COMMENT
I was reading Joan Didion's latest book, Where I Was From, recently. It is a meditation on her own past.
As a Californian. Didion no longer lives there, so maybe this gives her writing a kind of wryness. But as I read along, I kept coming up with the feeling that, at certain times, she could almost be talking about Auckland.
When she writes, "The California settlement tended to attract drifters of a loosely entrepreneurial inclination; the hunter-gatherers of the frontier rather than its cultivators", it struck a chord with me.
Auckland is the one major city in New Zealand that was never settled according to an organised plan. Right from the beginning we were "Waitemata cockneys" (John Logan Campbell).
The cycles of Auckland have always been boom and bust, most of it predicated on property speculation. Can you speculate and actively love a city at the same time? Or are you always noticing the price, thinking of a quick do-over and resale?
What does this do, over 160 years, to a city?
Are we more than what Didion calls "a community of irresponsible strangers - a blind and stupid and homeless generation of selfish wanderers"?
I am prompted to these dark thoughts by a little notice in CityScene headed, somewhat apocalyptically, "Final days to have your say on future". Tomorrow, at 5pm precisely, the moment passes for us to have "our say" on Auckland's future.
"More than 150 other Aucklanders ... have already had their say on council plans for the next 10 years," says councillor Doug Armstrong, searching for the upbeat.
What he means is, in a city of more than a few hundred thousand, a handful of people thought it worthwhile making submissions.
What does this say about us as a city? That nobody cares; that we are too busy chasing the phantom of the good life, worrying about the property market levelling out, what restaurant to eat at, and how to gnaw at the paw of our status anxiety?
This is certainly part of Auckland's cultivated self-image. But for someone who was born and has lived most of his life in the city, this image is a superficial fabrication. It is the equivalent of California's self-image as a "golden paradise" (not a state that is almost bankrupt, filled with small cities and towns that grasp at prisons as the best way to revive a flat economy).
It isn't as if we're not faced with serious decisions as Aucklanders. With the possibility of trucks roaring over Hobson Bay across a congested highway; a stadium to be almost wholly owned by an Australian company but paid for by obliging Auckland ratepayers; a city council that can accept a boating facility yet make no attempt to procure the one area that is widely used by the unmonied public; let alone a petrol-head's dream of snarling up an entire city for a car race - the serious issues seem to proliferate. Why the resounding silence?
Is it that, like Californians, we have been encouraged not to see ourselves as connected to one another? Or, also like Californians, "we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it", so that we live in a city without history that is always growing towards definition, rather than increasingly leaving any definition behind?
The fact is Auckland has been growing at an out-of-control rate for 50 years. The speed has accelerated recently, to the degree that nobody knows any longer exactly what Auckland is. This gives cynical local politicians almost carte blanche to do whatever they like with this poor, battered city.
Joan Didion says that Californians actively like being duped by their local politicians. It means they don't have to take responsibility for what are obvious untruths.
I ask myself why I haven't made a submission on the future of a city I actually care about. In the past, I've been active on conservation issues, most notably in the 1980s when it looked like the city council would allow the mighty Civic Theatre to be demolished.
Why my numbness now? I would say I share, with a lot of other Aucklanders, a cynicism about process.
Many people believe these public submissions are a kind of meaningless dumbshow. That people, ordinary people, aren't important in Auckland, a city that defines itself almost self-consciously as a speculative venture, and only secondly, and very dimly, as an increasingly vulnerable and fragile urban space.
It is not that nobody cares. It is that the public can see exactly what these public forums are. They exist to acknowledge "public opinion" and then go on regardless.
This sort of cynicism allows a city council to spend an outrageous amount of money on reports about the ecological damage the eastern highway will cause, then simultaneously disregard the implications. It's a paper storm of untruth. A child of 10 can tell the mayor what ecological damage the highway will cause.
What do we think about the fact that this council wants to have the right to grant development rights round the waterfront on the basis of something as non-transparent as "design"? Yet enormous buildings along the same waterfront continue to be put up with no public input whatever?
Why should the public suddenly become proactive when they have for so long been treated as pliable, easy to confuse and defeat? Aucklanders have been encouraged by their councils over the past 30 years into a numbed apathy and compliance.
So the pathetic number of 150 submissions is not an indictment of the public of Auckland. I see it as a public baring of the buttocks towards a council that many people regard with distaste; a vote of no confidence in a process that people have no respect for.
Didion ends her book by commenting on a familiar Californian mistake, "that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder". Sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it?
* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.
<i>Peter Wells:</i> Battered city going down in silence
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