Brian Rudman: You wouldn't get these architectural monstrosities in Sydney

Justice Patrick Keane's landmark decision on the proposed 36-storey apartment building above the historic St James Theatre is a shot in the arm for those seeking an end to the wild-west approach to redevelopment of the central city.

In ordering Auckland City to reconsider the application, the judge made two key pronouncements.

One was that the council could not toss design into the "too-hard" basket when considering development applications.

Issues of design, aesthetics and amenity values, he said, "are not to be disposed of by saying that design is a matter of aesthetics, that aesthetics is taste by another name, and that taste is irretrievably subjective and individual".

The Resource Management Act "makes the aesthetic an indispensable concern in every planning regime and for every consent authority".

The other point was that approving projects like this in secret should be the exception rather than the rule.

The developers, Norfolk Trustee Company Ltd, had "obtained the right to construct what will become one of the largest buildings in central Auckland without the application undergoing the public scrutiny which the 1991 act contemplates as normal. The assessment was made entirely within the council itself. That is exceptional ... "

Exceptional? Not by Auckland City's standards. Just the reverse, in fact. Two years ago, an internal council report was proudly reporting the city "processes around 8000 resource consents per annum, of which 98 per cent are dealt with on a non-notified basis".

Admittedly, many of these would have been for uncontroversial household renovations, but too many were not.

For advocates of a better designed city, such as Don McRae, of pressure group Urban Auckland, it's the emphasis on approving development applications in secret that has resulted in "the poor quality of the buildings over the last 10 years or so".

It was Urban Auckland which applied for the judicial review of the non-notified resource consent, and it has every right to be happy with the decision.

Forcing Auckland City to take more consideration of urban design issues, and of the views of neighbours and other citizens, are major breakthroughs.

But for Urban Auckland activist and prominent architect Nigel Cook, it's just a small step in the campaign to get a better quality of architecture into the central city.

He says the only way to achieve that is to insist that only high-quality architects be let loose on inner-city buildings.

Scathing of developers who use architects who "simply can't design a building", he says "there may be 20 of us in the city who can design a building and almost none of us get an an opportunity to do so.

"In places like Sydney and Melbourne, unless you have proved you can design a good building, they won't let you near the central area." The Victoria and New South Wales state governments, he says, "insist on quality. What happens is an architect will begin doing a small building in the suburbs or outlying area, then do a bigger one and get a few prizes and get peer-reviewed and slowly build up".

How is this enforced? "In Sydney and Melbourne they just say to the developer, 'Go away and get a proper architect'. You have to show that you can design a building." And developers and bankers have quickly got the message. "It's a voluntary thing because there's so much pressure from public, the council and architects to make a decent city."

He says "that big tower with the lavatory seat on top, in Shortland St - the SunAlliance Building - could never have happened in Sydney. You become a laughing stock with that kind of thing."

Also appealing is the City of Edinburgh's approach, which gives an urban design panel the power to set standards, to fast-track the "exceptional" and reject or delay the bad.

What both have in common is the belief that it's the city as a whole that has the right to decide what it's going to look like in 20 or 50 years, not some developer who is just passing through.