KEY POINTS:
Another day, another grand plan for Auckland's waterfront. Please, no more.
A week after I'd suggested Aucklanders were suffering from consultation overload as far as redevelopment visions for the city's front door were concerned, along comes another bureaucratic vision seeking our comments.
The latest document is Auckland City's
"draft CBD waterfront masterplan". The earlier offerings were proposed Auckland City and Auckland Regional Council plan changes for the Tank Farm area on Wynyard Point.
Both, it seems, somehow link up with Auckland Waterfront Vision 2040 on which we were all consulted a year or two back.
The absence of even one public submission to the Tank Farm proposals at the time I wrote earlier suggested a certain public exhaustion with the whole process after a chain of consultations on the waterfront stretching back to at least 1989.
It would have been a smart move if the bureaucrats had popped a Ritalin pill and laid back and let everyone relax a little. But undeterred, Auckland City has squeezed out one more such document and is seeking yet another round of public dialogue.
This latest "masterplan" is "an urban design framework made up of images and plans that will guide the location of new buildings, public open spaces, transport connections and different activities that will transform this part of the city".
It is, says the city, "designed to be flexible and to guide planning over the next 30 years ... "
Ploughing through the pretty pictures, it soon becomes clear that the label "masterplan" rather overstates the case. Far from being a template, setting out what will happen and where, this is one of those "visions" we've come to dread.
This one has been conjured up using "a design-led approach drawing on expertise from across Auckland City Council," plus members of the council's "independent advisory panels."
It's hard to disagree with anything this committee proposes. But neither does it come up with anything thrilling, anything to make you shout out those catch-cries beloved of the mayor and his bureaucrats - such as "world class" or "cutting edge."
There are walkways aplenty, enough, I'd wager, if laid end to end, to cross the Tasman. There are more marinas, more cafes, more public art, more ferry berths, more parks, more of everything, except excitement.
Perhaps I'm being a little harsh. Perhaps the excitement will burst out from the areas deliberately left vacant. Those bits, that in ancient maps are labelled with titillating promises such as "here be dragons".
Instead of "here be dragons" this committee has used bold red stars, one on the Tank Farm peninsula, the other on Captain Cook Wharf, each signifying "approximate location for major public building".
Further on, there's a suggestion that the new Captain Cook structure could be "iconic" and a "regional museum or interpretation centre".
Elsewhere it's revealed that a "key masterplan objective is to convert Quay St into a pedestrian, cycle, passenger transport focussed boulevard connecting the city to the waterfront".
This is linked to another master-vision which involves a harbour-crossing tunnel coming up in Grafton Gully, thus keeping traffic from and to the North Shore out of the central city and off, presumably, the pedestrianised Quay St.
This masterplan gives no costings, nor any guarantees that organisations such as Transit New Zealand or even the Auckland Regional Council, will go along with it. That's why I prefer to describe it as a "vision" rather than "masterplan".
The committee rather daringly concedes the attraction of an international design contest - in 10 or 15 years - to come up with ideas for transforming the two finger wharfs next to the Ferry Buildings, Queens and Captain Cook wharfs. Which rather begs the question if it's a good idea to tap the international design imagination for ways of reusing these two wharfs, why don't we do it for the waterfront as a whole.
Auckland's designers have been doodling on their drawing pads about ways of redeveloping the waterfront for so long that every idea is starting to look the same.
The Tank Farm design, for instance, has such a predictability about it. Then you look at the futuristic designs of redeveloped waterfronts elsewhere.
Valencia springs to mind. We opened the Britomart train station design to international tender, and ended up with something pretty special as a result. Imagine what the best creative minds in the world might come up with, when offered our whole waterfront as a canvas.
