Matthew Bradbury: Let's have our park and cruise ships too

In the 1890s, Queens Wharf was a conduit connecting the citizens of Auckland with the outside world.

Opinion

Nineteenth century photos of the original wharf show a crowded scene, not only with boats of every description, busy loading and unloading, but also crowded with casual onlookers, strollers, idlers, people talking, meeting, smoking. In short, a public space.

And this public space, with the same kind of life as a European square, ran seamlessly into Queen Street.

Queen Street had emerged from the mud and sewage of the Ligar Canal and become Auckland's premier business and shopping street, its commercial avenue.

Wharf and street, this was the commercial and social lifeline that linked the hinterland of New Zealand to the overseas markets.

Gradually port activity restricted public access as mechanisation made it a dangerous and dirty place. The consequence was the loss of a public space and a social connection to the sea.

Today, perhaps the biggest issue in central Auckland is the lack of new public space. With the growth in inner city flats in central city Auckland, the new citizens will soon need open space.

The question then is, can we combine the functional requirements of a passenger terminal with a genuine public space.

Japan's Yokohama Passenger Terminal, designed by Foreign Office Architects and built in 2002, offers us a practical example.

The building is a fully functioning passenger terminal that is capable of taking up to four 30,000-ton class ships or two 70,000-ton class ships at the same time.

There are also shops, restaurants, conferences spaces, exhibition spaces and parking as well as the entire infrastructure needed for a travel terminal, the departure/arrival lobbies, the ticketing booths, customs, and immigration.

But at the same time the building is also a brand new park for the citizens of Yokohama, built on the roof of the terminal.

This park is not just an ordinary roof garden, the park bends and swoops, connecting the wharf to the surrounding waterfront and parks. The park is made of grass and timber decking, with large outdoor activities areas, like an outdoor auditorium.

The users can also connect, through the roof, to cafes and exhibition areas in the building below.

What the Yokohama terminal seems to offers to Auckland is the possibility of having a functional building and a major public park at the same time.

But it's not just a building and a park in Yokohama. In a strange way the building has become the park or perhaps more accurately, a landscape.

If we think about the new Auckland passenger terminal at Queens Wharf as a landscape we can also start to think about the other important landscape conditions at the bottom of Queen Street - the stormwater discharge from the Queen Street catchment and polluted marine sediment.

We still dump untreated stormwater into the harbour, as anybody who has seen the half kilometre long, dark brown plume from the Freemans Bay stormwater discharge off Wynyard wharf will know.

While we seem quite sanguine about this, I wonder if future generations will look back on us, as we look back on Aucklanders in the 1960s, who saw nothing wrong with pumping the city's raw sewage into the harbour off Okahu Bay.

Then there is the terrestrial contamination of the port areas, especially the heavily polluted tank farm, to say nothing of the seabed, contaminated by a century of maritime detritus.

Yet we could clean up the water quality using new high tech Dutch stormwater treatment systems and dredge the contaminated seabed.

These are problems but there are some great opportunities.

We just need to think about our own unique public spaces, those kinds of places we like to go, the beach, and the bay. These could be the inspiration for the new park.

(And if any one who thinks mentioning a beach and an industrial wharf in the same sentence is crazy, just think about the urban beaches that the mayor of Paris has been putting down beside the Seine.)

Recent waterfront developments, Prince's Wharf, the Viaduct Basin and the proposed Wynyard Wharf development have all attempted to restore the vital link between residences and the harbour.

So on Auckland Anniversary day, for example, a walk around the waterfront is a fantastic celebration of our maritime connections.

Nineteenth-century Aucklanders had the vision to create Albert, Victoria and Western parks, as well as the Auckland Domain. Given that same, supremely confident vision and engineering excellence, we might actually have a place where we can once again swim and fish under the pohutukawa groves and watch the very large ships go by.

* Matthew Bradbury is a senior lecturer in the landscape architecture programme at ScALA Unitec NZ.