'Broken City' has been published!

HOW did an eminently sensible plan for light rail down Dominion Road, developed to a shovel-ready level of detail in 2018 and then suppressed until a recent OIA request brought it to light in October 2024, morph into a plan for light rail in tunnels, described by Cr Mike Lee as “a record per kilometre cost of any light rail build, by a considerable margin, anywhere in the world?”

Here’s the suppressed video from 2018:

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And the shovel-ready plans, which a Labour-Greens-New Zealand First coalition pledged to deliver light rail should have got on with.

Chris Harris and Mary Jane Walker are proud to announce the publication of a new book about Auckland’s great planning disasters.

The book is called Broken City: Why Auckland is F*d and What is Being Done About It. It is now available on Amazon as a paperback and as a Kindle.

As Broken City makes clear, what Cr Lee calls our “light rail saga” is just the latest in a series of policy blunders that have gradually ruined Auckland.

Going back sixty years, the coming of the motorways destroyed beauty spots like Grafton Gully, shown on the cover and inside the book, even though the very similar Canadian city of Vancouver gets by just fine with no downtown Spaghetti Junction.

Robbie’s Rapid Rail, the electrified rail scheme promoted by Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, might have saved the city, but it was killed off.

Huge public land banks to Auckland’s north and south, designed to keep housing affordable, were sold off after 1984, sometimes for a pittance, if not quite as cheaply as Auckland was first acquired from the Māori in the days of Governor Hobson.

In more recent times, Māori have returned to the city, only to see their homeownership rates fall from more than 50% in the mid-1980s to a mere 18% today.

All of the illustrations in the book are available for free on last week’s post.

Mary Jane Walker is a former Auckland City Councillor with an MA in political studies. Chris Harris is a former Chairperson of the Mount Albert Community Board, and holds a PhD in planning.

Incredibly, there is no other book like this in print at present.

Broken City cannot be beaten as a handy guide as to where Auckland came from, where it went, and where it is going.

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