Giveaways
THIS week’s post displays the images that illustrate a new book by A Maverick Traveller’s Mary Jane Walker and the urban historian Chris Harris.
Called Broken City: Why Auckland is F*d and What is Being Done About It, this book will be published on 26 December 2024. So, watch that space! We’ll provide a purchase link at the end of this post when it comes out.
The images in this post are embedded in text from the book that tells you a bit about each image and its context. But there is far more in the book itself!
Our story of the fall and rise of Auckland begins in 1945, with World War II just won and a post-war boom, not least in the ownership of cars and the population of our cities, about to hit a small but charming metropolis known in those days as the Queen City of the South Pacific.
At that time, the population of Auckland, its suburbs (then independent) and its outlying satellite towns was around 250,000. It was a population served by trams, ferries, trains, and bicycles, plus the occasional automobile.
But if we fast-forward to the present, Auckland now has a population of 1.7 million and a much more sprawling, congested, and car-dependent form than it had in 1945.
The 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of Auckland: its heyday as the Queen City, not yet despoiled by motorways.
There have been many better ideas. For instance, a plan whereby we would have beaten future congestion by channeling Auckland’s future growth onto four corridors kept free of congestion by progressively improving their public transport up to the level of fast, electrified rapid rail: the so-called Multi-Linear Scheme.
The rapid rail proposal was known, itself, as Robbie’s Rapid Rail, after its chief political champion Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, the long-serving mayor of Auckland City, which in those days covered the northern half of the central isthmus.
Robinson also helped found the Auckland Regional Authority in 1963, the most significant of several attempts to unify Auckland City and its independent suburbs in a framework that would allow the built-up area, and surrounding nature parks, to be planned and paid for as a whole.
The parks within the built-up area, many of them long and skinny and running along the sides of streams, were also to be joined up with cycleways, so that the city would become as bikeable as Christchurch.
This idea was set out in a 1980 report to the Auckland Regional Authority, The “Green City” concept applied to The Auckland isthmus, re-published in a prestigious British journal called Town Planning Review in 1984.
But after their announcement, each of these schemes then would be kicked for touch on the grounds that we couldn’t afford them.
And that, in any case, Auckland’s days of rapid growth were surely coming to an end. Many people believed that no city could possibly grow past a million in a country that depended on cows and sheep. It just didn’t make sense.
And therefore, that there was no place in New Zealand for these kinds of big-city dreams, from rapid rail to pedestrianized downtown areas and networks of leafy bikeways.
On the other hand, there was money for road-widening and the building of motorways, if only in a reactive, a year-by-year, drip-feeding sort of a way whereby the roadworks seemed to take ages, as indeed they still do.
It was a virtuous circle if you were a roadbuilder, road haulier, owner of a petrol station or a panelbeater, though a vicious circle from the point of view of almost everyone else.
And so, because we had ceased to plan ahead in any serious way, in a city that nevertheless kept growing, the cars ate Auckland; including such former beauty spots as Grafton Gully, now largely filled with concrete.
In 1841, the Surveyor-General, Felton Mathew, came up with a plan for Auckland in which terraced houses would overlook the gullies.
The gullies of Auckland would be like the town belts of other settlements such as Wellington, Dunedin, and Invercargill, or for that matter the world-famous parklands of Adelaide: green lungs that would divide the most built-up area of the future city from its suburbs.
In those days Grafton Gully was regarded as one of Auckland’s premier beauty spots: “a beautiful scenic reserve of native bush in the heart of the city,” (Auckland: the Gateway to New Zealand, 1930) and “a delightful reserve of bush,” within which “nothing could be more pleasant than to wander here on a summer’s day–along paths cool and flecked with leafy light and shadow.” (Auckland: City of Sunshine, 1942).
But in the 1960s and 1970s, the gullies would pass into history.
A downtown motorway junction is, basically, a terrible idea: a congestion magnet, as well as vandalistic of the city’s downtown qualities.
On top of that, Auckland’s frequent late-afternoon rains cut motorway capacity in half, so they either have to be double-sized, or else we accept that there will be gridlock every other afternoon peak.
When motorways were first thought up, in the 1930s, the idea was that they would skirt around the most built-up parts of the city.
In this country, an upgraded State Highway One was originally intended to run through Puhinui, Māngere and Mount Roskill on much the same route as today’s SH20 and from there around the Upper Harbour via New Lynn and Riverhead. You can read about that plan in the annual report of the Ministry of Works that appears in the Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives for 1946.
The original, pre-World War II plans for the renewal of Auckland’s downtown area had proposed the construction of more flats, in the spirit of Mathew’s Plan. Most of these flats would have overlooked the harbour. The scheme would have been amazing.
Instead, we put motorways into the ravines and depopulated the inner city, which after World War II had become the main area of Māori and Pasifika migration to the city. The demographer Wardlow Friesen has calculated that the innermost ten square kilometres of Auckland were depopulated by some thirty thousand between 1945 and 1990. A planning map from 1968 suggests that this depopulation was not wholly unwelcome to the powers that be.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the Dawn Raids and the development of Auckland’s Central Motorway Junction happened in the same era.
At the same time, as the city grew larger, the suburbs where most people lived became more distant from its centre.
Increasingly cut off by waterways as they spread beyond the central isthmus, the populations of these suburbs became less interested in the fate of the downtown, or indeed, of the city as a whole.
Some fought to save His Majesty’s Theatre from demolition in 1987 and to calm the traffic in the inner suburbs with tree planting, including trees in the middle of such streets as Kelmarna Avenue and Parawai Crescent.
But on the whole, there was less and less interest in what was going on outside of one’s own suburb, and perhaps not much interest beyond the front gate even there.
In the days when Grafton Gully was still verdant, the City Road area on the other side of Symonds Street used to be really beautiful and picturesque as well.
Well, that was then in the City Road area: this is now.
However, there is some good news. For, the reality is that when it comes to the quality of our public transport infrastructure, cycleways, pedestrian amenity in some areas, and so on, things have improved quite a bit on where we were twenty-five years ago, at least.
Auckland is starting to turn a corner. It is just that things were so bleak in the 1990s that it is, literally, taking a while.
Wellington, which benefited from massive investment in electric rail in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, is thought by most people to be far more urbane, far more like a real city, than Auckland, even though it is much smaller.
On the face of things, it is not clear why this should be so. For, both are harbour cities, with inner suburbs that slope down to the sea. Both cities also have topographically squeezed directions of further expansion, which lend themselves well to rail development.
Before the motorways, the loops of Symonds Street and Grafton Road in the east, Quay Street in the middle, and Nelson Street in the west, and in the middle the crows-foot of Queen Street and Wakefield Street, Upper Queen Street, and Greys Avenue all seemed to give the downtown a natural coherence very much like that of downtown Wellington.
It was a downtown seen as a worthy site for annual summer carnivals in those days, for at least a few years.
But then again, this downtown had better access to the still-natural gullies, and the vast parklands of the Auckland Domain with its new museum and winter gardens just then in the process of being built, to which access was still, as yet, unobstructed by State Highway 16.
When the motorways were first proposed, it was claimed that they would be in tunnels in most of the downtown’s sensitive areas, such as at the top of Symonds Street where it becomes Upper Symonds Street, an attractive locality in those days.
The motorways would have been on the surface in Grafton Gully, but the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects proposed a workaround in 1962, as follows:
(The source for these graphics is referenced at the end of this post.)
In the same year, 1962, the Ministry of Works engineer in charge of building the motorways retired, and in his retirement address, accused the authorities of a “motor car complex.”
There was actually quite a lot of knowledgeable opposition to way things were going in Auckland but, for whatever reason, it never built up enough of a head of popular steam to force a turnaround.
A copy of the following article was donated to Chris by a member of the public, some twenty years ago: it is not in the microfilm record (which occasionally misses a page), though it does exist in a paper original at the National Library in Wellington.
That Auckland could have turned out differently is made clear by the fate of the Canadian city of Vancouver, in a very similar geographical setting, in which the Burrard inlet and its three narrows double for the Waitemata and the mudflats of the Fraser River Delta for the Manukau Harbour.
“Arriving in Vancouver on a misty humid evening,” wrote a Kiwi visitor named Peter Blish in an account published in the Weekly News of 29 April 1953 (p. 22) “I thought it could have doubled for Auckland even down to its North Shore, which is always lit up at night.”
Yet Vancouver, famously, has no downtown motorway junction. The nearest the motorway gets to the city centre is six kilometres to the east of Canada Place, the local equivalent of Auckland’s Aotea Square.
According to recent news articles, downtown Auckland’s Karangahape Road, has (for some reason) been voted one of the coolest and most interesting streets on the planet.
Well, all I can say is, imagine how cool Karangahape Road would have been if its buildings had not been bisected by the motorway, across which this famous road continues in the form of — you guessed it — a bridge.
In the early 1980s, public authorities also maintained huge suburban land banks in New Zealand. One such example was the New Zealand Housing Corporation land bank that covered 687 hectares — nearly seven square kilometres — in the part of Auckland’s North Shore that is known as Albany.
These land banks were developed, in the public domain, by such agencies as the Housing Corporation, the Ministry of Works and Development, and even some of the larger municipalities, such as the Manukau City Council which, at the other end of Auckland, was in charge of developing its own city centre.
During the Rogernomic era and on into the 1990s the land banks would be privatised, quite often as it seems for small fractions of what the land would eventually be worth in a market where the state was no longer continually suppressing the price of housing.
As, for instance, in a case documented by Chris Harris in a story called ‘Ticky Tacky Death of a Dream’ (Metro, June 2011), in which the government sold off 127 hectares of development land in its Albany estate for $21 million in 1994; a sum which even then was not much for so big a chunk of Albany.
Ironically, an 8 March 2024 front-page article in the Wellington newspaper The Post, ‘One family to build them all’, notes that just one family, the Callenders, now owns nearly all the land zoned for the City of Wellington’s future expansion. This takes the form of a land bank of 542 hectares, nearly as big as the old Housing Corporation land bank in Albany.
It’s hard now to recall how run-down Auckland’s railway network was even as recently as twenty years ago. Here are some photos of the Kingsland Railway Station, close to Eden Park, around the year 2003.
It’s a lot different today, of course. The old station was demolished in 2003, shortly after the photos above were taken, and a new station was built in 2004, with further upgrades in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
Passenger rail services were nearly terminated altogether in the mid-1980s, but they held on, just. A major breakthrough came in 1993, when 1930s-era rolling stock on its last legs was replaced by Perth’s superannuated diesel trains, still new and fresh by New Zealand standards (Perth was electrifying its system at that time).
And then in 2003, with the opening of the new Britomart rail station at the foot of Queen Street, thanks to the efforts of Christine Fletcher. Remember, this was when Kingsland still looked as it did in the first set of photos above.
But there was much more to be done.
As late as 1999, the Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy (RLTS) had high-quality public transport to the airport as something to be looked into at some time in the future, which in those days was really code for ‘never’.
This was what we were going to have to make do with by 2021.
And even as Auckland hit a projected two million:
We’ve made a surprising amount of progress since those days, with Britomart, the Central Rail Link tunnels and stations being dug at long last: which, after rail electrification itself, was always the single biggest and most revolutionary component of the old Robbie’s Rapid Rail scheme.
The tunnels enable the trains to go through the central city in a loop, not round and round of course but rather coming in from an outer suburb and then efficiently back out again without having to reverse back out to Newmarket, as they have done up to now, while at the same time taking advantage of several new stations around the loop. Whence the bold logo of the Auckland Rapid Transit Directorate, from 1974 (love those seventies graphics!)
The formation of a Directorate reporting to central Government, to develop things to that point, was the high-water mark of Robbie’s Rapid Rail.
Sadly, the waters then receded. All the same, fifty years late is still better than never! Even if, in fact, it now looks more like it is going to be a little more than fifty years, with earlier predictions of opening in 2024 proving optimistic.
Plus, we have seen the development of the Northern Busway, better train station and ferry terminals, more and better bus shelters, real-time passenger information, integrated ticketing via what is now the AT Hop Card and, of course, the electrification of the Auckland passenger railways.
One idea that slowly came to be accepted, as well, was that of an integrated passenger network with frequent services and transfers, an idea championed by Paul Mees in his books A Very Public Solution (2000) and Transport for Suburbia (2009).
In 2013, the public transport lobby group Greater Auckland, successor to our tiny Campaign for Public Transport, proposed a ‘Congestion-Free Network’ (CFN) that included a busway to the airport from the east, interchanging at Puhinui.
In May 2017, the CFN was updated to include light rail from the city to the airport as well.
At that time, the Puhinui station was nothing special. It would obviously have to be upgraded.
The real significance of Puhinui is that it made the airport accessible to a much larger region to the south of Auckland, which Greater Auckland also proposed to connect with a wider Regional Rapid Rail system.
Naming this area the ‘Golden Triangle’, Greater Auckland pointed out that it contained nearly half of New Zealand’s population already, and that what was more, much of New Zealand’s future growth was expected to occur within it.
Investment in an improved rail system would also create more opportunities and help to remedy the endemic poverty which besets much of the Golden Triangle region.
Although Greater Auckland is an unofficial lobby group, the New Zealand Government and Auckland Council had by this stage come to a similar long-term vision: much bolder than the position in 1999.
And so, they greatly upgraded the Puhinui railway station into a major transport interchange, which opened in the middle of 2021.
The Puhinui Interchange is really flash, with artwork inside that makes even the 2011-vintage Kingsland station look rather utilitarian. We are making progress all the time.
The architectural critique of the Grafton Gully motorway comes from Stephan A. Jelacich (‘Registered Architect’), ‘New ideas on inner-city roading needs: architects put forward their proposals’, diagrams and text in Fred C. Symes, ed, Auckland Expanding to Greatness, Breckell & Nicholls, Auckland, 1962, pp 210–212, text at 210, 211–212, sketches reproduced with the permission of the New Zealand Institute of Architects.
As regards the Albany estate as it was in the 1970s, it is to be found in Ministry of Works and Development Plan for Albany, ‘Modified Steering Committee’ option. Source: Albany Basin Development [Archives Reference AADX W3149 44 149/86/11], Archives New Zealand / The Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua. The scheme publicised in the Auckland Star on 14 August 1974 appears above a covering article ‘Lost in the storm — hope for the future’ by John Roughhan [sic]. At the time, the Labour Government intended that the 687- hectare public land bank be made even larger: see Plan HDA (329) M 162/R2 ‘Plan of proposed land to be acquired for sub-regional centre and industrial purposes’ in the same MWD file series.
For more on parallels with Vancouver, see an earlier post on this blog called ‘Pacific Parallels: Auckland, Vancouver, San Francisco’.
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