http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/index/id/167

recent Insight program on housing issues

He came across as a strong, knowledgable and credible speaker – so I’m very surprised his book was an attack of the fluffy bunnies.

If he’d mounted the substance of his comments tonight as his main argument in his book, would have come across a lot better.

A much more empirical argument rather than appeal to an Australian nostalgia that’s run its course.

The Parnell debate is whether to build the station adjacent to the Mainline Steam workshops in the section of forested gully between the old village main street and the Domain, or whether to build it on the elevated section 400m further down the track, just before the rail line overpasses Carlaw Park Avenue. Apparently either site is feasible in terms of grade and constructability.

In my opinion the Carlaw Park site wins hands down on all fronts.
The ‘Parnell Gully’ camp argue that the station should first and foremost service the Parnell Village and the Domain, so they want it stuck between the two and redevelop the old steam sheds as some kind of T.O.D.
However this location in the bottom of an often dark, isolated tree filled gully with no direct road or bus accessibility. The foot access up to the main street is a very steep climb up some narrow back streets, while the foot access to the Domain involves a 500m hike up a hill on dirt path through the bush. If you put a classic 400m radius around this site about half of it is bush covered reserve land, a quarter historic residential cottages and only a quarter is mixed use industry/apartments/main street.

On the other hand, the Carlaw Park site is elevated, open and directly adjacent to major ‘Link’ bus routes on Parnell Rise. It is a slightly longer but more direct and less steep walk up to the Parnell Village, and access to the Domain path network is just as close (that is to say still not very good). This site is immediately next to the large development site of the old Carlaw Park stadium, and more importantly it is only some 300m as the crow flies from the university campus. If you put the 400m radius down here you get the university, part of the legal precinct, a much larger proportion of existing intensive mixed use, a small portion of park reserve and also a large swathe of land shceduled for redevelopment around The Strand and lower Stanley St.

NickR, I had assumed Newmarket would be ‘core’ – and it is your second railway station for Auckland, the confluence of 2 lines and a major destination in its own right.

Parnell looked very wild to me, far more trees than I was expecting and a bit rough and abandoned from the rail line. I know there is contention about where the steam locos are going, it didn’t look much of a place for them. Better to see some development at Parnell. I gather the rail line is too steep for a station, is that right?

There is also a very clearly defined border of the CBD, due to the barrier formed by the encircling motorways and the cuttings and gullies they run through.

However, none of these definitions really separates the city from the suburbs. The legal boundary of the Auckland City Council is far too broad, while it contains the CBD and the central area it covers some 200 sq.km of suburbs and industrial parks also. Likewise the common border of the CBD is to narrow. Certainly this takes in most of the office towers, but it leaves out the office and retail precinct of Newmarket, the mixed use fringe area of Eden Terrace, the old village of Parnell and the hip ‘inner city’ residential zones of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.

There seems to be tacit agreement among Aucklanders that an area like Ponsonby is ‘inner city’ while a place such as nearby Westmere is not.

I think the definition is actually very simple, and I imagine this holds true for any Australasian city: anywhere within the initial ‘walking city’ bounds of the old town is considered the city, i.e. basically anywhere within 3-4 kilometres of the main street/first commercial and retail precinct and the old docks

This isn’t just a case of drawing a line on a map, it is a functional border formed by the extent a contiguous city can grow without mechanised transport. It is characterised by an often chaotic fine-grained street grid, mostly exant compact dense housing with historical value and resulting ‘coolness’, mixed uses including former light industry and a general lack of large roads and highways (or at least only those that have been ‘bowled through’ after the area had already developed). Riccardo, I assume that uni students flock to true inner city areas not only because they tend to be adjacent to major premier universities, but also because they were originally built back when cars and buses did not exist, people walked for travel and there were plenty of local amenities. Those inner city areas were designed for car-free residents and low travel distances/times, and thus they are perfectly suited to impoverished young students.

I’d suggest this is true for Sydney, where Paddington is in the city but Bondi Junction is in the suburbs, Glebe is ‘city’; but I assume Leichardt is ‘suburb’ (albeit an old one). And Melbourne too Richmond is in but Hawthorn out, Clifton Hill in and Northcote out.

Wellington really has it in some ways – the road and rail runs along a bayside ’shelf’ to get to Hutt with little or no housing along that corridor, and tunnels through the mountains to get to Porirua, complete separation from the suburbs in a way paralleled in Australia only by the NSW Central Coast and Sydney.

Auckland I’m not so sure about. I think it’s a bit of the “Logan” effect, people get so used to trashing the reputation of a couple of areas like West and South Auckland that it starts to stick. Reminscent of Los Angeles. Suburbs that area as much part of the city as any other suburbs but socially labelled to make them sound as if they aren’t.

And like Los Angeles, you can smell racism on the lips of Aucklanders when they talk about suburbs. Even watching the Maori TV dramas where the words “Ministry of Social Welfare” such things are voiced in English between the Maori lines. I got the impression this is the big deal in Waitakere and Manukau, and not in North Shore or the East.

Agree with BP that Brisbane, despite being a unitary LGA, is no better able to split out the City from the Suburbs than the others. And the borderlands around Goodna, Eight Mile Plains, Strathpine and so on, don’t appear any different on one side of the boundary or the other.

I would suggest the ‘mythology’ of a City is basically a few uni students who, like myself, managed to live in the likes of Glebe for a while and pretend it was so much more fashionable than other places. And it was. It had all the things an inner urban teeming with students would be expected to have. Stuff that Macquarie Uni and even UNSW missed out on.

But I suspect it is making a virtue of a bad situation. We were crammed together in old houses for lack of money. There is a romance to that lifestyle but it is only because lack of money and desire not to commute from the outer burbs or beyond for Uni. If I and my friends had had more money, we might have chosen better housing in Glebe (the wonderfully named Forest Lodge is where I was).

Do people agree that is a bit artificial (and was in the 70s)? I mean there’s no Manhattan v New Jersey/Connecticut/Long Island split here in Australia. Or is there? And does it matter?

Can anyone speak with experience that their 1970s home in Fitzroy or Darlinghurst or the Valley somehow gave them some cred with the ladies/whoever that Lindfield or Balwyn or Fig Tree Pocket wouldn’t have done?