Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Subscribe to listen
Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Queen St, greener and more pedestrian friendly, and what now? Photo / Michael Craig
Queen St, greener and more pedestrian friendly, and what now? Photo / Michael Craig
THE FACTS
Postal voting in the Auckland Council election is under way and will end on October 11.
The future of the central city is a big issue for many Aucklanders.
Candidates for the Waitematā and Gulf Ward, which includes the central city, have wildly different views on how it should be developed.
Here’s an idea. The central library on Lorne St is more than 50 years old* and needs a lot of work. But challenge is opportunity, right? Athfield Architects has suggested the council should move the library to the semi-derelict Sky World site on Aotea Square.
The councilwould buy Sky World and redevelop the site into a new library and community centre, open to the square. It would pay for this by selling the existing library site to developers.
The city, the thinking goes, would get a livelier town square and a modernised library, and the council should be able to make money on the deal. This is because the Sky World site is not zoned for high-rise, to limit shading over the square, but the sky’s the limit at the library site.
It’s a valuable commercial property that could become home to high-rise student flats, office space, a new university building: there’s a lot of potential.
The library swap is one plan being discussed and debated among candidates in the Waitematā and Gulf Ward before this month’s local body election.
Athfield Architects' proposal for a land swap suggests moving the central library to Aotea Square and putting a new high-rise on the current library site.
Waitematā is not like other wards. Hundreds of thousands of Aucklanders work there, study there and play there, although we don’t get to vote there. But we care. While the ward faces many issues, Queen St really matters. So does the waterfront and the whole of downtown.
Six people are standing for the single ward councillor role and 20 are chasing the seven seats on the local board. Their details and policy statements are here.
Three of the ward candidates have notable council experience and are, in my view, the likely frontrunners.
Mike Lee is the incumbent and has the most experience: he’s held the job since 2010, with one term off when he lost the election to Pippa Coom. Before the Super City, he chaired the Auckland Regional Council from 2004 to 2010.
Lee was endorsed by the National Party-aligned Communities & Residents group last election. Although he is not aligned with C&R this time, the group is not standing its own candidate.
Then there’s Patrick Reynolds, who is deputy chairman of the City Centre Advisory Panel, a council body. And Genevieve Sage, formerly with C&R and now an independent. She has chaired the Waitematā Local Board for the past term.
All of them care deeply about Queen St and want to get more people into the central city. As the business group Heart of the City has reported, foot traffic is stuck at about 80% of its pre-Covid level.
In my view, that’s exactly what you’d expect in a city where a) the economy is depressed and b) working from home one or two days a week has been baked into the working lives of a lot of people. But even if the causes are largely external, the fix has to be local.
And while the candidates know it’s a serious and urgent problem, they have different fixes in mind.
Lee believes the key to prosperity on Queen St lies in rekindling the “golden age” of the past.
Waitematā and Gulf councillor Mike Lee, who is standing for re-election. Photo / Alex Burton
He has an article on his website headed “The Killing of Queen Street; the sad end of Smith & Caughey’s”, in which he describes the store’s closure as “a crushing blow”.
“Stylish Smith & Caughey’s has long evoked Queen St’s golden age, a time Auckland was the envy of the nation and Aucklanders boasted about their city.”
He acknowledges the street “has been impacted by global trends, a poor economy and trends towards malls”, but says “most of the damage has been done by ill-conceived, ideologically driven council policies, especially the ‘City Centre Master Plan’”.
It’s “a war on cars and car parks”, he says. The idea is “banning cars in the hope to make the city centre more ‘people friendly’”, along with the “wholesale removal of car parks”.
“Lifting the destructive blockade of Queen St” is one of Lee’s key campaign policies. He also talks of a return to the “glory days” and his campaign material includes photos from the 1960s.
The City Centre Masterplan was adopted in 2012 and Lee has previously railed against it.
Cars are not banned, except in one block, and downtown parking hasn’t been removed, wholesale or otherwise. There are 50,000 car parks in the central city, of which 23,600 are available to the general public.
Most on-street parking has indeed gone from Queen St. Drivers are now encouraged to think of the central city as a destination, or a place to drive around, but not a place to drive through. And to use parking buildings.
Reynolds believes this is essential. “With the number of cars in Auckland growing every year,” he said recently, “traffic in the central city has to be actively managed. If it wasn’t, there would be complete gridlock by now. Shopkeepers, drivers and everyone else would hate that.”
A photo of Queen St in the 1960s from Mike Lee's website. Photo / Time Spanner
Sage is not impressed by proposals to add lanes back to Queen St for traffic and parking and has been vocal in criticising Lee over it during the campaign. “No major city in the world would do this with its CBD. This is not the 1980s!”
She says: “Queen St’s new layout is needed (and is ready) for the CRL opening and the significantly higher volume of foot traffic that this will bring ... We need to balance the needs of pedestrians and vehicles – and I think the current configuration does this.”
Reynolds agrees. The aim is to “treat vehicles as guests, and mainly for services and deliveries. Managing ride hail [taxis and Ubers] ... Streets are being upgraded to appeal to people, and for public transit and bikes, and of course trees and beauty.”
He says: “Public realm [street] quality in cities is the foundation of retail prosperity everywhere now.”
Sage wants the council to engage more actively. “For example, we need to partner with proven operators ... to bring hospitality venues back on to Queen St and back into Aotea Square.”
She wants to “pull out every stop” to create a “buzzing, world-class, year-round arts and entertainment precinct” around the square, which she considers key to bringing in much-needed events.
All three candidates want cleaner streets and more resources to help rough sleepers. Lee also wants the council to help landlords keep the lights on at night in empty shops.
Genevieve Sage is standing as an independent candidate for the Waitematā and Gulf Ward.
What about the CRL? How big a difference will it make?
“The question is,” says Reynolds, “‘How can city centres thrive in this new world, with the internet, and after Covid and work from home?’ By being enticing, exciting, rich attractors of experience.”
He says this “isn’t just theory. We can see it at work in Auckland, in the only part of the city where the CRL works and people-focused street upgrades are now complete. At the bottom of Queen St, the square called Te Komititanga is thronging with people, and so are the adjacent Britomart and Commercial Bay businesses.”
Sage also points to the success of Britomart as “a great example of what attention to civic aesthetics can do for us”.
Patrick Reynolds, City Vision candidate for the Waitematā and Gulf Ward.
Reynolds champions the Athfield Architects’ idea for council to buy Sky World and redevelop the site into a new library.
He expects the CRL will be “a transformational project”, like the harbour bridge, and says “the City Centre Masterplan has been the guiding light in this major transformation. Beautiful is valuable, and having an ambitious vision is essential”.
Plans to make Auckland's Aotea Square livelier are likely to be on the agenda for the next batch of councillors. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Like moving the library to the square and replacing the bleak eyesore of a building that’s there now? “Yes.”
He adds: “A key sign that something is transformational is that it is misunderstood, underrated, sometimes even by the people tasked with promoting it.”
“Let’s talk about how to realise the CBD’s potential and what it could look like,” says Sage, “rather than just fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline.”
* Auckland Central Library was designed by the city architect, Ewen Wainscott, and opened in 1971. This story has been updated to correct its original statement that the building was designed by Athfield Architects.
