Aotea Square Sale: Business as Usual

This image is copied from a media webpage of Auckland Council's CCO Panuku Development. It describes plans to privatise and redevelop the northern area of Aotea Square which presently accommodates the much debated former Auckland City Council HQ building. (By the way check out this fantastic heritage assessment). NZ Herald ran the resulting story here.

Worth a look because of the video link that is there giving a panoramic perspective of the proposal that's absent from the picture above. For example:

 Looking North I guess, with Mayoral Drive in the bottom foreground.... You can get a little more of an idea from Bob Dey's useful update here. He reports, "In a presentation yesterday, Panuku said the mix of development in the proposed Civic Quarter was still to be finalised. However, it would be market-driven, with a focus on quality outcomes..."

And looking South into the proposed development with the old Council HQ building to the right. According to the Panuku Development media statement: "The city’s urban development agency Panuku Development Auckland has selected Tawera Group to restore the Category A heritage building after an international tender process.
Tawera’s Civic Quarter proposal features residential apartments in the upper floors with food and beverage facilities on the ground floor of the existing building. There will also be a new apartment building on the Mayoral Drive corner, a new boutique hotel on Mayoral Drive and a building featuring a Whare Tapere performance space fronting Aotea Square...."

These images are all about the new architecture. The plans lack the sort of landscape architectural perspective explaining how these new buildings and the spaces around them genuinely interconnect and inter-relate with surrounding uses. If anything, the urban design conclusion would be that to make the new buildings and the new north facing spaces between them work, the old HQ building should be demolished.

So what started out being a project to get development interest in refurbishing and adaptively reusing the old HQ building (albeit with the need to remove its asbestos) - in the interests of heritage and other values - has turned into a project to build a new hotel, some new apartment blocks and a performance space fronting Aotea Square. These additional buildings will occupy the 5,000 square metres of public land that's proposed to be sold. Some "shared laneways" are promised.

Is this the best Auckland can do here? And, did I/we miss something? When was all this decided? Selling off 5,000 square metres of public land, calling it the Civic Quarter, makes the sale of Queen Elizabeth Square look like a sunday school picnic (only 1800 square metres of public land).

It's been quite a challenge trying to reverse-engineer the decision-making processes involved.

At its meeting of 8 December 2015, Auckland Development Ctte considered this report, and "noted the development work program". At pg 25 is the "Towards the Aotea Quarter Framework Feedback Report". This 42 page report which communicates the results of various research processes and is dated October 2015, concludes: "there was clear demand to see the Quarter developed to meet its potential with a very definite focus on making public spaces, activities, buildings and communication better contribute to its arts, diverse culture, entertainment and civic identity, as well as to be more accessible to wider groups of the public."

This is followed with the 90 page Aotea Framework Plan (AFP) itself. I haven't looked at this closely. But the end sections give a flavour. A section on interdependencies states, "...The Council family needs to ensure that the outcomes of the Aotea Framework can be successfully achieved at all levels with a high level of inter-Council collaboration and alignment with key projects and large infrastructure development such as the City Rail link..."  (sounds more and more like the QE Square story and justification all the time - despite the fact the Aotea Station is barely a twinkle in anyone's eye and doesn't appear in any of the available plans for the overall area).

The implementation plans contained at the rear of the AFP set out a pile of work for the Regional Facilities CCO ($45,000,000 for "re-skinning" and "interior renewals" of the Aotea Centre; and $45,000,000 for "development of Aotea Centre backlands, active edges on Mayoral Drive and Aotea Square...").  Panuku is up for leading the project to refurbish the old HQ building whose budget is suggested $79-$89 million at the "developer's cost..."; and development of the "surplus CAB sites" with two new buildings at developer cost of around $130 million. (NB: CAB = Council Administration Building, and surplus CAB sites = some of the 5,000 square metres around the CAB building, mostly at present carparking land.)

That's enough background for now.

Here's my concern: the proposals for hotel and apartments in "two new buildings" will be snapped up by developers. Private commitment to the retrofit of the old CAB building will have to be paid for with public money. Especially with so much building going on across town, and the low hanging fruit of the new buildings. Also, how easy do you reckon it will be for Regional Facilities to get $90 million out of Council to do regional facilities upgrades and "active edges"? Pretty hard I'd say.

This is desperate development stuff indeed. Perhaps there are good long term strategic plans for the whole Aotea Quarter - that are stimulated by the opportunities the new station will bring, and which will deliver the regeneration changes this poorly planned area needs. But this big picture vision seems now to be subsumed by the Civic Quarter plan and its private development carrots.

Announcing these plans just a few weeks out from election day, with little if any public say along the way, not of any relevance anyway, isn't a good look for a Council bumping along the bottom of public approval ratings.

I don't know what statutory processes and hurdles need to be crossed to get these plans over the line. You'd think that sort of information would have been considered by Council in a public agenda. But maybe all that's been delegated to Panuku Development. Just needs a nod from Council and Bob's your uncle. This is a far cry from the processes involved in delivering the Wynyard Quarter, and from where I'm looking and from what I've seen it's out of control.

Council Candidates: make it your business to know what's going on in the heart of Auckland. Ask questions. Aotea Square and Civic Quarter development plans need full public exposure and review.