The Auckland Spatial Plan

A few posts back I mentioned how the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill will require the Auckland Council to draft up a “Spatial Plan”. Part 6 of the Bill says that the Spatial Plan needs to include these aspects:

As regular readers of this blog would well know, one of the biggest annoyances I have with Auckland is the lack of co-ordination between land-use planning and transportation planning. This lack of co-ordination has been going on for decades, and explains why we have hundreds of thousands of people living in the Pakuranga/Howick/Botany/Flat Bush part of the city, even though the transport links to that area (no railways, busways or motorways) are really quite pathetic. The lack of co-ordination also goes a long way to explain why the government is currently focused on building a road between Puhoi and Wellsford that will only encourage sprawl, rather than building the CBD Rail Tunnel that will encourage the intensification that our current planning documents call for.

It does seem as though I’m not the only person who has realised that the lack of co-ordination between planning and infrastructure provision (including, but not limited to, transportation) , and efforts to improve that co-ordination are largely behind this push to create a Spatial Plan for Auckland. A very interesting Cabinet Paper from the Ministry for the Environment outlines the process by which we have ended up including the requirement for a Spatial Plan in the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill, as well as giving us some good indications about where things might be headed next with this Spatial Plan. First of all, it outlines the problems faced in trying to effectively plan Auckland’s growth and development: The Cabinet paper correctly notes that it is the lack of integration between different council plans and strategies which has meant that the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy has ended up being fairly poorly implemented. This is different from saying that there is no overall plan for Auckland, or that the plans we have aren’t very good (as clearly Auckland has a myriad of plans and strategies, many of which are very good), the problem has ultimately been that the over-arching strategies don’t have enough legislative clout, and therefore what they’re trying to achieve hasn’t filtered through to the “nuts and bolts” District Plans (the documents that really guide what does and doesn’t happen) enough.

The outcome has generally been a bit of paralysis, in that greenfield development has continued ahead of projection – but generally without the accompanying infrastructural improvements that would be expected or required – whereas intensification has lagged behind, generally not because there isn’t demand for it and not because developers aren’t keen to intensify, but rather because council District Plans are stuck in the 1980s and have (Waitakere City apart) been absolutely woeful in giving effect to the Regional Growth Strategy. For example, in Auckland City there has been almost no land rezoned to the Residential 8 zone, which was supposed to be the “flagship zone” in giving effect to the Regional Growth Strategy. As a result of this paralysis we have seen the supply of new housing stagnate, demand has continued to build and as a result we have seen housing prices go insane.

So how can a Spatial Plan help fix these problems, in particular the lack of co-ordination between high-level strategic documents and the “nuts and bolts” documents like District Plans, as well as ensuring co-ordination between land-use planning and the provision of infrastructure? Well here’s what the Cabinet document says about that: Importantly, it is also recongised that a Spatial Plan cannot hope to achieve much unless it is given sufficient legislative “clout”. I think we can expect some future changes to the Resource Management Act that would require Councils to “give effect to” spatial plans when formulating their District Plans. It may be the same for other important strategic documents, such as future Regional Land Transport Strategies.

What we have in the current Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill is effectively a first step in the direction of creating a Spatial Plan that will be an incredibly strong and powerful document to guide Auckland’s future growth and development. The document will replace the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy, and potentially in the longer term could pretty much subsume the Auckland Regional Policy Statement and the Regional Land Transport Strategy. Having all these documents put together into one grand plan (as long as it’s well written!) could be hugely beneficial to guide Auckland’s development more effectively in the future, and finally achieve proper co-ordination between land-use planning and transportation planning.

A comparison of the current situation (first diagram), the recommended short-term option (second diagram) and the recommended long-term option (third diagram) for planning land-use development, transport projects and other infrastructure projects is shown below. As you can see, the proposals would certainly simplify matters. And, as long as we end up with a good Spatial Plan, I think that this would be a good thing. Of course, whether this spatial plan ends up being good for Auckland or not will depend on its details, and the fact that we’re going to go through the whole question of “how should Auckland grow?” once again does open the doors for getting rid of the Metropolitan Urban Limits and heading back down the ugly path of urban sprawl. Fortunately,  I think that generally planning is improving at the moment, and so there’s a pretty damn good chance that we will end up with something better than what we have at the moment. And finally we will have a properly integrated plan guiding where and how Auckland grows, along with ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is provided when it is required. That’s going to be a giant leap forwards.

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