Take down the lanterns - it's Dominion Road

Chinese business owners - mainly restaurateurs - who operate about 60 per cent of the strip's businesses opposed the idea saying it "would problematically mark Chinese people as different". Illustration / Peter Bromhead

How odd that the Auckland Council would even contemplate the rebranding of one of Auckland's best-known dining strips. Thanks to songwriter Don McGlashan and the Mutton Birds, Dominion Rd and the Balmoral Rd shops halfway down already trigger the sort of instant word recognition professional marketers spend millions trying to create.

How many destinations have a tune to go with the name, and a plaque which mysteriously appeared in the pavement a couple of years back, claiming "you are standing halfway down Dominion Rd."

Why would you trade that sort of branding for something as unoriginal and secondhand and ultimately inaccurate, as Chinatown?

Happily, the prospect seems dead in the water. The Chinese business owners - mainly restaurateurs - who operate about 60 per cent of the strip's businesses opposed the idea saying it "would problematically mark Chinese people as different". They preferred something more inclusive such as "food hub" or "food street".

Even that addition seems superfluous. We all know what goes on in Ponsonby Rd without adding food street or bar alley to the title. Indeed its predecessor as the "in" place to wine and dine prospered as plain Parnell, without even adding 'Rd' to the label.

Ironically, it was the minority of non-Chinese traders who supported the new name and such kitsch markers as dragons and red pagodas. They hoped it might drag more customers into the precinct.

The proposal echoes a government-funded Massey University report in 2011 which similarly floated the idea of relabelling "the Dominion Road ethnic precinct" as Chinatown. Mayor Len Brown welcomed it, but the proposal quickly fizzled.

A few years earlier, then-Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey had a similar proposal for a down-on-its-luck, local shopping area, New Lynn.

The one-time adman admitted his proposal was not a cultural move, but was purely economic.

"Chinatowns are significant drawcards for cities all over the world," he said. "New Lynn is dreary and sluggish and there's no good reason to go there if you are not a local."

He reckoned Chinese festivals and weekend events would change that.

That fizzled too.

Balmoral Chinese Business Association spokesman Fang Hua got to the point this week when he told the Herald: "This area is not a Chinatown because it does not have Chinese markets, theatres or shopping centres."

He might have added that it also lacks a surrounding population of ethnic Chinese residents.

The council report notes that the 2013 Census showed 66 per cent of the 14,322 residents in the surrounding neighbourhood were of European descent compared to 59 per cent Auckland-wide. Asians, which include Chinese, but also those of Indian, Pakistani and Southeast Asian descent, made up 28 per cent, versus 23 per cent for Auckland. Maori and Pacific people were around half the Auckland-wide proportions.

The population was educated - 42 per cent had bachelor degrees or the equivalent, compared to 25 per cent Auckland-wide - and 45 per cent of household incomes were more than $100,000 a year. A higher proportion rented than Auckland-wide.

These people use the strip as a local shopping centre during the day, then at night it's taken over by diners from all over Auckland.

The report notes that when the first Asian food businesses set up in Dominion Rd in the 1970s, they were a small minority and it wasn't until the 1990s that low rentals attracted new immigrants to set up shop there.

So it's a rather shaky background on which to hang up Chinese lanterns, erect some big dragon gates, and declare the place Chinatown. Especially when the Chinese shopkeepers seem more interested in melding into Auckland's multicultural environment than in isolating themselves in some artificially contrived, commercially driven ghetto.

In the great ethnic smorgasbord that is Auckland - nearly 40 per cent of us were born overseas - trying to create backward-looking ethnic enclaves, for whatever reason, is not only a retrograde step but it won't work.

When I moved into Ponsonby in the 1970s, it was, I'm guessing, the biggest Pacific township anywhere. Not any more. Who knows what the Balmoral Rd shops will look like in 30 years.

That's if they haven't been knocked down to make way for the new trams.

Chances are the Chinese shopkeepers will be long gone.