The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Let’s create urban villages, city centre edition

I have written before about the weird, lumpy population density of Auckland City. This is still the case, here is a similar map, from Census 2023 data. (I think dot maps are underrated for this sort of thing, there is no other way to bring out sheer differences in density like this)

Today I’m going to be looking at two of the areas where lots of people live on Hobson Street. That is the area I am more familiar with, and I’ve been there recently.

These areas have something in common: both of them are centred around a laneway. Or better: what could be a laneway, because both of them are currently languishing as sad little parking lanes. But there are also a few differences.

Nicholas Street

The larger of the two sits around nicholas-street.md, although it is also a bit more spread out. Depending on where you draw the line, it is six to seven thousand people on about 10 hectares (0.1 km²).

And at the centre is Nicholas Street. I’m not going to rewrite my entire previous post here, but the summary is that there area a few opportunities to not only turn this into a laneway, but also to create an extra passage to Wellesley Street, creating an arrangement not unlike that of Chancery Square.

So, is Nicholas Street actually a street? Sounds like a stupid question, and yes it is. But we’ll come back to that later.

So, if Auckland Council would wish to do so, it could start building a neat, people (and even kid) friendly place on this street practically tomorrow. It would provide a bit of quiet space between the busy and loud arterials that are Hobson, Nelson, Cook and Union Streets. Such quiet space is otherwise quite far away, the only other car free outdoor space within a 500 m walk is Lightpath, and that can hardly be described as quiet.

If we’re ambitious we could make it a proper third place, where people can meet and get familiar with each other. It’d probably be ok for kids to hang out as well. And having space for kids outside, nearby is in my opinion a must-have if you think about an apartment for your family. There’s plenty of frontage available for shops. This could be the focal point of a community, in other words, an urban village.

Can we do it?

Vogel Lane

This one I have of course visited before as well. And in many ways it is similar to Nicholas Street. It is in the middle of a an area with lots of apartments. The city block it sits in is hemmed in by Wellesley Street, Nelson Street and Hobson Street, and it has 3 connections to those streets.

Unlike Nicholas Street though, it already has businesses, so there it has a head start.

Now we come back to that stupid question. Is this one a street? You can check this on Auckland Council Geomaps. If you zoom in, it is easy to tell that Nicholas Street actually has a street reserve. But Vogel Lane appears to consist of private titles.

So, if this is private land, could they possibly coordinate and do it? Who is in charge? I honestly don’t know. A lot of people think parking is essential for businesses, but for hopefully obvious reasons, here it isn’t.

The upshot is they are not dependent on the vagaries of Auckland Council to create a people friendly space. Private businesses seem to be better at this than the council anyway.

And have they learned the lesson from McDonald’s? Why did they bother with indoor playgrounds if they don’t charge admission money for it? If you want to do businesses, you need humans in and around your shop. A little parklet could turn this into the de facto backyard for one to two thousand people.

Can we do it? Which of these two laneways do you think will materialise first?

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