Suggestions from overseas are frequently dismissed as irrelevances. But let’s take a closer look.
Here’s an experiment: Next time you’re talking about cities to a fellow Kiwi, try citing a mainstream urban planning idea from Europe and see how far you get. If you can make 30 seconds without the interruption of “It’s not in our DNA” then you, my friend, are doing well.
Every New Zealander knows that all European cities are great because everyone in Europe is urbane, sophisticated and law-abiding. They’re particularly gracious behind the wheel, if they drive, which they don’t because cycling is in the European’s DNA and everyone cycles everywhere every day. All streets are shared spaces. Trams abound, universally retained since the 1920s, while roadbuilding had no impact on cities. Unsightly warehousing and heavy industry simply do not exist. Nor does shift work.
Our picture of “Europe” is a weird amalgam of Scandinavian design, French trains, Dutch bicycles and Swiss chocolatiers. While that picture is clearly nonsense, it has a powerful hold on our subconscious, and it gets invoked whenever we try to improve New Zealand’s cities. “European culture is different”, we are told. “This won’t work here.”
Above all, we love to forget that European cities were rebuilt for cars just as ours were, leading to suburban sprawl, parking problems and traffic jams. Look at Madrid’s motorway network for example. Or the bizarre Corbusian cityscape around Lyon’s Perrache station. This happened almost everywhere. France, for example, removed almost all its urban tramway in the 1950s. Sound familiar?
Just as people cause problems, we can solve them. From 2003, Bordeaux reintroduced trams as part of a Haussmann-esque improvement to attract more people into the city. The trams aren’t just efficient; they are gorgeous, with a Scalextric style centreline pickup that negates any requirement for overhead wires. Sydney’s fabbo new light rail line uses the same technology. What works for Quai Louis XVIII works in George Street…and would work in Aotearoa, too.
European cities are typically larger, more crowded, and more complicated than anything we have here. Think about the tonnage of goods moved into Paris per day, for example. Or the numbers of tourists crowding the streets of Salamanca. Or the logistics of collecting rubbish in central Milan. If we have a problem, chances are somewhere else has had it too… and has worked out how to solve it.
As the habitat of more than half the world’s population, cities are the nexus of problems… and the source of ways to solve them. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Let’s learn what works…and adapt it for our own needs. The forthcoming Urbanism NZ Conference is a chance to shape the conversation around the human habitat in Aotearoa.
George Weeks is a committee member of UDF NZ. This article is written in a personal capacity.
An earlier version of this article was published in The Spinoff on 3 October 2022.
centre of Bordeaux
realm in Sydney’s George Street
people use the Sydney
Light Rail L2/L3 lines
Firstly, I found the plain and informative discussion of the article refreshing and interesting and appreciated the authors avoidance of urban planning rhetoric and jargon as well as agreeing with their argument concerning ‘ not in our DNA’.
In my experience though, what I have found more surprising is a similar attitude of this phenomenon from members within the planning/ architecture/ engineering sectors. While avoiding this issue or expressing support for car travel is sometimes due to social pressure (and hence economic) from clients and/or developers, cars and their associated infrastructure continues to be a dominant physical and social component of the NZ built environment. And in my experience of working within these various sectors I have sometimes also found a relative and fascinating ‘love of cars’ alongside a relative lack of belief in bus and bike travel as a respectable and legitimate form of transport, let alone it being actually practiced by them.
A particularly ‘memorable’ personal experience for me involved an influential figure within a NZ transport public service telling me, albeit in a lighthearted manner, they like to refer to cyclists as ‘psycholists’ or ‘cyclepaths’ as well as remarking European cities, with their ‘alternative’ modes of transport, as ‘boring’. They said they couldn’t wait to get back to NZ and drive around in their newly acquired sports car.
What is required is, essentially, a culture change, (even though we would proudly say we do not suffer from this phenomenon like foreigners do) but it is common knowledge this can take a long time to change. I suggest it will be even longer if members of influential public and private organisations are not able to practice what they may sometimes publicly support.