Destigmatising Density
There are many proximate causes for New Zealand’s recent disputes about planning permission. The more distal causes are related to New Zealanders collective attitude towards urban development.
Tensions around city planning parameters are rising again.
The NZHerald has published several articles critical of Housing Minister Phil Twyford’s new housing initiatives. Such as, the Minister’s tough turn on housing hard to justify and Nimbys are the heroes of democracy and our environment.
The policy initiative that concerned the commentators is the government announcing it will give planning and consent authority to its newly created Urban Development Authority (UDA).
Improving the resource management system and creating a UDA has been well signalled by the coalition government from as early as the Speech from the Throne. So claims that Phil Twyford’s housing initiatives lack democratic legitimacy seems to be overblown.
This government will take steps to improve our resource management system, with better spatial planning and better enforcement. An urban development agency will be introduced, and more emphasis placed on public transport and light rail.
This followed the 2017 general election where housing was one of four key issues according to a recent interview of Jacinda Ardern about her becoming Prime Minister of New Zealand.
The urban development model of giving consenting authority to a UDA has similarities to the proposed California Bay Area Rapid Transit model that I discussed in a previous article for Interest.co.nz. I have some concerns about the monopoly nature of such proposals but I do not doubt their democratic legitimacy.
Frank McRae rather than defending the current planning system is highly critical of it. He wrote -This ludicrous Dominion Road decision is proof the planning system is broken.
What defined the problem for Frank was a proposed 102 apartment building complex on Dominion Road being rejected for its resource consent on the grounds it did not fit the neighbouring character. The developer was Panuku -Auckland Council’s urban regeneration agency. One of the objectors was Auckland Council.
Many people on social media found the rejection absurd, baffling, jaw dropping and worm-brained. Dominion Road is getting light rail which means it is perfect for being a walkable neighbourhood close to amenities. Some people asked the reasonable question of -if density is not allowed in Auckland’s isthmus, its inner suburb area, then how will the city tackle its housing shortage and adapt to climate change?
Hayden Donnell in another article says that Auckland Council has nitpicked its way into rejecting two high-density apartment developments on public transport routes near the CBD. Hayden asked whether Auckland Council’s consents department really believes in the higher density vision of the Unitary Plan.
Simon Wilson a senior writer for the NZ Herald also discussed Auckland’s NIMBY tensions in a RNZ interview by Jesse Mulligan.
The various expressed emotions suggests that this debate has exposed some underlying core values about how New Zealanders view cities. This essay will explore these attitudes.
No doubt there are many proximate causes for the rising tensions. This essay will examine the more distal causes, which I believe is related to New Zealand’s collective attitude towards urban development.
I believe in New Zealand we have developed a schizophrenic attitude towards density.
By that I mean the second definition of schizophrenia, which is to hold
I deliberately use the word schizophrenic because it also conveys the idea that density has a stigma like schizophrenia a major mental illness has had.
I will address the stigma issue first and come back to the contradictory and antagonistic nature of New Zealand’s planning system later in the essay.
To properly fix our urban performance problems, such as the housing crisis, I believe the stigma of density needs to be openly confronted, much like it is enormously helpful to destigmatise our attitudes to mental illness.
This wouldn’t be the advice a PR firm would give. In fact the recommended advice, based on focus group analysis, is to only discuss the component parts of density. Built environments that are convenient, walkable, close to transit, schools, jobs, outdoor spaces, and things to eat, see, and do. But to never actually use the word ‘density’ itself.
Paint a picture of density (without saying the word): When it comes to density, it’s better to show than tell. The word itself is a turnoff. In fact, it conjures people’s worst fears of endless highrises and congestion. But most people describe an ideal place to live as convenient, walkable, and close to transit, schools, jobs, outdoor spaces, and things to eat, see, and do. (Pssst. Guess what? They just described density!) So, skip the density jargon, and opt instead for descriptions of great places to live.
This focus group analysis also gives general advice on how to promote an affordable housing agenda, which can be summed as, More Homes, All Shapes and Sizes, For All Our Neighbours.
As valuable as this tactical advice is I wonder if it needs to be balanced with a strategic understanding of why density was stigmatised.
Clearly identifying the causes of a problem is always helpful in finding an effective solution.
Patrick Reynolds writing for Greater Auckland gives a clear description of New Zealand’s urban performance problems. New Zealand cities became deformed by a spatially inefficient ‘cars only’ transport policy adopted from the US after WW2, which destroyed an earlier much more balanced spatially efficient ‘multi-modal transport model’.
I agree with the history that Patrick describes. Certainly three, four and five story buildings of the type which failed to get a resource consent in Dominion Road would have been unremarkable on a busy tram road in Auckland pre-WW2.
But was the genesis of New Zealand’s poor urban performance much earlier than the post-WW2 period?
The historical evidence is the suburb was institutionally favoured over the city as early as the 1920s.
This means back then it was societal beliefs and practices around the nature of what was considered good housing that influenced later transport provision not the other way around. Note this is a reversal of the normal situation where transport provision induces demand.
A century ago New Zealand like some other countries had a moral panic about industrialisation. High density city areas inhabited by the poor were labeled as slums. A plan was promoted whereby these city dwellers would be encouraged to move out of the city to healthier houses in the country. Town-planning was seen as a tool to do this.
Early garden-city and town-planning promoters were eager to convince the public that slumlike conditions existed in New Zealand cities, and that town planning was the required remedy. Promotional material castigating the evils of slums was produced and public meetings were held. This made quite an impression on both the public and the politicians.
The NZ Productivity Commission recounts this history in their paper -A history of town planning in New Zealand, (P. 3–4).
The “City Beautiful” and “Garden City” movements was an international trend at the turn of the twentieth century. The Garden City movement arose in Britain in the 1890s in response to the squalid conditions of their industrial cities. The movement feared that these cities were creating a
“degenerate working population and would cause national decline.”
Journalist Charles Read was a prominent figure of the movement in New Zealand. He twice toured New Zealand giving talks about how slums were affecting city life. He called for town planning to create healthy towns through practices such as land-use zoning and lower housing densities.
Minister of Internal Affairs George Russell organised the government-sponsored town-planning conference held in Wellington in May 1919. He said it aimed to;
“avoid the mistakes of the mother-country [Britain] where slums created an environment where a healthy race cannot be reared.”
Using restrictive planning rules to move people out of dense city environments was seen as a socially acceptable way to solve the externalities that cities were experiencing with ‘big smoke’ industrialisation, such as, rickets (a lack of sunlight and poor diet), typhoid and cholera (a lack of clean water) and crime (overcrowding).
City planning law was created.
The Town-Planning Act of 1926 enacted the first comprehensive power to regulate and limit the use of land for a particular activity.
During the Bill’s debate in the House of Representatives one Member of Parliament said:
“One can go into any city of any size at all and see residential areas, smoke-stacks, and everything else mixed up in one indiscriminate mass.”
Density was in this way demonised.
New Zealand went down the cul de sac of promoting standalone housing as the only desired urban form. This made the country easily susceptible in the 1950s to the ‘cars only’ spatially inefficient transport policy that Patrick Reynolds so clearly describes.
Garden cities did not deliver on what they promised. Houses in the country and the transit connected satellite cities mutated into car dependent suburbia. New Zealand failed to invest in the rail links that original garden city advocates promoted. Suburbia soon became labeled as sprawl -another emotionally charged, antagonistic term full of stigma.
Thus New Zealand’s expanding ‘garden cities’ were no longer seen as a social ‘good’. The town planning community quickly adapted to this changing social norm. Sprawl was classified as ‘bad’ which meant it too needed to be restricted and controlled with ‘compact city’ regulations.
All of this restricting and controlling did not create a ‘good’ though. Instead cities in New Zealand and those elsewhere who followed the same path created the ‘housing crisis’. All the housing options for newcomers to the city have been demonised.
Cities became pricy enclaves of exclusion. Access to successful urban environments with good jobs and economic opportunities has been increasingly rationed. This increased inequality by benefiting insiders and harming outsiders.
An unresolved culture war developed between compact city promoters and sprawl promoters which neither side is able to win.
The difficulty is that both sides have great strengths but also fatal flaws, especially for Auckland. A cul de sac truly has been reached.
Compact city regulations in places like Auckland has led to a lack of competitive land-use options needed to make housing affordable, while sprawl’s flaw is the country cannot afford Auckland’s expanding motorway system (both financially and for New Zealand to meet its climate change commitments).
This is the schizophrenic, contradictory and antagonistic characteristics of New Zealand’s planning system. By its very nature it is constraining. The planning system can’t build a city because its underlying philosophy is to restrict and constrain it. Planning in New Zealand has a century of restrictions to uphold.
This is why Auckland Council is at war with itself. Panuku tasked with regenerating and building is at odds with Auckland Council’s planning arm which is tasked with protecting a legacy of restrictions and constraints.
The recent major change in planning for New Zealand’s cities is the promise to build 100,000 more affordable KiwiBuild homes. This is a key policy of the current Coalition government.
The three political parties that make up the coalition each had a variation on KiwiBuild that they campaigned on. These policies were well canvased in the debates leading up to the 2017 election.
So it is fair to say that KiwiBuild has a strong democratic mandate from a majority of New Zealanders. This means the government has a mandate to be the catalyst for building rather than constraining cities.
Governments are not necessarily needed to build houses, but governments do need to have a positive institutional response towards the building of houses. The most significant part of the KiwiBuild policy is the switch of political will from negatively constraining cities to positively building them.
Yet it seems inevitable that New Zealand’s schizophrenic attitude to density will cause conflict when the coalition government attempts to ramp up the building of its promised 100,000 more affordable homes. The government, like Panuku, will want to build in parts of cities which are convenient, walkable, close to transit, schools, jobs… i.e. densely built environments.
A honest and transparent government would tell the public that a good proportion of its planned 100,000 homes will be built in dense city environments and that it will be changing planning rules so this can be done.
How does the government do this when some of the public and several significant public institutions hold strong schizophrenic attitudes against density?
It would be helpful for New Zealand to learn from other cultures which incrementally reformed their slums rather than condemning them outright. This might help New Zealand reverse out of its dead-end cul de sac.
Some countries instead of demonising, first slums and then sprawl, chose to institute policies to gradually improved slums.
Tokyo is a example of a city that did not stigmatise its slums. Instead there is intellectual pride that Tokyo once was a slum. Japanese public authorities provide excellent infrastructure for their cities. Yet they largely leave their city residents to incrementally improve their housing (and their mixed used commercial activity).
Supporting the resilience of city dwellers to incrementally improve shacks and slums into better residential spaces has helped Japan keep its homelessness down to an almost negligible level.
Personally I have lived overseas -mainly in a Helsinki apartment for several years -through this direct experience and through further reading I am aware that many urban communities do not have the stigma about density that New Zealand does.
Many returning New Zealanders whilst overseas have lived in dense city environments. Typically they find their prejudices and fears against density were unfounded. These returnees are helping to change social attitudes. Better city building ideas are spreading over the internet and social media. Politicians and public institutions will follow public opinion.
Space though in cities is increasingly becoming contested so there will be ongoing controversies to manage. This is an international phenomenon and is not just about competition for privately owned land to become higher density residential and commercial spaces, but also about other spaces, such as, public spaces, street spaces and car parking spaces.
Successful cities will be the ones that best allocate the scarce resource of space.
New Zealand is having a lively debate about urban matters so I am hopeful that the country can move forward on this issue.
I believe New Zealand is at an exciting phase of its history. It is beginning to learn how to build better urban environments that fairly and efficiently meet the needs of its people.
The Village Inside by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, 2010
Nimby stoush over High St undermines self-reliance by Brendon Harré, 2016, The Press (Print edition)
Successful cities understand spatial economics by Brendon Harré, Aug 2017, Medium
What is the secret to Tokyo’s affordable housing? by Brendon Harré, Jan 2017, Medium
Tokyo does not subsidise its transport system! by Brendon Harré, April Jan 2017, Medium
