The Simpson

By Matt Cooney, September 7, 2007 @ 6:19 am

Richard Simpson wants to reinvent his dysfunctional city and he’s not timid in his plans: bulldoze the Harbour Bridge and free up some coastline, dig a canal from the airport for ferry traffic, reopen old tunnels and rivers, and even reorient Auckland away from the Queen St shambles—all while getting the city online and sustainable. Thinking big, then. But why does Auckland get all the attention? And is Simpson just playing social engineering?

Idealog #11: September-October 2007. Illustration by Daron Parton

What’s the big deal about urban design?

Where you live is what you are in many respects, so it’s absolutely critical to get it right. It’s important for environmental wellbeing and from a cultural context, but also economically it’s critical as well. At the end of the day we’re terrestrial beings living on this planet, and we need an environment where we can mix and socially achieve what we need.

So how are we doing in New Zealand?

It’s pretty poor. There’s a lot of myopic vision and knee-jerk responses to land becoming available and looking at infilling it. If you look at some of the great cities around the world, everything is designed within a context. It’s like they almost establish a topology for the city and then design within a framework. Here we’re just starting to get it right, but we’ve still got a long way to go. I think one of the things that we suffer from in New Zealand is very much a utilitarian approach to everything.

It’s that bush mechanic mindset—the ‘can-do Kiwis’. Just give us a problem and we’ll rustle up some kind of a solution to do the job— ‘good enough’ but never great.

We used to be quite proud of our meat-and-two-veg approach. So look at [Auckland’s] ugly harbour bridge—what a shocker. It’s utilitarian. It’s a cheap, steep, mono-modal sort of connection across the narrowest neck of the harbour. That would have been seen as a practical solution.

Look at the Aotea Centre. That was designed by the Auckland City Council’s internal architects and it’s a bit of a shocker as well. Compare it to the Sydney Opera House across the ditch.

But we’re starting to come through. There are a lot of innovative ideas that are floating around the place.

What would you do differently?

There are three things that we take for granted in planning for the city. One is that we have Queen Street as our central street. It’s been artificially pumped up for so long, and keeps failing. It’s a sad tragedy—it just doesn’t work. We’ve got to start thinking about something else.

The second thing is the harbour bridge. That’s not there forever, and yet it dominates the way that our city connects to the North Shore and everything else.

The third is the waterfront and Ports of Auckland. Because the port grew very quickly, it’s always divorced the city from the waterfront.

That’s quite a list—and we have a whole series of interested parties, shall we say … it’s a hard area to try and get much change done.

The only way to do it is go in effectively with a verbal sledgehammer, and make that sledgehammer as big as possible. I’m the chair of transport for Auckland City, but I have to work through 12 different agencies to get things happening.

The structures that we have today have all come from pioneering times where the local baker or the butcher would put their hand up, stand and run the city for a while. Well, the city’s got extremely complicated and we’ve really got to question the way that we go about doing things.

I blame Wellington a lot for this. Try to establish urban design frameworks for the city and the next thing you get Wellington trying to drop in this big stadium, like a big UFO landing on our waterfront, and you’ve got these other agendas that are pushing it forward.

The reality of the world that we’re moving into, the 21st century, is now about cities that compete and Auckland is the only international city for New Zealand.

And it’s not really a great economic powerhouse yet for the country. We’re underperforming from that point of view. But, you know, for New Zealand, it’s got to be about the city.

Does it? Isn’t New Zealand better known than our cities, and won’t it always be that way?

Even the name Auckland—we should almost be going for a name change. In the States they say “Oh, Oakland!”

Call it City of New Zealand—that would get a few people upset.

Yeah, New Zealand Town. But you’re right—certainly New Zealand is well-branded. But we’ve got to do more to be branding Auckland city.
In fact there’s probably more global knowledge of Wellington, certainly in creative industries.

They’ve had some great mayors and some great councillors. And I think that they’ve gone forward in a sensitive way. When I was a student at Victoria University, Michael Fowler was a great mayor. He was an architect, he had some sensitivity to heritage and good design. Wellington changed a lot under him.

I think in Auckland, there’s been that crass, brash thing that comes with the bogan-type Citizens-and-Ratepayers thing, which is just about look, exploit, it’s my right and stuff the rest.

There’s a lot you want to change. Are you trying to do too much?

It’s a matter of seeding these things. When you’ve got these initiatives you’ve got to keep biting around the corners of them with little things that are easy wins. It’s like with Idealog—it’s getting ideas out there, because it’s the best way to win the hearts and minds of public; not owning them, but just sharing these ideas and let people add to them and come up with something that’s a bit better. And then you’ve got public support behind things, which gets it through, rather than sort of having to get political support, which is very hard when [Action Hobson, the party Simpson represents] is two politicians out of 20.

Some of these initiatives that I’ve promoted are pretty bold and sometimes people have said they’re a bit out there. But they’re not. There are big architectural projects that we’ve been involved with here and in Shanghai and other places; the only way you get these things off the ground and don’t lose your shirt doing it, is you have to think the whole thing through.

You just don’t throw pipe dreams out there, because they’ll get shot down. Like the idea about the canal: that’s been around since 1880 but it just keeps on getting overlooked. Some of the best ideas are things that we’ve kept overlooking, but you blow the dust off and look at them with a new light and new approach to it all. And they just start making sense.

Not to everyone. The Carlaw Park development isn’t going to happen now, is it?

It’s not, but then there are still issues. Eden Park is not going to be an urban catalyst. Remember when the [2011 Rugby] World Cup came up, everyone said “Oh urban catalyst, let’s do things,” and then suddenly you put it in a suburb and try and orchestrate it there. Eden Park has issues with concerts and other uses. It’s going to be like a ghost town between events.

But I love rugby and rugby is a national sport for New Zealand. Live rugby is just so important, and we’re not doing this whole stadium for the people who remember Colin Meads snapping his arm and carrying on with the game, the ones that remember ‘bring back Buck!’ and things like that. We’re developing this for the PlayStation generation.

There’s a whole new culture in the 21st century, like we’ve seen with the America’s Cup, where you have this [event] interactive online. And having live rugby and bringing that right into the heart of the city, bringing Queen Street alive and and the city thriving off it.

Urban planning is really social engineering, isn’t it?

It’s a huge responsibility when you make any decision and sort of change that because you know that it’s not just for now, but it’s for a long time yet to come.

What’s stopping us progressing?

We’re so smug with ourselves that we think we’ve got it all right ... compare Auckland to Perth—Perth is a city the same size and there’s a lot more rail. And they’ve got it right, Subiako’s great. That’s an example of what can be done, looking at urban renewal and things like that.

Subiako?

It’s a suburb in Perth. That’s the only trip I’ve had [with the council].

And was it business class?

No, it was economy class, on Freedom Air some of the way.

Good answer. Are you a born-and-bred Aucklander?

No. I was bought up in Hamilton. But I’ve enjoyed living in Auckland since the mid-80s.

What it is that you like?

I love the harbour actually. I’ve got a yacht and love sailing whenever I get a chance, which isn’t very often. We’ve got a bach out in Waiheke and just really enjoy that aspect of the city. The climate is not too bad. You’re a day’s flight from anywhere in Asia–Pacific that you need to go. If you lived in Hong Kong you’d still be a flight away from places, but it’s nice to live here. And people are friendly.

We’re blessed with such a wonderful natural environment—three harbours and 48 volcano cones. It’s an amazing scenario. But on the other side we’re the most car-hungry city in the world—we’ve got 1.66 cars per household, compared to Los Angeles which has 1.3, and we’ve got more motorway per head of population than anywhere else in the world.

I think we’re number five in the cities around the world in the Mercer Index [measuring quality of living]. But it’s pathetic that we’re number five—we should be number one.

Originally published in Idealog #11, page 28