On two occasions this week, I have been reminded of the ways in which cities can become battlefields. Not like the misery of northern Syria, where every city block seems a smoking testimonial to the horrors of geopolitics, but those that pit citizens against the behemoth of city hall. It was the battle for community that two broadcasts evoked. The first was a television replay of Citizen Jane: Battle for the City and, the second, a New Yorker podcast interview by Colm Tóibín on Robert Caro, author of the extraordinary, and weighty, Robert Moses biography, The Power Broker.

New York City has seen a fair number of battles for block dominance. Some, like that operatic homage to ethnic tension in Hell’s Kitchen played out in West Side Story and the tense Broadway gauntlet that is the centrepiece of 1979’s The Warriors, have been dramatised on the big screen. The two films portray youth gangs hemmed in by decayed city streets and rotting infrastructure at the time Robert Moses, the so-called ‘master builder’ of mid-20th-century New York, was laying waste the city on a scale not seen since Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris.

It is hard to imagine our gentle politics giving rise to a Robert Moses, a tsar-like public employee with toll-based income giving power and independence enough to control city planning, yet many of Auckland’s bureaucratic silos have been given insufficient political accountability under the guise of efficiency. Just as Moses gained power catering for the burgeoning growth of the city population, the rise in private car numbers and the consequent growth of the city’s land area, so our council’s internal fiefdoms are at risk of an overemphasis on meeting numerical targets as outcome.

Moses was eventually dethroned by the combined forces of Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay, yet it was Jane Jacobs’ heroic defence of the highly evolved life of the street and the city block that was a turning point in the battle for the city. Jacobs identified, analysed and promoted the rich interaction of neighbourhoods, as yet unaltered in urban renewal. She dwelt on the values implicit in the existent communities of those streets, rather than urban renewal and the accommodation of yet more vehicles.

Mayor Goff’s Auckland, Dalziel’s Christchurch or Foster’s Wellington are, of course, nowhere near the scale of New York of the 1950s and ’60s, and we are without its dense, established urban communities. We do, though, share rapid population growth, increasingly clogged roading systems and a housing shortage. These are large city issues powered along by the immutable logic of demographics.

These forces rightly drive the policies and strategies of urban public and private investment, yet the way they do so is critical and those values championed by Jacobs should be to the fore. Discussions around housing numbers, and architects’ role in meeting that demand, seem focused on the design of the discrete object, the better tower block, the more-efficient apartment and so forth. This is as it should be but the better design of housing should be an a priori, an opening bid. In the provision of housing in the numbers required, those forming rich, supportive and safe communities, as Jane Jacobs described, are critically important, perhaps more so than are better-designed dwellings, be they houses, townhouses or apartments.

The provision of rich, supportive and safe communities is a complex industry, which seems to involve every corridor of city hall and a fair number of central government agencies as well. If one has dreams of a utopian city, a verdant domain of citizens enjoying the delights of a well-ordered, resilient and sustainable life in balance with nature, there are some challenging times ahead as one attempts navigation of the many bureaucratic reefs that can wreck the best of dreams. 

It is an odd paradox that planning, a profession founded on the desire to improve living conditions in the industrial revolution, should, a couple of centuries later, have given rise to a quagmire that entraps the dreamer, the idealist along with those after a quick buck. If you have made it this far in our august profession without pitching up on some obscure clause of your district plan or being flayed in the Environment Court, well done. And if, as a consequence, you feel my disgruntlement seems a little harsh on a closely related trade, I invite you to embark upon a scheme that proposes an arrangement of use, form or spatial organisation challenging your urb’s norms. Then, you will surely suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Lest I be accused of promoting a return to dark, satanic mills besmirching the nation’s landscape or the establishment of charnel houses and abattoir on main street, let me quickly say that it doesn’t take much of a deviation from the norm to invoke section 4, clause 6.1(b). It is enough that one might propose, say, a mixing of housing and workspaces to precipitate a bureaucrat’s scorn at one’s naïvety and the advice that you need a specialist planning consultant to facilitate a consent. So circumscribed by rules have we become that innovation and experimentation is not a game for the faint-hearted or those seeking a timely or inexpensive result. 

It may be unfair to single out planning as the ugly stepmother of the serried ranks of impediment to the betterment of life. It is, after all, axiomatic that some rules are required if for no other reason than to prevent the spectacle of Hagley Park echoing to the bellows of cattle heading off to the Armagh Street abattoir. It is, though, the inability of rule sets to deal with proposals not considered at the time of their promulgation that is likely to cause us some difficulty in the months and years ahead as we come to understand the implications of Covid-19 on the built environment.

As I write, we in Auckland are feeling a little sheepish having found ourselves emerging from a second lockdown, after feeling so smug at having ‘knocked the bugger off’ in July. Though the cafés and malls in the urban fringe are busy, there is an increasing number of boarded-up shops, as the end of wage support looms and the prospect of travelling to work in a tower of stacked offices huddled together in the central city seems less attractive to those who have enjoyed the serenity of suburban lockdown.

Whether or not this is the hour of the suburb’s rehabilitation, I fear that institutional inertia will inhibit our ability to do more than tinker with the mechanisms that shape current settlement. This will prevent a more profound examination and implementation of those lessons learned in that strange hiatus from March to May. I am not convinced that having central government wallow about in the RMA, or indeed crushing it if the Nats’ electioneering is to be believed, gives me any comfort if the brute focus on the restoration of ‘normal’ at the lowest first cost in Christchurch is any measure.

It’s time for the ‘planning-free zone’; a place of experimentation where the weight of tradition is set aside in favour of research, analysis and innovation. Let the acronyms of council hold their counsel while we embrace a future freed from the constraints of codified tradition. History is not, as Henry Ford said, ‘bunk’ but the aggregation of rules invariably obscures the critical values and lessons of the past. Rather than slugging it out in reports laden with mitigations and apologias for challenging the status quo, it is time to reach for the stars again, to remember that the values upon which the rich, inclusive and safe communities are founded evolve in relation to global events.

Perhaps, to start things rolling, it is time for a competition, an exhibition of  ‘Covidian architecture’: the new 15-minute suburb with everything you need, our own Ellis Island for quarantined luxury or the zoom room for bifurcated families. Let’s go, let’s get drawing and modelling before the dead hand of bureaucracy, quangos and committees fire up and yet more regulations rain down.