Will the Auckland City Skyline ever change again?
by Scott Caldwell
It’s been nearly five years since the NPS-UD directed councils to enable more apartment-style housing in high-access areas. After years of delay, Auckland’s response — Plan Change 78 (PC78) — is finally up for a key vote before the Planning Committee on May 22.
The plan has positives but remains underwhelming. With further intensification plans on hold, this is the city’s last real chance to get it right.
This post will cover the most important issues at play and highlight places where Council’s plan and IHP differ.
Heights in the City
The NPS-UD is clear: City Centre district plans should “enable building heights and density of urban form to realise as much development capacity as possible, to maximise the benefits of intensification”.
Under the Unitary Plan, the city is riddled with a variety of height limits in different precincts – PC78 unifies these into the “Special Height Area” in the city core and the “General Height Area” in most other parts of the city.
The Special Height Area does not have specific height limits and are only affected by broadly reasonable and permissive controls to allow sunlight into Aotea and Freyberg squares. In particular this is a massive improvement over the Unitary Plan as this drops the floor area ratio caps, which placed a hard limit on the amount of floor area a tower could provide.
In this way, the Special Height Area take the NPS-UD direction to heart. The General Height Area, unfortunately, does not. Outside of the city core, the General Height Area now imposes a blanket height limit of 72.5 meters – the same as metropolitan centres like Botany and Westgate.
Although this is more permissive than the status quo, it raises a big question: Why?
Who is fine with a 72 meter building but harmed by a 90, 150, 200 meter building? If someone wants to build a tower on the vacant site on Vincent Street (a mere two minute walk from Te Waihorotiu Station), why would we say no?
This is the question everyone from the Mayor to the Minister was asking when RMA commissioners recently declined an 11-storey office tower at the end of K Road.
Council planners submitted in PC78 that the answer is “the importance of the City Centre’s sense of place and visual identity as informed by its natural heritage”.
As a life-long Aucklander and current City Centre resident, I’ve always felt that the City Centre’s sense of place and visual identity is rooted in tall buildings, but Council disagreed – and seems to have thrown enough “urban design speak” at the IHP that they relented, recommending only a small expansion of the Special Height Area to include the block bordered by Queen and Mayoral.
Planning Committee members should vote to accept this IHP recommendation, but push for greater expansion.
Slender Towers
When submitting the plan, Council planners fretted that unleashing more towers upon the slither of the city would create problems, and sought to solve these pre-emptively with a “slender tower over podium” strategy, an urban form where you have a full-block podium for the first 20 or 30 meters, and then a tower above.
This approach mandates a podium up to 28 metres, above which a tower must:
Maximum Tower Dimension - a tower development’s floor plate should fit within a 50 meter diameter circle
East-West Tower Dimension - a tower development’s floor plate should not be wider than 30 meters
Tower Setbacks - a tower must be setback from the edge of the site by the greatest of 6 meters or 6% of the height of the building
While these may sound benign, the combined effect is highly restrictive. Warren and Mahoney’s analysis for Precinct Properties of these restrictions on behalf of Precinct which they presented during the IHP process. What they found is that there is less feasible tower development in the city core under PC78 than if they kept the controls from the Auckland Unitary Plan – leaving us very far from NPS-UD’s maximum density directive.
The setback requirement was identified in particular as a tower-killer: it effectively re-introduced height limits, and only made development feasible on larger sites.
More absurdly, Auckland Council’s own HQ wouldn’t comply with the 30m width rule. Nor would many prominent international towers often held up as design exemplars.
Thankfully, the IHP has walked back the Councils proposal somewhat:
Maximum Tower Dimension - 50m -> 55m
East-West Tower Dimension - 30m -> 45m
Tower Setbacks - the greatest of 6m or 6% of the height of the building -> 6m
Planning Committee members should at least accept the IHP’s recommendations, but also ask, do we need these at all?
Auckland has urbanised happily without them, cities like Manhattan thrive with wall-to-wall thick towers, while other cities like Vancouver have been reviled for their strangely spaced towers.
Karanga-a-hape Station Precinct
Possibly the worst missed opportunity (other than untouchables like E10) is the failure to leverage the $5bn investment we’re making in CRL.
This is acutely true for the Karanga-a-hape station area, where some of the city’s strictest height limits and least flexible heritage overlays remain intact — despite a $5 billion investment in underground rail.
Nowhere is the mismatch between planning and infrastructure clearer. A proposed 11-storey office building on a gravel pit near the station was recently declined for reasons including “height and bulk,” based on the Karangahape Historic Heritage Area controls — which PC78 leaves untouched.
Karangahape Road has genuine character in its built form, but more importantly it has vibrant character from the people who inhabit it. Making the area accessible to more people without a commensurate increase in the amount of housing, offices, shops, bars and clubs risks displacement and gentrification of the area – and it’s not worth protecting the built form of Karangahape if we cannot protect its people.
These controls go well beyond protecting genuinely historic buildings. They require new buildings to be “compatible” in style and scale, to “respect” the existing built form, and to avoid “dominance.” The effect is to freeze the character of the area in time, even as the world changes around it.
Instead, our historic heritage controls should be focusing on preserving the genuine heritage that exists but allowing new development – because our city will be more interesting and more prosperous from the contrast of new and old.
Conclusion
The Auckland City Centre should aspire to be a big, shining city on the Pacific, but nothing in this plan indicates we’re heading in that direction. Councillors should accept the IHP recommendations, but plan for Round Two.