Month: April 2014

The Basin Reserve: An Asset We Mustn’t Destroy

Posted on by tjonescan

Wellington has got a very good thing in the form of the Basin Reserve. But sometimes, as New Zealanders, we have a tendency to undervalue what we have.

Award-winning Australian architect and urban design expert Jan McCredie is is no doubt what a good thing we have, and how much the proposed Basin Reserve flyover would put that at risk. As reported by the Dominion Post, she told the Basin Reserve flyover Board of Inquiry, now nearing the end of its third month of hearings, in no uncertain terms just what an asset the Basin is for Wellington:

McCredie told the four-member board the Basin Reserve was currently one of the most stunning entrances to a city you will find anywhere in the world.

Putting a flyover beside it would devastate Wellington’s reputation as a walkable city because it would instantly put tourists off moving through the Basin heritage area, she said.

It would also destroy one of Wellington’s major architectural points of difference on the world stage.

“In Sydney, you would do everything you can to retain and enhance the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. They are major points of difference.”

Jan McCredie had a lot more to say about the negative effects of the proposed flyover on pedestrians and visitors to Wellington, and she threw her weight behind the alternative Basin Reserve Roundabout Enhancement Option (BRREO), which involves only at-grade (ground level) changes.

Jan McCredie illustrated how badly building a flyover in an iconic location would reflect on Wellington and New Zealand:

The transport agency was kidding itself if it thought the flyover as an “elegant” bridge, she added.

“It’s not a light, fine structure. It’s carrying cars and it’s quite meaty … no one is going to come to Wellington and rave about seeing the flyover.”

Let’s value what we have. Let’s not destroy it with an unnecessary, ugly and expensive one-way flyover.

 

Save the Basin Campaign press release: Transport Agency witness makes revealing admission at Basin Reserve flyover hearing

Posted on by tjonescan

Landscape architect Gavin Lister, appearing for the New Zealand Transport Agency, has made a revealing admission at the Board of Inquiry hearing into the proposed Basin Reserve flyover. Under questioning by Board of Inquiry member Mr David Collins, Gavin Lister said:

“Flyovers are anathema to urban design thinking because of what they represent. They represent a car dominated city, a sprawling car dominated city which is kind of the antithesis of the compact,  mixed use, high intensity city supported by walkability and public transport”

Commenting on this admission, Save the Basin Campaign spokesperson Tim Jones said “Under detailed questioning from the Board, Gavin Lister admitted what the Save the Basin Campaign has been saying all along: that the idea of building a flyover at the Basin Reserve is a relic of the antiquated, car-dominated transport thinking that modern cities all around the world have abandoned.”

“Having made this admission, Mr Lister then made a rather extraordinary turnabout to say that these were exactly the same reasons the proposed flyover was needed. He did not explain why.”

“When the Transport Agency’s own witnesses make such trenchant criticisms of flyovers, it’s a clear sign that the Basin Reserve flyover project has been badly thought through and inadequately assessed against alternatives.

“Wellingtonians are innovators and forward thinkers. It’s time the Government and the Transport Agency consigned flyovers to the dustbin of transport history and started developing modern, meaningful transport solutions,” Mr Jones concluded.

Moving Beyond Autopia

Posted on by tjonescan

When a lot of one’s time and energy is going into a particular transport issue, it’s easy to forget that the proposed Basin Reserve flyover, or the Kapiti Expressway, or whatever other specific project the Government is trying to foist on us is just one part of their overall plan to build motorways up and down the country.

Auckland academic Jaqs Clarke (see credit note below) has recently come back from overseas with a new perspective on the Government’s motorway plans, which she discusses in her article

Beyond Autopia: the high social cost of New Zealand’s road building programme

I recommend that you read it in full, but in summary, she starts by saying

After ten months in an urban laboratoire in Paris on a post-doc residency I returned to Auckland recently, to realise that the city of my home and imagination has been most busily morphing into a belated version of sci-fi Autopia.

and goes on discuss Auckland in detail – but this paragraph suggests that the NZTA leopard doesn’t change its spots when moving from one city to another:

In Auckland in 2014 we might not be parking flying saucers, but the journey through these smoothing corridors, that propel us from A-to-B, are as close to flying as one gets at ground level. Nothing could be further from the sensory overload and teeming humanity of the streets of Paris, than the Autopia that is belatedly materialising in the Auckland landscape. Seduced by these cruise control fantasy zones, the lack of clutter not to mention pedestrians, the seconds-savings of our journey, we now move across landscapes that have lost all reference points, as the visual field is cleansed of messiness by concrete fresco walls and sound-barriers set against monocultures of New Zealand native plants.

Turning to Wellington, she writes:

Moving south the brave citizens of Wellington are currently attempting to place limits upon the architects of Autopia’s offering of a flyover. A flyover is an Autopian architectural typology that regards the landscape underneath it as clutter. A flyover lifts us from the forces of gravity and allows us to hover unimpeded, even temporarily.

and goes on to discuss how the natural flow point at the Basin Reserve has been repurposed – a problem that a flyover would only exacerbate.

She concludes:

The most resilient cities of the 21st century are not Autopian. The most resilient cities do not privilege cars, but sustain a complexity of urban values, are built upon a positive urban dynamism in which intimate pathways are given as much consideration as those of national significance. As New Zealanders we deserve our cities to be designed around best practice resilience models, not throwbacks to an era of fantasy and delusion.

Unfortunately, the current Government and the NZTA still have their heads firmly fixed in that era of fantasy and delusion. But the coming General Election offers an opportunity to change that.

About the author: Jaqs Clarke (PhD) is an urban theorist and writer. She completed her PhD in the Philosophy of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland in 2012. She recently returned from a post-doc residency in the urban laboratoire AMP at Ecole Nationale d’Architecture Paris La Villette . She currently has a short term research position at the University of Auckland and is completing her first book. Amphibious: six liquid metaphors for a 21st century creative imagination. Other writings can be found on her blog:  http://ecologyurbanismculture.wordpress.com