Queen Street: Design with Two Ends

(This article was written in September 2021)

The latest lockdown has brought another round of bad news for the fragile economy of Auckland’s Queen Street and the CBD. The shops are closed again, rent payments are up in the air and pedestrian traffic counts are near zero. Another punch in the guts for what is normally the nation’s busiest street.

Recent controversies - which climaxed in 2020 when the Save Queen Street group and Heart of the City Association joined forces in suing the council – have been bitter and adversarial, but nevertheless productive. All parties realised in the end that they want the same thing - a thriving main street, and that good design is crucial.

Yet that good design still eludes us. The just-published latest version of the plan for the Queen Street upgrade is a fresh example. As Simon Wilson commented in his report on 22 September, “the big thing missing from this plan is a big idea.”

To arrive at that ‘big idea’ requires a radically different take on the role of design. Until now, its role has been largely reduced to an ameliorating approach, focused on ‘improvements’. The focus has been on the street only and an optimal traffic regime for it. The context has been ignored and other functions of the street – which make it a destination, not just circulation corridor – have been neglected. This is tinkering with the means without understanding the ends.

In this case, the ends are literally the two physical ends of the street: Queens Wharf at the north end, and Aotea Quarter at the south end. These are two exceptional sites in our city but they have been allowed to languish as incomplete projects for decades. We should value them in their own right, but we also need them as magnets which would galvanise Queen Street.

To reinforce the importance of the physical context, we should also consider the assets on Queen Street’s sides. On the east side, we have the busy and popular High and Lorne streets, with Freyberg Place and Vulcan Lane and O’Connell Street as a bonus. And on the west side, we have Elliott Street and Durham Street and Lane, with Sky City and St Patrick’s Square close by. Many downtowns would be happy with this rich and diverse ensemble of character places.

The point here is that we need to consider the entire ‘core’ CBD, not just Queen Street, and review the full gamut of the street’s functions and activities, not just the competing modes of traffic. The latter has degenerated into an endless debate about whom to favour - pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, cars or buses? – when obviously different times of day, week and year demand different regimes.

In sum, Queen St needs a comprehensive, big-picture, long-term urban design framework for the entire precinct, not tinkering with lanes, planters, cones, paints and signs. Tactical urbanism may be fashionable, but it will not work in this case.

In effect, this calls for a strategic master plan for the core CBD, which would force the council to answer two difficult and painfully overdue questions:

-??????Why is Queens Wharf after 20 years of deliberation - including two design competitions - still an appalling wasteland and barely used?

-??????Why is the very civic heart of Auckland city – Aotea Quarter – still an unfinished project after almost 40 years of on-and-off campaigns to redevelop it?

The crisis of Queen Street’s role and design is not all council’s fault. Worldwide, city centres had been struggling for a long time. The pandemic has only aggravated a long, evolving crisis, having been assisted by the high density and intense mobility of the big cities. The causes of de-centering of cities are deep and many. They range from technology drivers – such as the automobile and the internet, to the business models of late capitalism – such as malls and online shopping, to new cultural norms – such as working from home and desire for a rural lifestyle.

Is there a remedy? Provided the Covid drama ends a few months from now rather than in a few years, yes, there is. As many cities in similar circumstances have discovered, the central city still has assets which the urban periphery, or the internet, cannot compete with. Uniqueness is the key.

What makes Queen St unique is not that it is a street, or that either pedestrians or cars dominate its traffic. What is special are its two ends. Queens Wharf is the crown jewel of Auckland’s historic waterfront, with spectacular views of the Waitematā Harbour. And Aotea Quarter, Auckland’s civic and cultural hub, is a cluster some of the most important buildings, venues and open spaces in the country. These are architectural and landscape treasures of national significance. But we seem to take them for granted.

These treasures even withstand international comparisons. A quick look at some of the world’s celebrated main streets, shows that our Queen St is truly special. Compare that to Oxford Street in London and the Champs-élysées in Paris. Both streets are flat and straight, and apart from a triumphal arch at one end and fancy shops and cafes on both sides, they do not have much else to show. Market Street in San Francisco is also flat and straight and if it wasn’t for its Ferry Building at the waterfront end, it would be forgettable. Via del Corso in Rome has a nice human scale, but besides the bland Piazza Venezia and the over-the-top Vittoriano monument at one end, and the oversized Piazza del Popolo at the other, has little else to brag about.

Across the ditch, Sydney’s Town Hall does not even have a proper public space in front like ours does. In flat Melbourne, the sea is very far away. And in Brisbane, Queen Street runs from an unremarkable bridge to an exaggerated apartment tower?

But the famous La Rambla in Barcelona can compare. Its generous width allows for spectacularly huge trees and accommodates crowds of pedestrians strolling along or and hanging around. It flows gently downhill from the main square, Pla?a Catalunya – comparable to our Aotea Square – and ends at the waterfront. Unfortunately, just before reaching the sea, it hits the traffic nightmare of the Columbus Monument square. In our case, by comparison, we have a series of pedestrian-friendly spaces connecting a cluster of finely proportioned historic buildings and a public wharf with connects us to the regional landscape.

Perhaps the only world city that bears comparison with Auckland’s fortunate old town configuration is Lisbon. There, the elegant Rua Augusta connects the popular Rossio Square, fronted by the National Theatre, with the monumental Pra?a de Comércio on the Tagus River historic waterfront.

The point of this international comparison is to prove that any renewal of Queen Street must include Queens Wharf and Aotea Quarter. These strategic assets comprise the uniqueness of Queen Street, which our booming shopping malls cannot match.

It is therefore of utmost importance and priority that the council completes these two major public projects. Think of them as the “bookends” to the street itself. Once these two end destinations become major attractions, Queen Street will regenerate too.

Without strengthening the two bookends, the books will continue to fall off the shelf.

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