When the government of the day decided to promote, and ultimately progress, creating the Super City, there were naturally many points of view - some for, some against, debate around how big is too big, how powerful was too powerful, would it be more equitable than the status quo, and so on.
One of the things I felt at the time was many people across Aotearoa New Zealand may not have grasped the real politics of New Zealand's first Super City - more people can vote directly for the Mayor of Auckland than for the Prime Minister of New Zealand! The Super City created a superblock within the local-central political interface. There are no counterweights to this across the rest of New Zealand, and it is a shaping force.
That aside, as a Super City resident, we felt no direct change in our daily lives after the Super City came into being. I can't recall rates changing, water still flowed and we still had to pay directly for it, roads and footpaths were still fixed (or not, as the case may have been). My understanding is the region moved from multiple different development and building regimes to one pan-region regime, and that seemed logical.
What did change was the happy factor. Auckland felt a happier place under the Super City, the region vs region narrative disappeared, and it became more about, 'where to from here?' I recall being involved in a discussion about the Guangzhou/Auckland/Los Angeles economic relationship, and the Super City scale certainly helped Auckland's relevance.
I have fond memories of how the new combined city went about its events strategy under what was then Auckland Tourism Events & Economic Development, optimising all its regional amenities - no longer a competition between one area and another, all working with small budgets and focused on their own facilities. There seemed many more ways to engage with the city, many more events major and local, new stuff was added, and it felt much more international.
Whether a Super City construct is right for other regions is something different altogether.
I note Mike Hosking's thoughts in a recent article raising concerns about where that model is at today. We haven't lived in the Super City in recent years, so don't have a lived experience of today. But we are still regular visitors, and there's no doubt it's been a tough few years for our biggest city. However, there should be no doubt that the city has the capacity and capability to work through these.
Leanne Watson from the Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce recently outlined in a column the areas business surveys have indicated need attention in greater Christchurch. Watson rightly concludes the first step should always be defining what problems you are trying to solve. The solution must always serve a clearly defined problem.
For us, having lived in Auckland before and after the creation of the Super City, we'd go with the Super City. We don't live our daily lives in greater Christchurch around the lines on the map. Whatever the people of the region decide from a governance perspective, now or in the future, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact the discussion is about how we organise things, not about who we are.
Christchurch is still the Goldilocks city, big enough to have real capacity, capability and connectivity, while small enough to avoid many of the challenges of a big city.
'Super City' or not, it will still be 15 minutes to everywhere!
