Tuesday 31 July 2018

National Planning Standards: some thoughts


The draft national planning standards that are out for comment are a curious thing.

The purpose of having national standards is not really clear to me. The MFE website says the following:

Currently, plans and policy statements prepared under the RMA are inconsistent with each other and slow and costly to prepare. They can be hard to understand, compare and comply with. This is because councils have generally developed their plans and policy statements independently of each other and without a common structure and format as a reference point.

The other side of the coin, that diverse landscapes, environments and communities should mean tailor made plans does not get mentioned. Neither does the innovation that arises from much experimentation of different formats and approaches. Surely we need to speed up the innovation process (try, succeed / fail, learn, try again ) rather than slow things down?

What do the draft standards tell us about urban planning in the the mid 2020s (given that is how long the standards will take to work their way through the system).

Top of mind is the nag that the standards will fossilize the late 20th century approach to planning and resource management and slow the pace of innovation. Not many look back at the 1954 model town and country planning regulations as being the high point. But perhaps some do. If planning stopped at that point, there may not have been the creep seen since. Equally, many important developments around landscapes and environmental enhancement may not have proceeded. So all depends upon
your perspective.

I wonder if the real purpose of the standards is not to make plans easy to compare or navigate.  Are the Standards more to do with what should be in and what should not be in plans, with the emphasis on the later? Some parts of the standards could be said to be helpful, in that plans have to explicitly tackle some issues; plans cant dodge them any longer. The requirements to be explicit about tangata whenua issues and aspirations, for example. Same comment could be made about Outstanding Landscapes or urban capacity. But do we need a standard to do this? Didn't there use to be a Schedule setting out what plans should do?

The bigger question is what the standards leave out, or will stop from being included in plans in the future.  Being a rigid formula that cant be changed, it is almost like the standards have introduced by stealth an 'anti Section 6' into the RMA - "it is a matter of national importance that plans must not recognise and provide for the following (unmentioned) things....."

How do the standards get updated? What if someone comes up with a brilliant new zone through some sort of fantastic consultative, collaborative process  - the Minister has to approve it? So much for devolution of decision making.

The standards feel like they come from the ‘good housekeeping’ school of planning - "when putting the washing away socks and undies go in the top two draws, T shirts next draw down, then sports gear, then jeans and other trousers in the bottom draw". Just stick to keeping things nice and tidy, easy.

Not much about inclusive, sustainable urban environments. Nothing about the next urban age.

On the positive side, the Standards may well just end up driving the development of more placed-based, better calibrated local area plans. The district plan standard allows for ‘precincts’, so I guess the way out of the straight jacket of the set zones is to call everything  ‘Precinct XYZ or Precinct ABC’. Effectively the Auckland Unitary Plan is a bunch of precincts masquerading as a zone-based plan. This may mean more complex and hard to understand plans, but then for every action there is a reaction, so what do you expect.

A few more detailed thoughts.

Regional Policy Statements

Where is the urban “bit”? Under special topics?

Given that managing urban growth, including coordination with infrastructure, is a regional council function, and one central to Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury Regions (and even Otago these days), you would think an RPS would be allowed (even required) to have a chapter on urban growth management. Perhaps it is all dealt with under the National Policy Statements section - NPS UDC.

District Plans

How many layers to a plan?

The standards provide for 7 'spatial' tools (zones, overlays, precincts etc). This allows for plenty of flexibility in format, which in practice is likely to make plans 'incomparable' with one another.

Having said that, the layers seem to get tied to certain things. Overlays can only deal with district wide matters, by the looks of things. This seems a bit restrictive. If you want some sort of  layer that cuts across two or three zones (like a road corridor that traverses residential and commercial areas) where there is scope to free things up, how do you do that? Is that a Precinct? Why can Precincts only be used where two or more provisions are amended?

What is not mentioned is the relationship between the layers - do some layers trump other layers for example? Despite best efforts, there is always overlap with these layers and the Auckland Unitary Plan is replete with confusing relationships between layers. It is often not clear if overlays and precincts replace zone provisions, or are in addition to them, for example. If the layers pull in different direction, what gives?

More district-wide matters?

Having a bunch of district wide matters is one way to simplify a number of zones and precincts. The list of matters set out in the Standards feels too limited:
  • Where does ‘transport’ - parking and access and all that - fit in?  
  • Urban design? Some plans experimented with a single urban design ‘code’ (or set of principles / criteria)  that all zones referred back to as relevant, rather than repeat material through each zone. 
  • Same idea was applied to Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in a number of plans.
  • What about if the Plan has an affordable housing requirement in it, that applies across the zones?  
  • And what about if plans introduced some sort of city-wide green building standard to help improve energy efficiency, reduce green house gas use, minimise waste and manage stormwater on-site?
  • Does wind assessment for taller buildings have to be repeated in each zone that allows for buildings over 20ms in height? 
  • And what about 'character' areas - not historic heritage as such, but areas with recognized character that is worth managing.  Or is this a 'precinct' matter. I get a bit lost. 
The sub-text seems to be that plans shouldn’t have this fluffy stuff in them.  Just stick to the knitting.

Pick and mix zones

The zone standards are odd creatures. The residential zones refer to density, when the real issue is built form. Height of buildings may be a better metric than density. The purpose statements refer to ‘suburban’ and ‘urban’ character.  Yikes.

What happens if a community want a 'bush living', 'coastal settlement' or 'inner-city' residential zone, something a bit more evocative of the purpose of the zone. I guess you could add some words after the most relevant standard zone to get around this. Is there anything stopping a plan saying: Residential ( xyz ) zone?

At some point in the not too distant future, I think building height and form will start to be set out in a block-by-block way, yet activities will be managed area or city-wide. Do we need just one residential zone to manage activities, but room for a range of spatially defined built form outcomes that are a lot more nuanced than four zones?

Same idea for commercial zones - do the range of activities in commercial zones vary that much? What does vary is built form. By the way, I notice that there is no zone for 'large format retail' AKA big boxes. This may be a blessing in disguise. Perhaps that wave of development has blown through. A similar comment can be made about 'Business Parks'.

What to do when the plan goes quiet?

Of course the real ‘meat on the bones’ are not in the Standards. What the built form could be or should be for a residential or commercial zone is not set out, for example.  Most importantly is the task of assessing developments that step outside the standards for a zone - what is acceptable / appropriate in the context of the site and the environment, what is not appropriate? Increasingly plans are opening up this 'discretionary' space, but not providing much guidance on how much is too much. To me this is where a standard, if there is one, should head.

Back to 1954 Regulations

Having said that nobody wants to go back to the 1954 model regulations, interestingly these regs did have some components which are now considered 'innovative':

The Residential A zone allowed for:

(a) Dwelling houses;
(b) Semi-detached houses;
(c) Apartment houses containing not more than two household units.

The above pretty much covers the normal building typologies with a similar outcome.

Apartments with more than two household units and terrace houses with up to 6 units with rear vehicle access were conditional. This allowed for site by site assessment.

Did they knew about urban design back in 1954 (with terraces having to have rear access!)?

Height for all residential buildings was limited to 30 feet or 9 metres.   Height was the defining characteristic of the zone, not density as such.

In the Residential A zone non-residential buildings like churches could go to 40ft or 12 metres.

A bit of variety of height is not a bad thing - 3 storeys can sit easily beside 2 storeys. I think corner sites could take taller buildings.

The Residential B zone  allowed for dwelling houses, semi-detached, terrace and apartments. Apartments could go up to 104 ft - 31 metres as a conditional use.

The B zone set a range for heights - a permitted height and a maximum height. Having a discretionary range is quite a good idea, I think

The maximum height was quite substantial. Did they know about urban capacity issues back in 1954?

Friday 20 July 2018

New urban agenda 3: What’s next.

Back to thinking about the next phase of urban planning.

In some of my blogs I have tried to think a bit about what is around the corner for urban areas and urban planning. In past blogs I have set out my thoughts on the Productivity Commission's’ report on better urban planning. Like ageing generals who train to fight the next war based on the techniques that won them the last war (and who don’t recognise that technology and tactics have changed), the Productivity Commission’s take on cities and planning seems old hat. Armed with the concepts that swept the western world in the early1980s, they hope to reform the final bastion of 'central-planning', namely urban planning.

Their analysis rests on the classic economic view that planning’s role is to enable agglomeration economies while managing the downside of negative spillover effects generated by urban intensity (such as congestion and poor urban design). But overlaid with that approach is the neoliberal criticism of planning being unable to effectively manage the growing complexity of cities. Only free markets can mediate between the needs of many diverse consumers and producers. There is no one vision that can prevail. Finding consensus is an illusion. A planned allocation of resources is impossible.

In the town hall of Sienna, Italy, there is the fresco: Allegory of Good and Bad Government. The good government fresco shows that if government is virtuous and rules justly, then the city thrives and prospers.  Bad government, and the city suffers. The 'bad city' fresco has a decaying, cramped appearance, while street crime is clearly visible. Outside the city, the 'bad countryside is marked by burning farms, disease and widespread drought.. The fresco was painted in the 1300s.

In the fresco, the virtues of Good Government are represented by six  figures: Peace, Fortitude and Prudence on the left, Magnanimity, Temperance and Justice on the right.

Are cities and their effective management that different today from the 1300s? Interesting how the virtues of good governance require a mix of  actions - fortitude and prudence, for example. Those values are probably timeless, but what does change are the tools of trade.

You could say that the last 20 years has seen the ‘market’ as the primary means of determining resource allocation -  the market has been used to mediate between competing visions, values and outcomes and the market has determined the winners and the losers. But the number of losers has started to mount. As a result, there is a shift underway back to a bigger role for the state and more of a planned allocation of resources. This is to address issues like education and inequality, but also to address long run, entrenched problems like climate change and obesogenic environments - things that the market approach cannot tackle well. Overlain with this is a growing concern that current means of economic management are no longer up to the tasks of dealing with technological change. As Adair Turner puts it in his great analysis: Capitalism in the age of robots: work, income and wealth in the 21st-century:

It is likely that we are in the early stages of a technological revolution which will eventually result in the automation of almost all economic activity, almost all work activities. When considering automation potential, the question is when, not if.

The implications of this revolution is a split between a few involved in the on-going development of technology and the many involved in delivering a range of non-technology based social and consumption led services to the few technological elite, as well as to each other. This may be the world of a few high skill / high pay jobs and many low skill/low pay jobs. In Turner's view, increased productivity that can lift all incomes is unlikely - improved productivity from technology gets swamped by the growth of low paid service orientated jobs.

Whats more, in this new economy, land becomes an important means of storing wealth and generating income:

In a world where all goods and services can be produced at ever collapsing prices, the relative value of desriable things which are inherently uncreated, such as land in desirable locations, will almost inevitably increase. 

Interestingly, Turner sees urban planning as one means to address the resulting consequences of highly uneven patterns of  income and activity:

High quality urban development. Macro and micro economists often pay little attention to
the physical realities of spatial development, city design, architecture and transport
systems. But in a world where land located in desired locations is likely to account for a
rising share of all wealth, and where, as Tyler Cowen has stressed, the cost of housing and of
commuting is a crucial driver of adequate living standards, the geography of economic
development plays a vital role. The more that we can make multiple cities attractive places
to live, and multiple areas within each city attractive, via good public transport, attractive
public spaces, and the provision of high quality cultural and sporting amenities, the more we
can mitigate, at least to some degree, the intensity of competition for the positional good of
locationally specific real estate.

The function of urban planning and management is likely to grow more complex in this context. It is not just about separation of incompatible land uses and reducing negative spill over effects (which may become significantly reduced as a goal as technology gets better); rather will urban planning increasingly become focused on ensuring a diversity of land uses and activities within each area of the city  and across regions (inclusion, not exclusion)?

Rather than  government's reaching for the cheque book to promote inclusion (which may prove difficult in an environment of limited income growth), I think the forthcoming period will see the government try to harness private capital to achieve social ends. This means the state providing some certainty over land uses and development timing to deliver a return to private capital, with part of that return ‘taxed’ for pubic benefit. But in providing that certainty it will be important that the essential qualities of an inclusive, adaptive and resilient city are not lost.  Planning will have to keep both the public and private sectors ‘honest’ in their dealings with the city.

So, are we about to enter the city of the early phase of the sixth kondratieff wave or the fourth industrial revolution? As with previous waves and revolutions, change is likely to be fast and hectic in the first phase.  This will be the city of artificial intelligence, automation and bio technology.  What may be some of the drivers of urban development and urban management?

Improved mobility

The two great drivers of urban form over the past 50 years have been the car and the lift. The car allowed cities to spread outwards, while lifts allowed cities to grow vertically. Technology will advance both. As electric, driverless cars take hold and driverless public transport becomes more common (and therefore cheaper and more frequent); couple both with mobile technology and it may well be that the next new workplace is the car, bus or train. Replace the one hour commute with the one hour work session and maybe the city will disperse and expand some more. Equally much freight and heavy vehicle movements could occur at night, out of peak periods, lessening the need for expensive projects like the ill fated East-West Link in Auckland.

Lifts are likely to get cheaper and may be able to better serve both vertical and horizontal arrangements of apartments and workplaces.  Bring down the cost of lifts and 4 to 6 storey apartment developments with only a few units on each floor  may become more affordable and desirable (no need for a large block of apartments ). This building height retains liveable streets and provides for a sense of connection between a living area and the street and gardens that people like, but suffered in the past as it involved either too many stairs to climb or an expensive lift only justified by long corridors of units served by one lift core.   Link that apartment with a horizontal 'lift' to a centralised car parking building and more space comes free.

Governments strapped for cash.

As demands  on public spending rise while the ability to raise taxes stalls, it is inevitable that governments will look for means of spreading the load. This can already be seen in housing and urban infrastructure. In both spheres governments have been looking at how the private sector and or the third sector can take on more of a role in the provision of social and affordable housing. Urban infrastructure will shift to a user pays approach. The outcome is likely to be a good supply of housing and infrastructure is some areas - areas that can support the cash flow required to fund the houses, pipes and roads, but limited provision in other areas, where cashflow will be more restricted. How can we cross subsidise?

International labour markets and automation.

The gig economy is kind of here already with the growth of the professional, scientific technical services sector. Automation and technology may strip out many stable, middle income jobs in the banking, insurance,  finance  and administrative sectors - the mainstay of urban economies.  An important question will be the extent to which uncertainty over long term income generation potential for people and households will translates into different forms of housing and ownership tenures, especially given the need for the market to have certainty over income streams if it is to take on a bigger role in housing and infrastructure. The short term is likely to ever more dominate decision making.

Asset inflation.

Price inflation seems to have taken a long holiday after the inflationary periods of the 1970s. Some say it is permanently on holiday. Wage growth also seems to have stalled and many households have run out of options to increase incomes - most households now involve multiple full time workers while debt has built up, when back in the 1950s, households only needed one income and not too much debt to afford a house.  There are now no other options for households to generate more income (except perhaps sending the kids out to work).

What seems to have replaced price inflation is asset inflation. Low interest rates and monetary easing has created strong pressure for investment in assets like property and shares. Housing (or at least the land on which housing sits) has become a commodity, traded often. Quick turn around suggests cheap and cheerful design. There will be some demand from the likes of Iwi, community-based organisations and some wealth funds for long term holdings of land and buildings, which suggest a demand for quality, but that may be the minority.

It used to be that land was one of the three factors of production - land, labour and capital. At some point land seems to have reduced in importance and perhaps will become totally redundant as a factor of production in a knowledge economy. Land seems to have switched from an input into a bigger process that generated wealth to being a repository for the wealth generated by a bit of labour and some capital.  The more rapidly information and communication technology progresses, the more that wealth and income derive from inherently physical and subjective assets, such as land, brands, or beauty.

Environmental hazards.

Quite a bit of rejigging of cities will be needed as climate change strengthens - low lying coastal areas will see disinvestment and gradual retreat. Flood plains will get more frequently inundated. Steeper hillsides may be more prone to slips. In all cases  development - existing and future - will get displaced. As insurance gets more expensive and harder to obtain, dis- investment will be more common in some areas 

City as a social exchange

Above all, cities are increasingly about social interaction and exchange, rather than just economic exchange. Mobile technology seems to accentuate the ability of people to interact, to meet and converse. Add in the growing number of retirees and workers in the gig economy between assignments and the demand on freely accessible urban public spaces is likely to grow strongly.  Every neighbourhood will need to its local ‘hub’.

So what are the implications?

Cities need to refresh themselves constantly, nevermore so at a time of rapid technological change. They need some ‘slop’ in the system to enable decline and redevelopment in a way that does not result in abrupt and substantial disruption and displacement of existing communities. Part of the problem Auckland has is that its buffer of ‘redevelopable’ areas is limited. 

But cities also need diversity and equity of opportunity so as to respond to social and economic pressures. They need safe and vibrant public realms to support social interaction,  an urban fabric that lowers the entry costs for new businesses and enterprises, but also positive assistance to build in diversity into each neighbourhood.

Left to themselves city growth and development can quickly become uneven and unaffordable, and the above trends could speed up that process of uneven, expensive (or often ultimately dead end) development.  Market-led urbanism will not deliver choice and diversity:
  • Too many shopping malls and not enough local shops 
  • Too much gentrification in some areas and too much decline and disinvestment in others
  • Too many big office buildings and business parks and not enough small, flexible and cheap work places
  • Too much cheap and cheerful design.

Above all, cities need diversity and choice and that diversity and choice needs to be built into the urban fabric. ‘Public private partnerships’ will be the common call to achieve this. To enable these partnerships, precinct and area based plans will take over from city-wide plans, with these place-based plans based on and building in a series of transactions over use and delivery of space and resources. As big data takes hold, there will be the ability to develop finely calibrated local area plans that speak more of volume, form and interfaces, than zones and activities. Deal making between public and private capital will be more prevalent, but within a framework of checks and balances. Some form of arms length, independent planning commission will be in place, but with oversight from an audit body, as trade offs and transfers from one area to another become more common.

And could those planning functions be administered by a machine? Quite possibly.

Note 1:

http://cms.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Paper-Turner-Capitalism-in-the-Age-of-Robots.pdf

Tuesday 3 July 2018

In praise of planning blight?


Time for a bit of idle thinking.

The decay and deterioration of an urban area due to neglect, crime and old age (urban blight) is generally held to be a bad thing. One of the functions of urban planning used to be to arrest and hopefully prevent urban blight from taking hold. The certainty over land use futures provided by planning and the management of negative spillover effects from new developments helps areas to resist the pressures of dis-investment and decay associated with blight.

Planning has sought to reduce the adverse effects of blight on urban neighbourhoods as there are a bunch of social and economic consequences for those 'left behind'.  Some of the early attempts at solving urban blight by public sector-led redevelopment ended up adding to urban blight. Overtime the emphasis has shifted to providing certainty to the property market by zoning. But has planning done too good a job? Is a degree of  blight a necessary condition for cities? While an area of the city gripped by urban blight is to be avoided, do cities need a bit of blight from time-to-time for city development markets to function?  Sometimes, places need to decline before they can redevelop.

Urban blight's cousin - planning blight - is also considered to be a bad thing, perhaps more by association than in actuality.  Could planning blight be a milder form of urban blight that helps along  the process of decline then rejuvenation? Planning blight has been described as the reduction in property investment and upkeep due to anticipated future rezoning. Sometimes planning blight can also be associated with designations for future public works that are not implemented for a long period of time. 

There is clearly an issue with regards to how Auckland is to redevelop and intensify, as there is with many first world cities. The easy options to accommodate growth have been used up, largely. Outwards expansion of the urban area is now costly and much less attractive than it was even 20 years go, given increasing length of commuting times back into main employment areas. Within the city itself, most easy infill type options (add a unit to the back of a section) have been taken up. 

Redevelopment is needed (scrap off and start again). Add in geographic constraints and community opposition to change and the pressures on the urban area mount. But redevelopment (apart from government-led projects like Tamaki and Hobsonville) appears costly and complex.  This is at a time when most commentators want the private sector to take up more of the slack with regard to house construction.  

Generally conditions for redevelopment are favourable when then is growing demand, zoning is enabling, existing development is getting old and worn out and the area is due to move up the urban density ladder. The ratio between land values and improvements (buildings) needs to be low (for example where land makes up 70 or 80% of the value of a property) for redevelopment to be viable. Older development is the most fertile ground for this type of ratio, but a small house on a big, expensive section is also likely to have a low ratio between improvements and land value.

However, is it just old development that is ripe for redevelopment?  Does there also need to be some uncertainty about where the area is heading for redevelopment to work? Older areas may just gentrify - for example the 'doer uppers' will move in and improve the old stock, rather than redevelop. Equally, signs of a turnaround in fortunes for an area may see current landowners sit on their land, reaping value increases. Why sell, unless the offer is huge? But if there is some uncertainty about the future of an area, then current landowners may be wanting to 'get out'.  

At least some of the old drivers of urban redevelopment that helped to create uncertainty  (and with it, urban blight) seem to have dropped by the wayside:

  1. Absolute poverty is less of an issue that it used to be (so 'slums' are no longer an issue)
  2. Economic conditions seem more stable, with the 'ups and downs' less pronounced than they might once have been
  3. Building standards are much higher and so buildings do not deteriorate as fast as they used to
  4. Industry is not longer dirty and smoky creating pockets of lower value areas in their vicinity.
Disasters are also a good precursor to redevelopment, but are not to be encouraged. NZ is free of military conflict, while widespread urban fires are a thing of the past; but we do, however,  have natural disasters.

In the past, these types of forces may have created a degree of uncertainty  in urban environments. Areas often need to go down before they came back up. Redevelopment was a natural process that followed decline, with risk taking developers (perhaps) the first movers into areas that have been left behind. Owners and investors would follow. Through this process of decline and renewal, new housing stock is added.

Since about the 1970s and this process seems to have been halted. Partly this is through gentrification and heritage protection. It may also coincide with planning  bringing a lot more stability to the urban property market.  

Some redevelopment has occurred within industrial areas close to the central city of Auckland, with apartments replacing industrial units.  Why there? Did uncertainty over future business demand for inner city industrial sites start to see some industrial landowners question whether holding onto land was a good idea?  Did some uncertainty creep into the market - 'better get out now'. At the same time that uncertainty created an opportunity for others to exploit. Developers did not have to compete against residential investors or owner-occupiers to buy land, as most would-be home owners and residential investors would not look at industrial sites. Demand for apartments  in industrial areas may have been uncertain, but for some the risk was worth taking (but has some of that pressure for redevelopment fallen back as industrial land values adjusted to the prospect of higher returns from apartment development?)

The question is what to do, if some of the old drivers of redevelopment are absent?
One reaction is the call to open up the city land market to much more 'competition'.  This is essentially the approach of the National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity. If most sites in the city could be redeveloped in some shape or form, then there must be some 'willing seller' options for developers across a city. At its simplest, if 5% of landowners actively want or need to sell and move out at any one time, then the bigger the pool of potential sellers, the more competition facing those who want to or need to sell. I don't know if 5% is the number.

However this strategy is all a bit scatter gun in its application, which makes infrastructure planning much harder and infrastructure upgrades more likely to lag development.  It is also relies upon making the redevelopment 'balloon' as big as possible in the hopes that within that balloon there will be a few folk who, for whatever reason, need to sell to a developer. But the bigger the balloon, the more the plan has to work hard to ensure that new development blends in with existing development - it is not really possible to identify areas of change if most of the city is up for change.  Hence the extent of change possible is often quite modest in its form to placate the locals. There will also be a bunch of people chasing the properties for sale - owners, investors and developers.  Generally owners and investors will out bid the developer. There is not necessarily much uncertainty as to future conditions to exploit.  

An urban redevelopment agency might be another tactic, one the Labour-led government is thinking about.  In the past such agencies have been used to help stimulate redevelopment of declining areas; to help accelerate the process of rejuvenation.  Most often this involved taking an area that had declined and adding dollops of public money to engender some confidence.  In a world of more limited public money and the need to redevelop existing stable areas, do such agencies need to be recast? Do they need to (somewhat contradictory) focus on the down side rather than the upside of cycles of urban change?

The other option is for the developer to test the boundaries of possible development on a site; to work through the consent and/or rezoning process to create a gap between a property's current value and what may be possible on a site.  That is, to exploit planning's scope for flexibility. This tactic creates the endless fun and games of the RMA process. It also creates an incentive for the developer to 'bank' the consent and sell the site, rather than bank and implement the consent. 

In this context, is there a role for planning to actively 'de-stabalise' some areas to help start a process of decline then rejuvenation?  Is planning blight actually a good thing?

There is no definition of planning blight. Generally it is taken to mean uncertainty and limited investment in an area due to uncertainty as to zoning and associated development. If landowners think there are zoning changes in the wind, then they may sit on their properties, not wishing to develop them until the future is clearer.  This may help generate the conditions for redevelopment. 

Another small example is the fringes of Takapuna. For a long time through the 1980s and 1990s, it was thought that Takapuna would expand - workplaces would grow and more shops develop. Residential landowners on the edge of the centre sat on their hands and hoped that the commercial centre would expand outwards towards them, raising the value of their properties. No point developing the section, just wait. A form of benign blight set it. But as the 1990s rolled into the 2000s, Takapuna's growth stalled. Other centres developed (like Albany), workplaces located elsewhere like Smales Farm.  At some point, landowners started to wonder if the centre was no longer going to grow. As time marched on they also wanted to realise their asset. So redevelopment into apartments began to look like an option. The rundown nature of some of the housing, plus rising land prices driven by Auckland's overall growth  changed the dynamics. A zone change to allow higher rise development was prepared. Opposition was limited. Now some apartment developments are mooted. This has been a 30 year process of hope, uncertainty, decline and a change of thinking.

Planning has kind of enabled this process, in a funny way. Identification of Takapuna as a sub regional centre helped fuel hopes of commercial expansion, while a tight rein on that commercial zoning helped to generate higher values within the centre and therefore a degree of hope on the edge of the centre that at some point these values would expand outwards and a reward for waiting would be obtained. But as hopes of commercial expansion receded, talk of apartments and rezoning facilitated a change of attitude.

Is this a small example of what needs to happen across the city in many areas and pockets?  Do we need to generate some planning blight to help facilitate urban change?   The possible expansion then contraction of retail and business areas seems a likely candidate. 

What would be a example of a plan-led approach? Do we need an suburban version of a greenfields 'future urban zone'? Large areas of greenfields land are zoned future urban so as to protect the land resource from incremental subdivision and development ahead of urbanisation and to ensure that when the land is urbanised, it is done so efficiently and effectively. There is a degree of blight associated with this process as landowners await rezoning from future urban to a live urban zoning. The costs of this blight are considered to be acceptable given the benefits of the comprehensive approach enabled. Would a suburban version be a good idea? Would a 'future, possible intensive mixed use zone' applied to areas like future LRT corridors be a helpful tool? Or should we encourage retail areas to expand, or hope to expand, in the knowledge that over time retail will wax and wan, opening up opportunities for alternative uses around their fringes?