New Zealand Urban Research and Planning: Changing Urban Governance in Response to Government Policy Orientation and Earthquakes

To an external observer urban policy in New Zealand exhibits significant differences between cities; for example, the largest metropolitan area Auckland is struggling to manage strong growth pressures, particularly those affecting housing affordability, whilst Christchurch is only slowly repairing and rebuilding following the devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. However, in a small country such as New Zealand, the relationships between government and the city councils and between local government and communities are critical irrespective of the specifics of the local context. These relationships relate on the one hand to the degree of centralisation and/or devolution of power and on the other hand to the resilience of local communities and the potential for the city to transition to a more sustainable lower carbon future. In different ways, these four articles on New Zealand’s urban policy, planning and governance critically assess these relationships.

The public sector management reforms that took place in many countries from the 1980s on have had significant impacts on democratic urban governance. Christine Cheyne’s article reflects on the public sector reforms that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand, and the resultant impacts on public participation in local government decision-making. The article outlines the changes to the statutory provisions for public participation in New Zealand in the 1989–2009 period and finds that, by the end of the era, there were significant improvements in transparency and openness, and increased opportunities for public participation in both the statutory environmental planning processes and in the planning of local government activities and financial expenditures. Cheyne goes on to consider the impacts of a change in government in 2008 (from a Labour-led government to a centre-right coalition) which heralded the introduction of statutory reforms, the justification being to streamline and simplify planning processes, in order to speed up decision-making and remove unnecessary regulation. As a result of these reforms, many of the gains in public participation made in the previous period were reversed, opportunities for participation in the environmental planning process were reduced and restructuring of local government for Auckland (by far the largest urban area in the country) resulted in reduced representation per person.

In another example discussed by Cheyne, central government removed the democratically elected representatives from the Canterbury Regional Council in 2010, replacing the elected members with appointed commissioners. The progressive centralisation of power continued in Canterbury (Mamula-Seadon & McLean, 2015), triggered by the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes; with the government-appointed Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), created to manage the recovery and rebuild process, taking over many of the functions of the Christchurch City Council in particular. Whilst the process of recovery from the Canterbury earthquakes is ongoing across the region, its glacial pace (and often behind closed doors decision-making) in Christchurch continues to astound and frustrate local residents and journalists alike. The government (through CERA and the direct involvement of Ministers) has led the production of a blueprint for rebuilding the central city; has enabled the compulsory acquisition of central sites for private sector development; and has promoted a proposed NZ$500 million Christchurch Convention Centre. Along the way “CERA has been persistently criticised for lack of meaningful public engagement and collaboration” (Mamuela-Seadon & McLean, 2015, p. 11).

In her article, Suzanne Vallance focuses on the recovery process from the Canterbury earthquakes in Waimakariri, to the north of Christchurch, a district which includes farms, lifestyle blocks and a growing number of towns with residents commuting into Christchurch each day. In contrast to the experience of Christchurch residents, Vallance reports that the Waimakariri Civil Defence (CD) recovery effort identified at an early stage both the complicated social problems facing many local residents and the inability of the existing CD model to accommodate community initiatives and intelligence. Under the leadership of the local mayor, a hybrid recovery model was put in place that combined both physical infrastructure and social recoveries. In addition, the Council initiated a process of organisational restructuring that, according to Vallance, supported independent recovery by local communities. As this hybrid model evolved, formal and informal community engagement became an important part of the rebuild process. Vallance argues that the Waimakariri District Council’s response to an event that is both prolonged and complex, provides a number of recovery lessons. In particular, she notes that the high level of engagement between the Council and the community resulted in “alignment between the recovery programmes and people’s expectations”. The relevance of this finding for larger urban centres should not be downplayed.

Over the last 65 years, the New Zealand government has played a key role in transport investment with the bulk of government funding being spent on motorway construction and associated roading developments, with current support for a Roads of National Significance programme. Whilst there has been some government investment in public transport and cycling, it has been somewhat intermittent and comparatively small in scale. The interesting question is how is transport planning shaped at the regional and local level, given, for the most part, the government’s auto-centric approach and the emerging different objectives for mobility and accessibility in urban areas. Muhammad Imran and Jane Pearce consider transport planning from the mid-1950s to late 2012 in the three largest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Their search for discursive barriers to the adoption of more sustainable transport models identifies six storylines: “economic, mobility, safety, consumer, funding and environmental” which have been utilised to varying degrees and at different times in all three cities, to support the ongoing road-building paradigm. The high level of path dependence identified in their research suggests that a significant shift will be needed in order to break out of the prevailing mindset and develop more sustainable urban transport systems.

Kylie McFarlane, Regan Solomon and Ali Memon draw on the theoretical literature on strategic spatial planning to investigate the governance structures that were considered for Auckland Council, created in 2010 by amalgamating the existing seven local authorities and the regional council. A key issue for these authors is the relationship between horizontal and vertical integration. Whilst integration along both axes is considered necessary for engaging multiple actors across a city-region, inevitably either vertical integration (aligning activities between multiple layers of government) or horizontal integration (working across sector boundaries) is likely to dominate. The Royal Commission to review Auckland’s governance reforms established in 2007 (under a Labour-led government) recommended strengthening vertical integration through the creation of one council, with multiple tiers; stronger representation in government; and the adoption of one regional spatial plan. The National-led centre-right government, elected in 2008, preferred a structure that emphasised horizontal integration, and a flatter single-tiered unitary authority. McFarlane et al. argue that the government preference (and ultimate decision) for a single unitary authority was driven by an economic development agenda; and restricted opportunities for place-based planning served to legitimise the strategic spatial plan and downplay socio-spatial inequalities. Will the new governance arrangements enable coordination and integration between the region’s land use and transport planning? Since the Auckland (spatial) Plan includes high sustainability goals there will have to be significant re-prioritisation of transport investment, with all stakeholders overcoming the path dependencies identified by Imran and Pearce.

Patricia M. Austin
University of Auckland
[email protected]