A very interesting article in the NZ Herald today about Danish urban planner Jan Gehl. Gehl is the type of urban planner we need a lot more of in this world – concerned about humanising spaces, creating areas that are friendly for people, reducing auto-dependency, and above all – looking to make our cities nicer places to be in: surely what all urban planner should aspire to.
Anyway, here’s part of the article:
If New York can reclaim Broadway for pedestrians, then so can Auckland, says Jan Gehl, the Danish urban planner credited with having more impact on more cities than any other person in the past decade.
It’s like the line ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’ in Frank Sinatra’s classic song New York, New York, says the 73-year-old.
He has made a career of reclaiming streets for pedestrians and bicycles in the belief that people and public spaces are the lifeblood of a city.
Since setting up Gehl Architects in 2000, the former academic has worked with about 70 cities, including on the transformation of Melbourne and, most recently, the permanent closure of New York’s Broadway in February this year.
Three years ago, Gehl Architects began a “public realm health check” which found Auckland was in a beautiful harbour setting but a hostile city where too many concessions to the car had created. In the words of Mr Gehl, it was “a mini Los Angeles”.
On the plus side, the latest Gehl report has found more people living in the city centre – 21,600 at the last count – and a university city with 63,000 students contributing to the city’s vitality and cultural diversity.
Mr Gehl says Auckland has all the goodies to be a great city and is making some progress. But a major change of mindset is needed to address the balance between how much space is dedicated to cars and how much to pedestrians.
“Having a north-facing waterfront is the ultimate dream of all cities in the Southern Hemisphere – and you have it. But it is poorly utilised and hidden by red fences and used as storage for secondhand cars.”
To break the physical and mental barrier between the city and the harbour, he recommends closing either Quay St or Customs St and narrowing the remaining street.
Other suggestions are reducing Queen St from four to two lanes – Auckland City Council has stopped plans for reducing traffic and creating 24-hour bus lanes after objections from retailers – and halving the amount of city asphalt within 10 years.
The Gehl report says one of the challenges is the system of motorways creating a “traffic machine” to and through the city centre.
“The overall pedestrian environment is of poor quality and therefore does not encourage people to walk across the city centre,” the report says.
Says Mr Gehl: “This nation needs a vibrant wonderful heart and you have all the makings of a good heart here [in Auckland]. What is needed is some refurbishment. One could really make a fantastic city.”
He said Copenhagen had improved every day for the past 40 years “and people have come to love the city”.
Jan Gehl’s recipe for Auckland
* Halve asphalt in 10 years.
* Reduce Queen St to two lanes.
* Close Quay or Customs St to traffic; narrow the other street.
* Provide space for cyclists.
Seriously, let’s just do what he says. He really knows what he’s talking about.
We are seeing some of these ideas come through, in the form of Auckland City Council’s shared streets projects. I’m very much looking forward to watching those come to fruition over the next few months.
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Did you go to the talk? It was amazing. He was preaching to the converted in my case, but it was amazing – and even more crucial is that the range of people was much more “influental” than usual. Sure, there were the usual activists and traffic professionals like me. But I also noticed a number of politicians, important resource consent planners (including from the private industry) and so on. It was like a black-tie event advocating a revolution! Good stuff.
Nope I didn’t get to the talk, when was it?
It was a good article in the Herald, I particularly liked the part of reducing Queen Stand closing Quay St or Customs St and narrowing the other. I think my preference would be to close Quay St and with the red fence moved back past Captain Cook wharf (where I think the cruise terminal should be) there would be a huge amount of open space for people to enjoy, I don’t think we would know what to do with it all initially but I’m sure we will find something. Hopefully some people high up take notice.
Matt, the red fence can stay where it is, as long as the gates are open! It’s quite an icon actually.
I agree that Quay Street is a far better option for closure than Customs Street. However, I would put bus lanes along Customs Street as many many services use it. The bus lanes could link in with the bus lanes along Fanshawe Street.
Keep the red fence! Wellington still has its fence in some places, but both sides are accessable.
A similar idea he had to reduce the Quays in Wellington was rejected by council. Good luck getting that one passed in Auckland. I’d say a certain rail tunnel will be need first (just imagine the opportunities the city would have if the tunnel was constructed).
I don’t mean get rid of it I just mean move the closed off part to after Captain Cooks wharf.
Tonight – Aotea Centre. Ludo Campbell-Reid organised it, several hundred people (well, at least 200, quite possibly more) attended. He gave a very long, rambling, yet utterly focused & fascinating (if that makes sense if you weren’t there!) presentation.
Ranging from the past, on how cities from the 50s had all ignored human scale and needs (“an apartment block’s most important feature is how it looks from the freeway”) because they had abandoned traditional ways of human life and architecture for “modern” things like large-scale birds eye view architecture and for “making the car happy”. He had this lovely, very caustic comment about modern architects who fly in and out of a city they barely know like bomber pilots, dropping bland skyscrapers or other “feature buildings” – he called them “bird shit architects” (delivered in his slow, slightly broken English, with humorous illustrations, it didn’t sound as harsh as it may on reading it). He wasn’t much more happy with traffic engineers, but as far as I was concerned, he was only talking about roading engineers 😉
He then discussed Copenhagen’s slow move away from the car (as I suspected, these things do NOT happen overnight, more like 2% every year…). Started out with closing one of the main streets, and then slowly moved on from that – they had ALL of their 16 city squares as parking lots back in the 1960s, today apparently none.
He also showed a lot of the work of the past Melbourne transformation, and being done right now in Sydney and New York, which is pretty amazing. Whole boulevards halved in terms of lanes, replaced with medians and protected cycle lanes, and others – just closed off. Pedestrianised in a stroke of “experiment”, many of which ended up being made permanent.
He also gave some depressing stats for Auckland, including that we apparently have the highest per capita car parking in pretty much everywhere. This dove-tailed with the very sensible “if you give them tarmac, they will drive, if you give them bike lanes, they will ride” talk. He also talked about the need to keep footpaths continous over minor side streets and driveways, something I am constantly telling architects about (so much for them being more up to speed with urban design that us traffic engineers).
He then explained the report he is currently finalising for Auckland City – including how we should be proud of our northern-facing harbour, our good-and-could-be-wonderful waterfront, our interesting topography, before leading into our problems and opportunities. You would have loved him talking about the need to reduce our use of one-way streets, and the issues faced by pedestrians, especially west-east through the CBD. That report will be GOLD.
As I said, it was also very heartening to see who was in attendance. I may be flattering it somewhat, but it seemed that quite a few of the important figures of the city where there, from people like Wayne McDonald or John Banks (who lauded Gehl in his entry speech, but of course did not mention cycling, despite it being 40% of Jan’s speech later on) as well as the usual suspects like us advocates, or Ludo or Richard Reed.
Thanks for this summary Max, a pity I missed the talk. Let’s hope council actually listen to what he says and that we see some implementation for once.
I hope that it is just not the “important figures” in the city get to hear and reflect on the thoughts of people like Jan Gehl but others who influence. The Herald article notes plans to reduce traffic on Queen St were blocked by retailers. If a few shopkeepers who can’t see the benefits they would recieve from reducing traffic are able to determine our urban planning process what hope for anything getting done.
Actually there were approx. 650 people there.
As usual John Banks gave his introductory speech then left immediately. What a missed opportunity. I felt like asking a question about what he (JB) thought of the presentation, knowing that he had left. Our leaders aren’t leaders – they are followers. They wait till they see what public opinion is, then jump on the band-wagon. What we need is somebody to stand up and say this that they are going to make this sort of thing happen, and then ask who is with them. But we have nobody doing that. Unfortunately Ludo is not high enough to do that. It needs to be a top politician, probably the Mayor, or top civic official who has the power – and in Auckland’s case it needs to be someone who can control planning, transport strategy and urban design…but of course we have created three separate posts / teams to deal with those things, thus reducing the chance of quick, radical, transformational change the scale of which we have seen in New York, Melbourne etc.
we know what to do…we just don’t have the ability to do it, or the person to make it happen…YET.
I think retailers may be smartening up a bit. I believe feedback on the Elliott and Darby St upgrades was more supportive of the upcoming shared space transformation.
At least that’s what the council told me in a letter I got following from submitting my support for Darby.
I didn’t see JB leaving – I agree, that’s bloody bad form.
I like the idea of closing Quay and/or Customs. They feel like cross-CBD rat runs for traffic that should be using the motorways to bypass the center.
The sad thing is none of this is new, nor at all out of the realms of possibility. Opening the waterfront has been debated ineffectually for decades.
As noted above a two lane Queen St without parking was one of the original options of the recent upgrade (the other was two general lanes, two bus lanes and no parking). Unfortunately the city was held to ransom by a noisy handful of ill informed retailers.
Likewise when they were planning the new CMJ links from the harbour bridge to the port it was suggested that once they were built Quay St would be stripped of its arterial route function and narrowed to one lane each way. Somehow the ball was dropped on that one (it probably went out when Hubbard did) and Quay St is still 4-6 lanes.
I wish they would hurry up with the shared spaces already, they are starting to sound a lot like vaporware as since they were announced there hasn’t really been any action on them. Also what ever happened to Sky Citys plans for Federal St?
I think the shared spaces have been getting their final resource consents recently. We should start seeing some serious physical works in the next few months on Fort Street, Elliott Street, Darby Street and Lorne Street by the library.
What will happen to High St I wonder? The best case for pedestrainsation or shared spacing gets left as a parking lot simply because it had a streetscape upgrade fairly recently?
Yes sadly while High Street is the most obvious candidate it is unlikely to be touched for a while yet due to its relatively recent upgrade.
The shared space projects aren’t vapourware, but admittedly from what I heard in presentations they gave to IPENZ a month ago, they seem to be taking a very much “let’s get this PERFECT” approach to it, with lots of lead-up planning and thinking about issues like safety for the disabled or ability to do the future maintenance.
Which hopefully will bring good results, but certainly isn’t speeding it up.
“What will happen to High St I wonder? The best case for pedestrainsation or shared spacing gets left as a parking lot simply because it had a streetscape upgrade fairly recently?”
Nick R – I think you have pegged that one just right. It’s too new for them to admit they had their priorities wrong with that one.
Let’s close it for RWC weeks as a test case, if we can’t get them to close Queen Street itself!
If High Street is closed for the World Cup what would be the odds of it ever reopening again? I would bet the uproar over reopening it would be so great the council would have no choice but to close it permanently. It would also be cool to close it over Auckland Anniversary, imagine a nice sunny February day with maybe a market or a concert in the square. They use to close it for part of Fashion Week and set it as runway, so it is not without precedent. Auckland has some fantastic public spaces, but they need to used more actively as destinations in there own right and not just a pretty place to walk through on your way to somewhere else.
Well … the supercity council might be able to say that the “old” council got High Street wrong…
Personally I think Freyberg square is the most successful public plaza in Auckland. It really angers me how they insisted on running a road across it though.
Pedestrainising High St and removing the road across the square would be so beneficial. It would link the CBDs only significant pedestrain streets (Vulcan Lane and Durham St) together and connect these to the Chancery, a pedestrain only development. Closing Courthouse lane past the Metropolis forecour and ‘shared spacing’ Chancery St and O’Connell St would be the icing on the cake.
This would give Auckland a pedestrain ‘old town’ quarter centred on Freyberg Sq, a place of historic buildings and pedestrian scale. The square, although quite compact, would spill out into the neighbouring streets.
In the short term they might have to leave vehicle access at the very end pf High St where the carpark comes out, athough in the long term this exit might be relocated to Kitchener St. Plus there would need to be procedures in place to retain delivery access to the Little High St and Metropolis freight docks.
Nick – I think just removing car parking and widening the footpaths to suit would be fine for the beginning. We can retain vehicle access (shared space or if need be low kerbs, not the current unfriendly high ones) for the car park buildings and for some loading spaces. But yeah, get rid of that street bisecting the square. Maybe some “guerilla bollarding” could work 😉
One of the big reasons often quoted for having vehicle access is for deliveries. Perhaps it is also time we just mandated that these can only happen at a certain time of the day, i.e. 5am – 6am. We could just install retractable barriers at the entrance to the street which are lowered during the delivery hours.
Well, there’s lots of couriers and smaller deliveries at other times. But I really don’t think servicing is the problem – it’s through traffic and parked cars (dead space). Servicing / loading only makes up a vanishing percentage of all cars on the road (trucks in total make up only about 2-5% of all traffic depending on location). We need not make it harder on stores to service themselves – though I understand some such timing regulations are planned in the shared-space zones.
ingolfson: “We need not make it harder on stores to service themselves”
Making it harder for shops to do business in the CBD just forces them out to suburban malls.
there are pedestrianised schemes all over the world that still have to allow deliveries to shops. its so common, its not rocket science. just make the spaces closed to deliveries between something like 9.30am and 5.30pm. outside of that you can deliver, which actually helps to create some levels of activity in times when the space is actually quiet from a pedestrian point of view.
Yeah it’s not like Auckland would be inventing something new here, there is a wealth of international experience doing this. The sorts of pedestrainsed streets we are talking about have been popular in parts of North America and Australia since the 60’s, and of course everywhere managed to have entirely car free cities (deliveries, shops, the lot) prior to the advent of the car at the beginning of the 20th century.
Heck Venice manages to be a car-free city!
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed it but there a number of cars drive up on the High Street footpath (near the carpark building, ironically) to park there once it gets dark. This isn’t legal, eh?
Back to Jan Gehl: I do so hope to see at least one or two of his recommendations implemented before the RWC. Some like making Queen Street two-lanes shouldn’t be difficult. It can be on a trial basis on say, weekends which was how Times Square was won back by pedestrians in New York although I am aware that the council is pretty reluctant due to the expensive footpath upgrade.
But oh! Once a year for a few hours, thanks to the Santa Parade, you can experience Queen Street car-free and how wonderful it is.
And university graduation processions! One of the best things about graduating is that you get to walk up Queen Street. Makes all those long nights finishing essays almost worth it.
The thing that struck me was that Copenhagen was on a par with
Auckland in the 1960’s.. the key to making spaces more liveable is to get cars out. In copenhagen this involved systematically car parks every year.. fewer car parks.. more people.. now look at it!
You’re right Annie. I often think of parking as the “elephant in the room” when it comes to planning and transport issues. How you manage, and deal with, parking has a huge impact on both your transport and planning outcomes, but for some reason proper studies of the implications of different parking policies are incredibly difficult to find.
Everyone just dumps it in the “too hard” basket, and seeks to provide as much parking as possible.
I’ve prepared a wee map of my thoughts for the High St precinct:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101291069583876254503.00048ac1dbab6c1de2fd5&ll=-36.84756,174.76701&spn=0.005898,0.011362&t=k&z=17
Dark red is pedestrian only, light red is a ‘shared space’ while blue has a higher priority for vehicles
I like your plans Nick. This is already a fantastic little corner of the CBD that will be enhanced through the Fort Street shared space project. It’d be awesome to take that to the next level and make it a truly pedestrian-focused area.
The retailers want free parking.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10657175
They need a festival like Cuba Street or something to really unlock the potential of this area.
@ James B
fascinating and worrying view from shopkeepers, but does point to a wider planning problem. often the quality of any particular area is not so much determined by the policies / actions for that area, but the policies etc for other areas. you won’t get investment / development in places you want it to, whilst its still so easy to develop etc in places that you don’t want it to happen. I have this discussion with local authorities all around the country…they just can’t see it. If you want our CBD to become a truly world class CBD, you have to start making it harder to locate out of CBD as well as working to make your CBD more attractive.
Its still too easy and attractive for a retailer to go and locate in one of our many suburban malls, thus undermining the role of the CBD as international (shopping) destination.
very disappointingly, Hamilton CC were one who could see it, and they tried to introduce a radical new control of out of centre retail – Variation 21 – but its just been controversially overturned. it would have made a huge difference.
Hmm, so according to the above article High St is getting squashed by “belligerently policed parking, chainstores and suburban malls.”
…so their answer is to compete with malls and chainstores head on by demanding free parking?! Why not get rid of parking and cars completely to create a point of difference from those malls? Where is a high end fashion botique most at home, in a car choked analogue of a suburban mall, or in a european style historic ‘old town’ with a very high standard of urban design.
Surely they realise that their shoppers park in carparking buildings anyway? The developer of The Chancery obviously does, he stuck the parking up the back hidden from view, and created a pedestrain only village of shops. You don’t see people driving in the middle there to park their cars, but you do see a lot of people dining and shopping.
Anyone else feel like the shopkeepers would like to turn Auckland into a giant shopping mall? Unfortunately people like that shopper they interviewed are never going to shop in the city anyway. Of course the city gets dark and cold, it’s winter, nothing can be done about that. High Street is no worse than it was 5 years ago and certainly better than it was 10 years ago. Although did anyone notice the final sentence that said that High Street would be upgraded after the World Cup?
Yes, that was interesting. Maybe they will do a shared space thing there (assuming there’s any budget ;eft by then( because all the High Street retailers will suddenly scream “Me too”!
I personally know one store manager on the Street who certainly would like to see it. I think the whole article was just depressing. Why do they constantly feel car parking is their issue? Bleargh.
I agree it was a depressing article. I mean what do the retailers want – the council to create a giant carpark that would ruin the CBD so that people can park there for free? I think they need to get real and accept the points of difference the CBD offers.
I have heard that since the Queen Street upgrades pedestrian numbers are up significantly. So much for a dying CBD, High Street generally seems to bustle for me. I would say the problems they face are simply due to the recession.
Regarding a post RWC upgrade, that’ll be a decision for the new council and I certainly haven’t heard anything about it.
I had an interesting conversation with a family member tonight about Queens Wharf. Their opinion was they should build a shopping/cafe precinct on it as there is nowhere to shop in town. I quickly pointed out, what about High St, Queen St etc and all I got back was “but they are to far apart, we have nothing dedicated to shoppers in town”. Needless to say I was mortified at the idea of doing this. Perhaps a shared space along some of these areas would help to focus people on them.
Umm, wtf does your family member mean? What about the downtown mall, or the atrium, or the chancery? The whole of the CBD is about shopping!
IMHO they should consider a fresh produce market cum hawker food market, that would get people down there.
Exactly Nick – that kind of thing would make the sheds (and the Britomart end of town) more lively yet. Also, what happened to the night market idea? It seems to have died again.
There’s a facebook group dedicated to the markets http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=25498112017&v=wall&ref=ts
@Matt L, I wonder how they did deliveries before vans and trucks..? Parked their carriages on the main streets and slepped the goods up I reckon, when they saw the increase in patronage they’d get with a pedestrianised CBD I see no reason why they wouldn’t change their minds…
I think it is safe to assume any pedestrianisation will allow for managed freight and courier access at particular points or times of day. The key thing is to get rid of the fairly useless single occupant private cars and car parking. For example you could have two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, plus all night. Thats half the day available and all night. Another thing would be to set up a series of loading zones dotted around the pedestrian area, theses might consist of a couple of courier bays, a disabled park or two and maybe a few five minute parks if these is room. In the case of High St none point would be more than 100m from a vehicular road anyway.
It might be that full pedestrainisation isn’t necessary, and that shared spacing proves very effective. After all, if there aren’t any parking buildings or driveways on the street and the roadside parking is removed people would have little need to drive there, especially if the pavement treatment makes it an unlikely through route. All that would be left would be things like couriers, deliveries and the odd taxi.
Obviously emergency services access needs to be maintained, but that is simply a case of having a clear path down the street wide enough for a fire truck. Cops and ambos will have no problems mounting the kerb and driving down the lane. You’re gonna want to keep the middle of the street clear for pedestrian circulation anyway.
I guess the thing with shared space is that you really have to hugely alter the environment to make it work. Therefore you can’t really do shared spaces cheaply. You could do pedestrianisation cheaply.
For High street we should just start by banning all non-delivery vehicles and making sure that that’s enforced, just having all the parking bays free of parked cars would hugely improve the street. Alternatively the council could just dump 60 planter pots, one in each of the carparks (I count 60-70 carparks on High street), along the street….anything to get rid of the parking would be a huge improvment IMO.
I saw an article in the Aucklander on Thursday where the retailers on High St were saying they need more carparks or they’ll have to re-locate to the malls… Sigh…
What would be cool is if they could dump a couple of tonnes of sand into the roadway during summer and convert it too a beach. It might not please the shopkeepers though to have sandy people wandering through their shops.
Lol, probably not. But really, pushing for some streets in the CBD to be closed for cars during RWC is a real great idea. Experiments like this are the best way to convince the doubters and avoid the red tape.
They did a similar thing along the Seine in Paris and it looked awesome seeing all the people enjoying it.
http://ocurriendo.com/actualidad/files/2009/04/paris_beach2.jpg
I think Auckland is going to have a tough time reducing the number of carparks in the city at a rate of 2-3% a year when developments like SOHO square (1250 parks) and Rhubarb Lane (3000 parks) are adding such a significant numbers of spaces to the city’s stocks.
Not sure how Auckland wil reduce parking at a rate of 2-3% a year when developments such as Rhubarb Lane (3000 parks), SOHO Square (1250 parks), Quay Street parking building (1500 off) and others like them are adding so many additional spaces to the city’s stocks.
I loved Auckland.
I spent a great deal of time on buses and walking about.
I longed to find a beautiful place to sit and rest with other tourists by the water.
Why is the Botanic garden 2hours into suburbia with 3 changes?????
Jan Gehl is right, you guys dont know what a gem you’ve got.
The Ironbark Building on K-road is awesome though!
I’m glad you liked it. To be honest Auckland Domain is effectively the real botanic garden of Auckland. Come back soon and you will see many spaces opening up along the waterfront. I think Auckland has been abused in the past, however we are slowly turning this around. It will take time though.