A studio project on the redevelopment of a site in Mount Albert to address the current urban design issues, provide for higher densities of development, increase people’s use of the area, and of public transport, and be economically viable over time required an understanding of the Auckland City Growth Management Strategy and how it might be implemented. The area chosen was at the Mount Albert train station.
(Photograph by Patrick Clearwater.)
This project showed me the complexity of dealing with traffic, arterial roads, public transport and growth. I offered the following critique of how far the Auckland City Council growth strategy allowed achieving all these aims together.
The Growth Strategy identifies Mount Albert as one centre of growth in Auckland City. The strategy states that the purpose of redevelopment is to enhance existing public transportation facilities, education institutions, recreation spaces, community services and business activities, and to create a vibrant Mount Albert town centre. Also that development should focus on residential growth and create a place that offers a range of activities.
There are some conflicts between the selected urban design criteria and the process of development that the strategy envisages. Peter Calthorpe suggests that arterials and thoroughfares should not pass through transit-oriented developments, and that arterial traffic should not be slowed by the activities within them, to support an efficient regional traffic system (
The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, community and the American Dream, 1993, New York, Princeton Architectural Press). He says that the commercial cores of centres and associated transit stops should be to one side of the arterial. In addition, the type of transit that he describes tends to be either light rail or buses, neither of which creates the barriers of a heavy rail line, so the adverse effect of the railway barrier in Mount Albert is likely to be greater than what Calthorpe describes.
People + Places + Spaces suggests the ostensibly opposite principle of focusing walkable nodes on arterials and public transport so that they benefit from the movement economy (Ministry for the Environment,
People + Places + Spaces: A design guide for urban New Zealand, 2002, Wellington). Both the Auckland City Growth Strategy and the Regional Growth Strategy follow this principle: almost all centres of growth are on arterial roads. Perhaps the issue this principle addresses is that of retaining landscapes that people value, by retaining the usually historical routes of arterial roads. Or perhaps the suggestion is that retaining these routes, and gradually increasing the connectedness and permeability of the street network, may decrease the need for cars to dominate particular roads.
This principle is compatible with the incremental development recommended by the growth strategy. However, in creating a plan of development for the site chosen in Mount Albert, it was found to be necessary to create a plan for a much wider area than just the one hectare site, which the strategy does not require. For example, the overall density of the area surrounding the train station is required to be 40 dwellings per hectare. For the purposes of the development project, a density of 60 dwellings per hectare was presumed to be an appropriate density the particular site, at the centre of Mount Albert.
In the short term, increased density of development cannot address the barriers of the arterial roads and the railway line. Despite the fact that the final proposal for development increased the level of permeability between the two sides of New North Road, the busy and noisy New North Road still a major barrier for pedestrians. It is suggested that shopping streets for pedestrians should be located in streets through which traffic does not pass at all. There is an opportunity in that the Regional Arterial Road Plan no longer classifies New North Road as a regional arterial, because of future extensions of State Highway 20, and so the need for the road to cater primarily for vehicular traffic may decrease.
Appendix H to the Auckland Regional Policy Statement states that the average 200 employees per hectare is for the zoned employment areas within the centre or corridor. In Mount Albert this is the existing 3 hectares of zoned business land in accordance with the Auckland City Council’s District Plan. The purposed increase of employment density is thus limited to the existing business zoned areas, which are mainly located along New North Road. This may contradict with the Auckland City Growth Management Strategy, which proposed Mount Albert to be an Urban Living Community of residential growth and mixed-use town centres. The ideal of mixed use development would not be able to occur outside this area. The growth strategy anticipates the centres on the railway line to be self-sufficient, while also encouraging people to move between each centre along the railway, but a limit on the area that should be mixed use will not achieve this, because active edges beyond the town centre that encourage residents to walk to the station are not required.
In order to make this development proposal feasible, a technical analysis of the feasibility was undertaken. The growth strategy requires a certain level of density, and to make a profit while providing this required a further increase in the residential density on the site. This is shown by the fact that a density of 60 dwellings per hectare was not feasible. The growth strategy favours incremental development. However, individual developers may not be able to negotiate to form the new streets that can give amenity to the higher density development. The street height–width ratio, and detail planning at the human scale may not be considered by developers.
