Editorial: Let planners start putting people first

Five years ago Auckland's regional and metropolitan councils adopted a tidy plan to confine the city's spread and accommodate projected population growth within present boundaries. There were pockets of vacant land available for development within those boundaries and they would be used, but by and large the extra population would be housed by more intensive development of much of the existing urban area. The regional growth strategy, as it is called, challenged the very essence of Auckland's attraction to people.

That attraction is, beyond everything, its coast. Auckland has sprawled around the cliffs and bays of two splendid harbours and the Hauraki Gulf. Now it is spawning development northward beyond the gulf, and south and east. The regional growth strategy, as daily features in the Herald this week have shown, is being perforated in all directions. At the various points outside the perimeter, pressure for subdivision is proving irresistible. Developers know, if council planners do not, that New Zealanders prefer an expansive lifestyle to the medium-density dwellings the planners want to foster. Why is that a problem? The planners told our reporters that the city cannot continue expanding because it could run out of room in 15 years. But if there is a natural limit to the city's expansion, the planners have no need to worry. When the city runs out of room it will be forced to fill up with the density they seek. But the planners' explanation is absurd. There is no natural limit to Auckland's sprawl. Its tentacles conceivably could extend to Whangarei or Hamilton and beyond.

A better reason for containing the city is more mundane - the cost of its infrastructure. A compact city can be serviced more efficiently. Roads and drains, power, gas and telephone lines can serve more people more cheaply. But again, that is ultimately not a reason to force the city into a shape that its residents resist. If the efficiencies of higher density are reflected in lower servicing charges to the residents, people would be able to weigh up the costs of their lifestyle choices. However, the planning instinct is not to leave those choices to people. It is to shape the city for their expert conception of what a community should be - a place where people live, work and shop in close proximity, and travel, if they have to, by public transport.

Public transport is the real purpose of the regional growth strategy. It was the subject of an associated plan, called the regional land transport strategy, which envisaged more intensive urban development around the nodal points of a network of transport "corridors". It is to enforce that more intensive development that the planners want to stop the city's sprawl. They know that unless they can produce a more densely populated city it will not sustain the kind of urban railways and integrated bus and ferry services they would like to see. But do Aucklanders want to live in a city like that?

Opinion polls tells us most support a public transport solution to the city's chronic road congestion but not so many are forsaking the living spaces and expansive suburbs that generate so much car traffic. And many of those already living in those nodal points of the planned public transport system protest loudly when they discover their neighbourhood has been zoned for higher-density development.

A few months ago the Auckland Regional Council convened a gathering of civic planners, academics and students of environmental management to hear an American apostle of the theory being foisted on Auckland. In planning circles it is called "smart growth". Smart, because they think it is. "Dumb growth", presumably, is what people do without their direction.

A little modesty in this profession might go a long way. If its efforts to ring Auckland's natural growth are bursting apart, it might be time to rethink the plans. If Aucklanders want to live in a sprawling city dependent on the private car, they will. So far, it seems, they do.