Auckland's 'Super City' turning 15 - but how super is it really?

Uruay to Hoe their point. More than a decade later, discussions are still being had about whether it was a good move for New Zealand's largest and most populated city. Today, on the Front Page ends At Herald's senior writer Simon Wilson joins us to discuss what needs to be done to make sure Auckland's still thriving for the next fifteen years. So fifteen years on, Simon, how super is our supercity?

unitary council. After fifteen years, it has now been an opportunity to take stock of just how well that's progressing, What is being solved in the city, what is the state of play with funding, with planning, with ambition, and how are we doing with our natural resources and with the way in which people are able to thrive.

I think five hundred and seventy five participants who made over one thousand proposals, and out of that they reached in many ways a very high degree of consensus. So there is over ninety percent support for enhancing the natural environment of the city. And I don't think that should surprise anybody. We know we live in a beautiful city, and we know we want to look after it, and we know we want to make the most of it

and not threaten it. That environmental side comes turns into things like the beach is clean, when the storms come, do they remain clean or clean enough? So will we doing enough in those sorts of areas as are we dealing with CARDI dieback? Are we looking after the forests? Are we making sure there is enough what is called urban nahili, which is the urban forest. We're making sure

there's enough greenery in the city. And we know that those things are becoming more important, not just because we like trees and trees are good for our mental health, but also trees provide enormous amounts of shelter, and that's becoming more important. In some parts of the city, particularly in the south of Auckland, where the sun is getting hotter and stronger and the weather wilder, and we need those kinds of protections too. So all of that's happening.

There is a big push for the city to become

more innovative. Question for Auckland is that we have pretty highly educated population, pretty highly mobile, We are a relatively wealthy country, and we have pretty good communication networks, and all of those things ought to mean that we're very well placed globally to become what's called an innovation city, to be using technology to make the most of our economic opportunities, and to do it from this fabulous place so that we attract what Sir Paul Callahan used to

call the people to come and work, play and live here because it's a great place to live and because you can do the stimulating, interesting work that you want to do that maybe you were doing in Europe or Australia or America, that you come and to it in New Zealand, come and do it in Auckland, where you get all the advantages of the outdoor life as well as the fascinating diverse society, and you still got those

economic advantages too. The problem with that vision is that it is the vision of almost every city in the world that's about the same sizes.

You know, there are a range of issues that we confront that we're not very good at confronting, and unless we get much better at them, we risk being left behind by other cities in Asia and Australia and in other parts.

to boost off peak frequencies as well. There are many stations in Auckland suburbs that only get trains every twenty to thirty minutes and I'd like to see this improved to more turn up and goes to our frequencies.

right now. Some people say more roads, Some people say better public transport, better cycling and so on, so that you take people off the roads. Some people say congestion charging, so that the busiest roads should be have a toll on them at those times to discourage people from using them. Then these debates are ongoing in relation to the CRL.

If you could move ten, twenty, even ten percent of the population who are currently driving every day, you could move them onto other forms of transport, onto public transport, in particular, you would overnight, you would solve the congestion problem. You would have streets that are freer than they currently are during school holidays. So the CRL is a big part of that is a big part of saying there

will be twice as many trains. The trains, the train trips will be faster, They will take people further to where they want to go, because if you're coming into the city, you won't just be deposited at Britain Art. You'll be able to get off at Cutting a Happy Road, or get off at Midtown area now closer to perhaps to where you work or where you study, and those things will all make public transport more appealing. That's the theory of that. And you know there are other things too.

If we had a concerted effort to have kids not be driven to school, that would make a real material difference to congestion on our roads, not just for in terms of the school traffic, but also in terms of people who you know. You drop the kids at school and then you could drive on to work, or you drive to work, so you might as well drop the kids to school. It's a checking anything. If you could break that, go back to a generation or two earlier

where that wasn't the norm. Now you'd make a big difference.

The example that people always used to give when the supercity was formed was what are we going to do about our waterfront? And there were so many different local authorities that had different points of view that nothing ever happened. Since the super City, the waterfront of Auckland has developed quite significantly. So you think about Queen's Wharf was given back to or Council and became they wanted to make

it the People's Wharf, the renovation of Shed ten. They're the North Wharf area, that the viaduct, which was pre Supercity but has continued to evolve, the North Warf area. There are cycleways, there are great recreational areas. There are lots of things for people to do that are free, as well as going drink and eating, the bars and restaurants and so on. You think about the sale GP thing last summer, where there was enormous, enormous popular support

for events that people could get to. Those sorts of things have all evolved and been made possible because of the super city. It's been easier to plan, easier to organize, easier to get approval and funding for that kind of development. That's the upside. The downside is that it's a city of one point seven million people. There are twenty one local boards, most of them have populations that are bigger than most other cities in the country, and they have

local boards which are part time members. They don't have anything like the funding of other city councils. So there is a real gap at the local democratic level now between decisions that get made centrally by Auckland councils centrally and people's aspirations in their neighborhoods and their suburbs. And that's very hard to know how to bridge because you know, the one obvious way to bridge it would be to say,

let's have lots more democratic engagement. Let's have lots more opportunity for people in local areas to belong to committees and communities where they can feed in ideas and have a say in what happens. But nobody's very keen on paying for that. Nobody wants to have that kind of local democracy where we've got lots and lots and lots of officials. That's quite problematic. Decision making is removed and nobody has a real has a clear answer.

as well. I mean, I'm just thinking about a situation perhaps where a local board is petitioning for a zebra crossing in their town center versus what that money could do, say for the waterfront in the viaduct, and how like who along that line would that local board need to go through to get the funding for that zebra crossing, because I can probably tell you right now that that funding is probably going to go towards something in the city, right Actually.

of the local areas. So if there is money to be spent in your area and your local board wants a zebra crossing there, that money won't be taken and used in another local board area or in downtown, right, that will be allocated to the local board to spend in that way, they might have to persuade Auckland Transport

that it's worth having. An Auckland Transport might come back to them and say, well, we've got twenty requirements for more zebra crossings and yours, in terms of the risks that we've measured, is only number ten, so we can't do it this year. Now, that might happen, and you have an ongoing debate about that, because the local board will say, but this is our priority, so therefore they should listened to. Transport will say well, it's not our priority.

And that's a clash that is not managed very well all the time. Now, so you do get that tension. But Auckland Transport can't say, well, the money you want to spend on the zebra crossing, we're going to spend it in another part of the city.

And that was one of the problems. Another problem was you had a case out and with a couple of local boards near each other. Both of them wanted and entertainment a recreation center, and they both got They both made those projects their one project, and they were pretty close to each other, only a kilometer or so apart, and the city planning didn't need those two centers so close to each other. But the idea of the local boards deciding meant that that was progressing. I think in

fact that got stopped in the end. But you can see the problem that would be there. How you balance central planning with local important local decision making every day is a problem. It doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and it's but that is part of the thing that the council engages with.

country New Zealand has. If our farming, if our agriculture isn't doing well, we are in trouble as our whole country. It's not just farmers in trouble. We're all in trouble if it isn't doing well. We know that, but that is also true about Auckland itself. Auckland is such a powerhouse economically now that if it isn't doing well, then

the country suffers as well. So we need from a national perspective, we need planning to do both those things as well as keep the regions viable so they're worth living. And we don't want everybody to come to Auckland because that's just that's there would be a nightmare.

slipping away. You know, I've been following the super city since it was formed in twenty ten, and the first to me, Lenn Brown, always used to say, don't fret about the fact that we're not getting big transformative change happening straight away. Every little bit helps. We will do this incremental thing, and it will build on the last and we will keep building on it and the next and the next. And that is how most polots tix works most of the time. It's the reality of politics.

And he knew that, and the city was progressing. But what Mike Horn is saying is that actually that isn't enough. We understand that we are not making ourselves attractive enough for the world's best and brightest to come and live and work here, for the world's entrepreneurs to want to set up here and put money into the New Zealand economy. We understand we need to transform in order to do that. We also understand that you can't just make the buses a bit more efficient and I hope to transform the

transport system. You've got to be thinking bigger about it than that. You can't just make the schools a little bit better and hope to transform the problems we have an education. You've got to do better than that. You can't just build a few more houses and solve the housing crisis. You've got to build a lot more houses

to solve the housing crisis and on it. Guys, how we get how we do those transformative things is extremely difficult because probably most people are reasonably comfortable with the idea that we as The survey shows very high support for density done well, particularly around transport hubs. Doesn't follow that you want more density in your street?

for people to attract more people? Well, we've got one point seven million people here already, what's going to What is it going to take, I guess for us to make that jump and just to really fasten things up and get to the Sydney, get to the New York, get to the London.

more likely to be kids going to school. Now more likely people are in work and able to stay and work. All of those things follow from having a place, a secure or and dry, safe place to live, So that's really important. Beyond that though, what's the point of difference for Auckland, Well, in terms of big cities. You know something somebody said to me once when I first moved to Auckland, which is over twenty years ago. They said, what I like about it is the mess. What he

meant was, you walk down the street. You don't know who you're going to meet or see, you don't know what you're going to see, you don't know what might have been changing. It's always stimulating. And that's a big city thing where the fact that it doesn't quite work properly but people make it work for them. If that

is possible, that can be pretty exciting. You know. One of the things that means is that really cool little bar there that those people set up in a place that doesn't even seem like it should be a bar, but hell, they're now music venue. And you know, if you think about a place like Wammy Bar in Auckland, that seems nonsense. It's an underground and it doesn't seem

big enough and all the rest of it. But people make do People make do with the mess, and when they can do that and thrive, you get that happening in all the different sorts of ways, and that can be very exciting to live in. So we need that you need, and it means that you need, as I said before, place to live. It also means that you know that you're not going to spend too much of

your life stuff stuck in traffic. You've got to have viable alternatives to that, and you've got to have a sense in the economy that there are opportunities for people that people can move on up and take risks and make money. You've got to have those things happening, and if they are all happening, then big City has become exciting.