I went to a clambake the other day: a gathering not far under a COVID-mandated maximum crowd size. We were gathered to talk about Queen Street. Despite it being billed as a co-design session, it seemed only Tony van Raat and I represented designers though, perhaps, there was a raft of related trades lurking in the crowd of property owners, users, residents of the valley and several bureaucrats from city hall.

For those who have not ventured north for a while, the street is in pretty bad shape, bearing the impact of an increasing number of buses, evicted from their normal routes by the rail tunnel work on Albert Street. There is also a bewildering number of ad hoc additions, apparently to create room for masked pedestrians giving one another a wide berth.

The speedy flow of buses down the main drag has been facilitated by removing the need for them to pull out of the traffic lane while loading, the pavements widened at stops with infills of tarmac and wood, between which a slalom of boxes, cones and paint blobs has been created. The result is a shambles, with cars, cyclists and pedestrians cast into competition for the small strips of remaining trafficable asphalt.

That COVID has reduced the number of competitors in the main street dash adds to the sense of abandon of the country’s once-proud main street. Charitably, we might note that the street is a work in progress, the excavations of the new rail loop turning the west of the CBD valley into an ever-changing maze presided over by a dayglo-clad praetorian guard. We were advised that, when the tunnel and stations are done, the street will be… well, it was up to us to decide.

The valley, then, is a suitable case for treatment but the method by which this is being approached fills me with foreboding, never more so than when the Post-it notes were distributed and our genial facilitator from the ‘west island’ encouraged us to workshop ideas that would restore the Golden Mile to pre-eminence. My spirits in this sort of gathering vacillate between the heady optimism that the people will be heard and the uncomfortable feeling that somewhere, in a back room, a raft of traffic engineers has already knocked the thing off and will soon reveal the result, seeking only our affirmation of their labours before calling for tenders.

I bear the scars of this sort of thing, trying to wrangle designs through some of our ironically named Council-controlled organisations. These are Council set-ups, designed to deliver one or another infrastructural service but which roam through the isthmus immune to political direction, for all the world like rogue elephants disregarding the plaintive instructions of their mahouts.

Operating in the public realm has never been for the faint-hearted and especially so for we gentle architects, our altruistic imperatives inevitably colliding with the seemingly immutable dictates of turning radii, invert levels and the plethora of codes that are brought to bear on our dreams. We have had some success with a professional version of holding our breath; returning again and again to our preferred solution, while hoping those we are butting heads with lack similar staying power and, hamstrung by interdepartmental competition, internal budgeting constraints and impending retirement, will eventually see the wisdom of our thinking.

Those in the lower latitudes may be tempted to see this as nothing more than the Gomorrah of the north getting its just deserts but I know that pragmatism and DIY design prevailing over aspiration is something of a national trait when it comes to construction and, looking at post-earthquake Christchurch, never more so than in times of national duress.

The desire to return to ‘normal’ is a potent motivation but there is an awful feeling that perhaps this time we may have ‘cooked our goose’, that we may have to live with the viral scourge for a long time and, if that doesn’t provoke a change in the way things come about, then the queue of climate-induced disasters waiting to smite us will surely force it upon us.

It is a strange phenomenon that such a small country is so loath to embrace comprehensive change as it once did. I want to blame we architects – to suggest that we are too meek to raise a voice in consideration of the utopian, the fantastic or just the blatantly obvious. That may well be the case: that the absence of the inspirational from our digital drawing boards leaves a listless polity in its wake.

I suspect, though, that the accursed neo-liberal economics coupled with a political realm that has a small group of centrist swing voters calling the shots has more to answer for than our professional timidity. For all that, I do think our invisibility in the melee of public discourse has something to answer for.

Perhaps the workshop will deliver a robust brief that will beget a thoughtful design process. That would be a useful outcome, though I don’t think gathering a large group of citizens in a room for a couple of hours is any way to develop a brief that reaches much beyond the generalisations of better access and greater safety, oh, and, as in all beauty pageants, world peace.

We designers employ a familiar modus operandi of researching and brief-writing, designing and critiquing. To do anything less than this is to revert to Kiwi DIY, a strategy founded on the belief that we, the people, are all ‘the jacks of all trades’, conveniently forgetting the other half of the aphorism, that we are ‘masters of none’.

David Mitchell said only architects have the ability to inspire people with our buildings, and that that was the only skill we have. I think, if we gathered up a few related design disciplines, we might extend that to the design of public open space, too, and I am tempted to call, as Tony van Raat has done, for a competition. I would do so but the history of competitions in Auckland is littered with the hard work of competitors trampled on by blundering politicians. This may all seem an Auckland issue, yet, elected ‘pollies’ disregard for the experience of designers and their cynical use of our labours for their own ends can be seen wherever politicians meddle in the making of the public realm.

A small gang at the workshop seemed ready to set aside the Post-its and go it alone, even, heaven forbid, talking about beauty as an outcome. I have to say, I was a little taken aback by the call to beauty, so punch-drunk have I become that anything beyond firmness and commodity seems an impossible goal when dealing with city hall. Never have our cities been more in need of inspiration, love and attention. Though the city coffers have suffered a viral hit and it might be some time before the jackhammers are released on the last few metres of untouched CBD, now is the time to dream, draw and argue. Your cities badly need you!