Nigel Cook: City disfigured by private affluence, public squalor

Opinion

Auckland calls itself the City of Sails but has now built a wall of high buildings between the central city and the harbour along the old seafront so that to all intents and purposes the harbour hardly exists for people in the city.

What is being created is an example of private affluence and public squalor. The people in the two apartment blocks called Scene at the beginning of Beach Rd get a wonderful view of the harbour by altogether blocking the public's view.

It does not have to be like this. There are other building shapes that developers can use that would allow the public to glimpse the harbour and enable us to be part of - and to enjoy - the commercial and sporting activity out there.

Elements of the wall exist by the Parnell overbridge but it is really set in place with the Scene apartments. These block the view across the wharves to the harbour and the North Shore that commuters had as they came down Anzac Ave to work. It is that kind of glimpse that made you aware why you were in the city, why it existed and added the spiritual dimension without which a place is not worth loving.

Along Customs St the old Edwardian merchant buildings are the original wall and one or two of these could be removed. The city then opens to the sea at Queen St but the wall rises again after a couple of blocks and the Viaduct Basin parking buildings hide the water from us.

Then come the dull collection of Edwardian copies along Fanshawe St, which were regarded by the last council and the planners as some of the best in the city. They aren't. You do not produce a good city by copying the past.

It is important to understand what Urban Auckland is saying is needed. Good living in the city centre does not need the great wide open vistas that greedy developers are selling to a few people at everyone else's expense. What is needed is a sense of openness and to be able to have glimpses to the horizon.

From my office in High St, I saw just a sliver of water but every so often I would see the America's Cup yachts sliding by on their way to compete, or the great high slab of a car-carrier turning ponderously in the channel, and I would be drawn momentarily from my drawing board to those wide open seas out there.

This is why we live here, why we work in such a place. A city council that fails to nurture that feeling - our connection to the sea - is not doing a proper job of governing.

There are plenty of models for the right way to do it among our brother cities - Brisbane, Sydney or Vancouver, for example. Even those different types of cities in Europe have worked out ways of putting a dense population in great high buildings without blocking one another. Why haven't we?

The short answer is that until the election of the new city council, private property was held inviolate by the governing group. Only a minimum public responsibility, mainly safety, was required. This was a commercial city run for commerce, and the owner of central-city land was seen as the core of city policy.

For more than 40 years our councils and planners tried to exclude all other activities, particularly residential, from the city centre so the developers would have a free rein.

When the great push for inner-city living began in the mid-1990s, the council planners had no skills to manage the new types of buildings or spaces. Office towers are different. It's okay if they are close to one another - storage or foyers can be put in the dark places and office workers function even though they can only see windows at some distance.

But apartments are cells and often have only one outlook and if that is blocked by another building a few metres away, as is happening between Waterloo Crescent and Eden Tce, the apartments are not worth owning or living in. The city is building slums behind the wall.

You cannot make a single rule for the whole of the city centre. Auckland needs bureaucrats who are more than makers and enforcers of rules. They must consider the effect of each building on its site and on the city in general. The size and shape of a building is as important as the way it looks.

The planners we have cannot be left to plan our city. We need urban designers, design panels of professionals, peer review and a lively media to monitor our buildings as they do in other cities. And the whole process must be public; nothing behind closed doors. The excuse of commercial sensitivity is invalid when the whole thing is in the property press a week or so later.

With insight and discussion, those buildings at the bottom of Anzac Ave could have been participatory additions, not bad-mannered brutal intrusions. They simply needed to be a different shape - not smaller - but even higher and bigger if they were slimmer and with gaps between each tower.

A building site is not just a piece of land to be filled up with buildings. It is a place to enhance the city as well as the owner's bank balance.

* Nigel Cook is a member of Urban Auckland, an architectural lobby group.