliness of most new development demonstrates the impotence of the council to enforce the “quality” in its flagship “quality compact city” policy.

But now, under pressure from Wellington, this threatens to be a design and planning disaster on a massive scale. The risk is more than tarnishing the Character Coalition’s cherished cultural values — identity, beauty, history — and replacing them with traffic congestion, overburdened infrastructure and decimated urban forest. The radical intensification encouraged by the National Policy Strategy on Urban Development will concentrate even more people and assets on a narrow volcanic isthmus exposed to the vagaries of nature — which are certain to get worse on a rapidly heating planet.

The only way intensification can proceed with a degree of efficiency, security and visual logic is to place most of it in Auckland’s central corridor where the motorways, railways and busways can provide rapid mass transport. It is high time for the council to abandon its “compact city” delusion and recognise that 21st century Auckland is a linear city-region, which demands its own logic of intensification. Dushko Bogunovich, adjunct professor, Auckland University.