The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Urban or suburban?
Some people think apartments in cities are great. Even for families. Kids can play in the park. It is close to everything.
Other people think apartments are slums. Keeping kids in apartments borders on neglect.
And I fully agree with both of them.
Two cities
There are two groups of observations on streets which often come together. I will call them ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’. These come from two fundamentally different ways of looking at what a street is.
| Urban | suburban |
|---|---|
| You see people of all ages on the street | You usually only see cars on the street |
| Buildings interact with the street. You can often look into shops through the front window. | Buildings are isolated and buffered from the street, often by parking and greenspace *1. |
| Shops are directly on the street | Shops are enclosed in a dedicated mall. |
| Street corners often have shops, cafés or restaurants to take advantage of the two crossing traffic flows | Street corners often have fuel stations to take advantage of the two crossing traffic flows |
| Front porch *2 | 1.8 m high wall. |
| Other humans mean safety (eyes on the street). | Privacy. Any other human is a possible treat. *3 |
| Kids often get around independently on foot or on bicycle | Kids are driven around by parents. See previous point. |
| Trees provide shade and shelter from the elements | Trees are a potential hazard for traffic |
| People are welcome on the street | People are tolerated as long as they don’t impede traffic |
| Terms like ‘street’, ‘avenue’ and ‘lane’ have distinct meanings | ‘Street’, ‘avenue’ and ‘lane’ are simply more obnoxious synonyms for ‘road’. |
| There is room for people on the street | The street is a no go zone for humans which shall be crossed in a car. |
The urban environment largely does not exist in Auckland, apart from a few individual streets. *4 The old shopping strips are in an awkward position in between, built for the urban environment, but then retrofitted with varying success for cars.
The city centre, where most apartments are, is the suburban environment on steroids. New buildings often have large blank walls and wide porte-cochères. There is more intense traffic on roads with more lanes, making walking a cumbersome and unpleasant activity.
Apartments
So, back to the two groups above. At first blush those opinions seem the opposite of each other, but they’re not. They’re not talking about the same thing.
The first group are usually urbanists. They say that having but a small apartment is not that limiting, since you can always go out, to the park or playground, to the pub. They are wondering why other people don’t understand this. They are thinking about apartments in an urban environment.
The second group is wondering what’s wrong with the first group. Do they like that suffocating combination of little private space inside and the harsh environment outside? Do they want kids to grow up like hermits glued to a screen? Will they ever know how to play outside? They think about what you can currently see in Auckland: apartments in a suburban environment.
Show don’t tell
You often see the two groups talking past each other, which is entertaining, but also not very productive. It is a difficult discussion for urbanists. What they’re trying to sell doesn’t exist in living memory.
We have a few promising developments which may one day show this idea, like Takapuna town centre and the Unitec campus development. Show. Do not mess it up.
‘Greenspace’ is a somewhat derisive term for urbanists, it denotes space which is grassed or covered with other planting for no apparent reason. Examples are the green verges on residential streets and the grassed areas you often see around parking lots. These spaces are effectively wasted. Contrast with ‘parks’ where you may see people having lunch, playing kids, etc.
Back when the animals—, umm, back when the people on the street still spoke, you could maybe talk to your neighbours sitting on the front porch. See also Original Green on front porches.
Read the plea for safer urban design on Greater Auckland and count the instances of “being alone in a desolate spot”.
Recently we got Wynyard Quarter, Te Ara Tahuhu Walkway behind Britomart station, and a couple of shared spaces in the city centre. Probably a more familiar example are malls — where we keep a little bubble of urban environment inside, like an organ in a jar of preservative.
Alas, thanks to the magic of single use zoning, you cannot have apartments facing these streets.
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