The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Let’s create urban villages, North Shore edition
So, time for the North shore edition. I’ve written about a few opportunities before, and unfortunately here as well, during the life time of this blog, none of those have materialized yet. Takapuna came closest, with some urban redevelopment, but Takapuna town centre has still almost no population.
Takapuna
Takapuna is weird. On one hand it is still probably the main town centre on the lower North Shore *1, but on the other hand, go to the centre of takapuna (where the shops and cinema are) and there’s just… nobody living there. There are a lot of apartments nearby — the big tower with the Bishop’s mitre is probably the closest one, but none are in the town centre.
And OK actually that is par for the course in Auckland, but still. It is weird. The usual compromise of apartments in other countries with apartments is: you trade lack of personal space (indoors and especially outdoors) for having lots of stuff on your doorstep.
So what would be a good space for apartments? What about this awkward empty space next to that new square / walkway to the beach? At time of writing, it is where the temporary tennis court is.
Can we make it happen? Like, why hasn’t this happened? This is really weird.
And also, guess what there is between all this stuff and the beach?
Takapuna — where we actually got apartments
Where we did get apartments instead is the Amaia development, on this little island off Esmonde Road. Where this church used to be. And well, this is a weird place for apartments. It will have views on the ocean and the city, I’ll give them that. But the location is terrible. I don’t think you could find a worse location near Takapuna even if you tried.
There is nothing within a 5 minutes walk, apart from this busy arterial road called Esmonde Road. And I mean nothing. It takes 5 minutes just to reach Barrys Point Road. And even then, ugh, Barrys Point Road.
That development should have been where that stupid parking lot on Takapuna Beach is now. *2
Birkenhead
I’ve written on this one before, and of course it is still this crappy little parking lot today.
It is one of those places where you scurry to your car as fast as you can and get out. You don’t hang around. And that is bad for business because shops need humans to exist nearby so they can wander in. And Birkenhead is in a good position for that: it already has quite a few apartments and townhouses nearby.
It is not hard to imagine how it could look. It has a quite nice size for a town square. And unlike most other tramway era suburbs, its main street, Mokoia Road, no longer functions as an arterial road.
Like Vogel Lane in the city, the square itself is privately owned, so let’s see what they can do.
Smales Farm
Smales Farm is not the crappy suburban office park it was 15 years ago. It still has plenty of surface parking for sure, but it has gotten some development that could be described as city. And it is the North Shore Central Bus Station. Having one bus line nearby gives you almost no mobility (and urbanists should stop pretending it does), but Smales Farm has a lot of routes that kind of naturally converge there.
So people living here can reach a wide area by bus. And you can have lots of businesses, including an anchor like a busy supermarket, in a small place without getting suffocated by parking. *4
Alas, there is one big disadvantave, and that is the noise and pollution from the motorway nearby. And the zoning has to cooperate, it currently only allows businesses. Like, why is that even a thing next to a rapid transit station?
Northcote
Northcote is a bit of an unicum in Auckland. It is getting lots of apartments, and those apartments are not sitting on busy arterials. (Contrast this to the city centre, and to eg. Great North Road.) It has a greenway nearby, easily reachable from said apartments via quiet streets.
I can go there and take pictures of those apartments without having a parking lot in the foreground.
In that background, the shopping centre is really starting to show its age, following the usual shops surrounded by parking pattern. But also, the street between the parking lot and the library is one of Auckland’s oldest pedestrianised shopping streets *5, dating back to 1959. There is already a planned redevelopment, and yes they have enough common sense to keep that pedestrianised street. *6
So, on the North Shore, there is one contestant clearly in the lead. Can any of the others catch up?
Despite valiant efforts in the 1990s to replace it with Albany. Long story, this is also why there is a golf course next to Smales Farm.
The original sketch was more European looking but hey we are getting a few decent looking 5-over-1s over here, so why not use those as inspiration.
At time of writing, the developer of this complex went bust. I don’t know if it is due to poor sales, or if the developer made some poor decisions. It’s a shame, these looked like genuinely nice apartments. Somewhat luxury. One likely problem is that the entire target audience seems to be emigrating to Australia right now.
This is probably the fate of any business that has the bad fortune of sitting on that small parking lot with the Golden Apple supermarket in Glenfield. One restaurant already died.
Now that little block of streets within Smales Farm. That would be an ideal spot for a bus interchange. But we don’t have one, instead we have this awkward gyratory, pretending it is the middle of nowhere. That is because those streets are privately owned. Man, is anyone even in charge of planning decisions in Auckland?
Does it count as a street? People may not recognise it as one because it never had cars on it. But, it is a linear public open space between two rows of buildings, and that is what a street was for the 5,000 years between back when Uruk was a city, and 1930.
See https://northcotedevelopment.co.nz/our-future/town-centre-plans/, this pedestrian zone will be extended to Lake Road, forming a continuous walking path with Cadness Reserve and Te Ara Awataha.
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