Mega Auckland 2050
New Zealand needs Mega-Auckland - a Sydney-sized city of 5 million people that looks like Singapore, with the isthmus full of tall towers, modern metros and gorgeous green spaces. Change-makers need to make it happen over the next 25 years.
Why? Two reasons.
First, the Donovan dilemma: New Zealand can’t afford to maintain its current infrastructure as a thinly spread and slowly-growing country. New Zealand has stunted per-capita economic growth and productivity improvements. In the long-run our quality of life, power, safety and stability will decline unless this changes.
Second, New Zealand needs to grow our economic and hard power as a nation by thinking bigger. Cozy backwaters in the south Pacific are unlikely to have a good time in international relations now. This generally reflects Matt Yglesias’s case for the USA to think bigger, but New Zealand is in a worse position with fewer options.
New Zealand’s needs to address Donovan dilemma by going for growth, but it needs hard power to do it. As a small state ever less protected by the struggling rules-based international order, New Zealand should seek more raw power to defend its economic and strategic interests on a more even playing field. Our vulnerability requires us to aim to be a medium-sized economy with some weight and hard power; and improved international relations weight requires us to have a bigger economy with more hard power - more blood and treasure, as old-school IR nerds say.
This leads into the two ways of dealing with the dilemma - going hard on economic growth to maintain and upgrade infrastructure; or minimizing the burden on existing infra, accepting stagnation, and probably retreating to occupy less of New Zealand where it is cost-effective to do so.
I’m going to suggest that New Zealand go for growth, by explaining what it would look like.
The strong starting point
Auckland is a city of nearly 2 million people, the commercial and cultural core of the country, the largest Polynesian city on earth and home to migrants from all over New Zealand and the world. It has some solid public transport networks with the improving suburban rail lines and the impressive Bus Rapid Transit between the CBD and North Shore, some massive new commercial and apartment buildings along its waterfront,and is a similar size to the capitals of the mid-tier Australian states. Our firms are mostly headquartered there; most of our professional services firms biggest offices are there; much of our infrastructure spending is there.
Auckland has had recent big successes:
The super city successfully amalgamated councils into a single local government area.
Improved public transport, particularly the Northern Expressway and improving bus frequencies.
Broad upzoning, used as a case study for the benefits of broad residential upzoning, maybe the most broad and studied in the Anglosphere.
Waterfront revitalisation, based around Britomart, including the Wynward Quarter and Commercial Bay, soon to include the Downtown Towers (replacing a carpark).
When things change for the better in New Zealand, they usually change the most, and first, in Auckland. The current plan is something like a few new public transport routes, medium-density housing of townhouses and terraces in much of the city, some mid-rise apartments, a bit of greenfield growth and a population peak of maybe 3 million. Maybe a bridge. These are meaningful but not massive improvements, and we should think bigger.
Problems and potential
This piece is more propaganda than diagnosis, but the short story is:
Auckland is broadly low-density, sprawling from a small core of tall buildings in the CBD, mainly along the waterfront and Queen and Shortland Streets. Even the inner suburbs ringing the CBD like Epsom which are almost entirely 1-2 storey houses.
Aucklanders rely on cars to get around, especially outside the (mostly low-density) inner to mid-lying isthmus suburbs. This is despite being an increasingly big city and some successful big public transport projects (the Northern Expressway; the City Rail Link)
Auckland is in a highly constrained area - it is an isthmus with a waterfront, limited space to go either west (the Waitakere ranges) or east (already gone out to the sea that way) and with the North Shore separated by the harbour and connected primarily by a single bridge.
Auckland has a single, primary CBD with massive new commercial buildings and, generally, a pile of towers and good transit connections.
Outside of the CBD, there are a range of smaller town centers, with limited high density. Jobs are spread thinly, often in suburban office or industrial parks.
For the above reasons, public transport is mainly viable for CBD jobs and not the large number of more spread roles.
Auckland is next to very high value green land to its north and south, making it costlier to sprawl in the directions where there are land.
Auckland has a fair number of reactionaries, NIMBYs, mediocrities and hypocrites who whinge about most good things, and we have political systems that empower them and planning systems that are gamed by them..
Auckland is the core of urban New Zealand despite these issues. But it could and should be bigger. If we stick on our current path, we will get a fair few new townhouses, some trams by 2050 if we are lucky, and otherwise nothing much will change. This won't change the underlying problems.
You don’t get Mega Auckland with our ongoing incremental reforms - things like focusing on “medium density” where almost all allowable heights will cap out at 6 floors. For a mid-rise, that is barely getting started - 8 and 10 storeys are common mid rise apartment heights. Costs spike at certain levels, such as above 4 or so floors when structural requirements get a lot more onerous. Allowing 6 storeys, when you need 8 or 10 to be viable, allows nothing. We’ve got to think bigger.
Right now Auckland has the density of a nice provincial town, which is nice for those who like that. But New Zealand Inc needs a big fuck-off city with big fuck-off economic power.
What we're missing is ambition - we are missing massive housing, we are missing the modern metro, and we are missing public placemaking in good locations to serve the swarms of new and future residents.
Massing Massive and Modern Metro
Missing Massive is the lack of high-density residential apartment blocks. The gap is in how few high-density apartment blocks are outside the CBD. People would undoubtedly live in towers in Ponsonby - people live in a tower in New Lynn. All we need is to mass enable and encourage high-density apartments, on top of a base of mid density throughout the city, a hawker mall or three and we are there.
Modern Metro is the light rail Aucklanders need, not trams. Trams are slow, generally in traffic and low capacity. There’s a reason some Melbourne public transport nerds considers Auckland’s system with a lot of frequent buses may be better, city-wide. Light metros fit more people in, go faster, and can serve longer routes and more dense areas. They can go along at street level ("at-grade"), or even on streets. But it can also go on elevated passages with sound shields, to quietly head through major bits of the city.
[source: https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2020/08/27/buying-the-light-metro-ip/] - Look at these bad boys
Planning for Mega Auckland over 25 years lets us plan for heavier metro and high-density development along the lines. New metro complements the longer, less frequent, completely separate suburban and regional commuter rail lines. Improved speed and frequency will make the most of the existing heavy rail. But a true metro - underground or elevated - will boost capacity from different areas, and between hubs that don’t even exist yet.
Heavy metro, how good
The case for a Big New Zealand
New Zealand is not in a benign strategic environment. The environment of expanding free trade with bigger and more prosperous trade partners has ended and started retracting. Protecting our interests requires us to be both richer and have more hard power. And New Zealand cannot get rich just by trading already built, already leaking houses to each other. It must grow, and have both a strong domestic and import market and be worth exporting to. And part of that growth is to get the strategic and economic power to trade and engage with the world on better terms.
In a scary world, we need to do way better on the international stage. We are losing relative clout in the Pacific. Our two biggest trading partners keep clashing and are at times erratic. New Zealand needs more power to fend off competition just to remain a regional power in the Pacific. Singapore and Australia balance the same relations with us, with more people and power, and it seems to be working for them with strong ties in the east and west. Their greater size and wealth is an unsubtle lesson.
New Zealand needs more power, more people and more money. These fit together and require a bigger, better Auckland.
It is all about Auckland
Why the focus on Auckland? Because a) people go to cities which are big job markets, Auckland is the attractive and obvious place to attract further migrants, and b) deeper markets with intense concentration are much better.
One 5 million person city is more specialised, and more attractive for investment, than ten 500,000 person cities. Aldi exists in Australia because the scale of its cities makes it worthwhile. They fit in the niche of being complementary to and cheaper than existing duopoly full service supermarkets. Melbourne’s markets fall in the boutique niches remaining. What goes for supermarkets goes for many industries.
Agglomeration effects - the economic benefits of big and compact cities - are hyper-location specific . It is not enough to have a big city: people have to head to the same cafes in the morning and the same bars after work for the spillovers of knowledge and connections to create virtuous cycles of growth and prosperity. But this means the most potential we can get is by being super connected, super compact and in appropriate places super dense.
New Zealand has one realistic option for connected, compact, super dense growth: Auckland, mainly on the isthmus. Matt Yglesias argued for One Billion Americans, as a way of thinking bigger [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans]. But the US has tons of cities. It could get to a billion in a range of ways. It could focus on having a few mega cities (current or new); it could repopulate huge swathes of old cities and smaller state capitals. It could simply permit mild density everywhere, because its cities are so numerous, large and low density. It is also extremely powerful and extremely rich. By contrast, New Zealand only has one city of any size, unfavourable geography, less wealth, and a distant location from other markets.
So Auckland needs to grow, and its commercial center needs to stay exactly where it is but triple in size and scale. Auckland has a gorgeous waterfront with a pile of new towers along it. Further intensification of the CBD as a gorgeous, well-connected area is already on the way. The suburbs immediately around the CBD (like Parnell and Ponsonby) should be entirely rezoned for high-density, and expect to be rebuilt.
Outside the CBD, Auckland should concentrate on high density transit oriented development and medium density infill. The city has space for dozens, maybe hundreds, of towers along existing transit lines (I’m told the ground is good around the Northern Expressway stops). We can take a complementary approach by connecting the major centers of Auckland with a metro, and build skyscraper parks around these stations. Medium density is appropriate in places without high capacity rapid transit. But this should enable 6 to 10 floor apartments, not just townhouses.
25 years is doable
It is realistic for Auckland to triple its size in 25 years, building high density towers throughout the isthmus connected by new metro lines.
The Taipei metro only started being built in 1996, months before I was born. It now has 5 lines, with a ton of elevated tracks. At the same time, Taipei has beautiful night markets and streets. Shenzhen was a town of 50,000 in 1990 and opened its first metro line in 2004; it now has like 20 million people and 17 metro lines. New Zealand isn't anything like that size or scale - even Taipei is twice the size of NZ now. New Zealand doesn’t require immigration much greater than the 2010s to grow this much. We can make a Mega Auckland by 2050.
The rest of the country will be better off too
People who want small cities, or just Auckland at its current size, will have options. Christchurch may end up as populated as Auckland is now, as the South Island commercial hub and New Zealand's second city (second largest cities tend to be half the size of the biggest).
Smaller cities might be perfectly served by mid density intensification - Christchurch and Lower Hutt's have any amount of townhouses; a number of 6-floor or so narrow apartment buildings are now being developed in Wellington. Each of these are gorgeous and liveable typologies if they are in areas connected by transit and rich in walking-distance amenities. You can live by bus stops and train stations, on top of cafes and gyms, near your friends and with parks and schools visible from your balcony. Those can be supported by buses and trams.
And if you like even smaller places to live, the point of the growth response to the Donovan dilemma is to ensure there cities have the people and wealth to keep funding infrastructure and roads to small places in the provinces. Mega Auckland is the only way to be sure we can keep nice roads out to Thames or Castle Point. If we go for degrowth, we will likely have to do managed retreat on infrastructure rationing grounds, not just climate adaptation.
And maybe only Auckland will have a bougie shoe store, but at least you’ll be able to get some sick boots couriered down to Gore.
Conclusion
The Donovan dilemma requires NZ to commit hard to either growth or degrowth. We will all be a lot better off from growth. Auckland could be the capital of the Pacific, a regional peer to Melbourne and Sydney, and a southern counterpart to Hong Kong or Singapore. Auckland will be a bigger, better city, in a richer, more powerful country if we go hard on growth. It is doable. So, we should do it.
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