By now the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the Royal Commission’s conclusions on the governance of Auckland will have been widely canvassed.

Many people are convinced that rearranging Auckland’s territory and representation will enable Auckland to blossom into a world class city, complete with vibrancy, vitality, and, of course, ‘sustainability’. I remember similar optimism following the opening of Britomart. I wish I could be so confident.

The common ground among enthusiasts for boundary reform is that Auckland has failed to realize its potential because of a lack of ‘unity’ among decision makers. I must confess to a bias in favour of the contestability of ideas, and an equivalent lack of faith in the presumption that bigger local governments make better decisions than small ones. The strongest enthusiasts for Smart Growth have been the Auckland and Canterbury Regional Councils.

Auckland’s problems lie elsewhere.

The images and models we carry round in our heads have a major impact on both our reasoning and our prejudices. We know the Earth is round but North is at the top of the map. So we fly up to Singapore and fly back down to Auckland. Also, we drink our ‘sundowners’ while watching the ‘sunset’ even though we know we are watching the ‘Earthrise’. Similarly, our image of the “ideal city form” shapes our thinking about Auckland.

Most cities are multi-nodal. That is, while there may be a dominant centre – which is necessarily “the centre” – they also have surrounding centres whose economic activity typically adds up to more than the activity of the central area. The classic examples of the multi-nodal city are London in the Old World, and Los Angeles in the New World.

Many are “Twin Cities” like Minneapolis/St Paul in America, Coolangatta/Tweed Heads in Australia, Buda/Pest in Hungary, and Wu/Han in China. These have typically been formed by the slow merging of two independent cities into one as both grew to encompass the other.

However, many multi-nodal cities are formed as new centres develop within the growing and churning metropolitan area. The original central ‘star’ ends up surrounded by “planets” some of which have their own “moons.” Houston is a stellar example of this pattern if only because so many of the ‘planets’ have their own groups of high rise buildings landmarking the nodes, just as Aucklanders are made aware of the Takapuna node by its distinctive high rise towers. The other class of cities are mono-centric metropolitan areas dominated by a CBD surrounded by suburbs and minor centres, none of which seriously challenge the primacy of their CBD on any measure. There are remarkably few mono-centric cities and they grow fewer by the day. However, their image dominates many minds, if only because of the fame of the Manhattan Skyline.

The difference is not trivial. Most people are surprised to learn that the residential density of metropolitan Los Angeles is higher than the density of metropolitan New York.

While San Francisco is the financial centre of the Bay Area, San José now has a larger population and land area. The Bay Area’s 7.2 million people are distributed among nine counties and 101 cities, including San Pablo, Berkeley, Oakland, Palo Alto, and of course San José. The Bay Area hardly ‘speaks with one voice’.

Being a New World, post-Henry Ford city, Auckland has always tended to develop as a multi-nodal city.

Even when Auckland was quite young, nodes such as Mission Bay, Devonport, Henderson, Parnell, Newmarket, Ponsonby, Otahuhu and Panmure were developing their own town centres and individual character. However, the advent of trams and ferries provided a new and powerful impetus for centralization towards Downtown, as happened in many similar cities around the world. Then the availability and popularity of the motor car allowed these nodes to flourish once again. The Harbour Bridge and the new motorways of the fifties and sixties enabled the development of totally new centres such as Manukau City and Albany. And now high-speed broadband and the long overdue development of a proper roading network will further hasten decentralization. Soon one or more centres may well surpass Central Auckland in both economic activity and population.

In other words Auckland has been following, and will follow, the natural progression towards a truly multi-nodal city, which is driven by ongoing economic and technological change.

Many of Auckland’s problem have been caused by political and administrative attempts to resist this natural progression.  An early and notable example of this mono-centric bias was the response to the motorway network first proposed by the traffic engineers, De Leuw Cather, in the early sixties. Their first report proposed a network that would enable multi-nodal development by allowing through traffic to bypass downtown Auckland, while dropping off traffic around the ridges of Ponsonby and Newmarket and Parnell rather than directly into Queen Street. This was greeted with general outrage by the Queen Street focused Council and was hastily withdrawn and replaced with the system we have only partially completed today. Sadly the parts we have finished have continued to focus all traffic on the Queen Street valley, while bypasses to both the East and West have either not been started or not completed.

The obvious location for a second harbour crossing is over the upper harbour, but the latest ‘visions’ include underground tunnels feeding both road and rail traffic into the Tank Farm or some other downtown location.

Furthermore, the Auckland Regional Council has followed the unfortunate example of many regional governments in the US by advocating a mono-centric Auckland with a downtown focused radial rail system. The viability of the rail system depends on forced intensification behind Metropolitan Urban limits (MULs) and Transit Oriented Development. The transport tail wags the economic dog.

At first sight the proposed restructuring of Auckland Government will encourage the Super City government to promote the primacy of Central Auckland and actively discourage the further growth of decentralized nodes. We will hear much about the primacy of downtown retail in spite of the fact that the biggest “department store” in New Zealand is now TradeMe with its 450,000 visitors a day. On-line shopping and trading is booming and will boom even more as high speed broadband is extended throughout the nation.

Furthermore, telecommuting will increase as broadband speeds increase and so even fewer commuter trips will focus on employment centres. Our political leaders continue to believe that people on the periphery have the longest commuter trips, when in fact they tend to have shorter trips which take less time because their routes from residential-suburb to employment -suburb are less congested.

This political bias towards mono-centrism can be countered by Government laying down a few ‘rules of the game’. The new Auckland Council must be prohibited from promoting “Smart Growth”, a “Centres Based Retail Hierarchy”, and from forcing all development to take place behind MULs.

Auckland’s leaders must instead be charged with enabling the development of communication and transport networks designed to serve a metropolis based on multi-nodal land use.  Otherwise Auckland centralists will continue to impose their mono-centric view on the whole region.

At the end of the day, the changing economic forces and the new technologies coming on stream will prevail and the City will churn in reponse. But this churning and adaptation can be either rapid and easy, or delayed by expensive and drawn out attempts to squeeze new wine into old bottles.

For more go to Centre For Resource Management Studies

 (First published in NBR)