appealing clarity and has worked to great effect in many city centres around the world, particularly those with an urban morphology pre-dating the automobile. This is evidenced in the growing interest in cities such as Copenhagen and Melbourne, which have been retrofitted to prioritise the life between buildingsi. Guided by a ‘Public Life Survey’ completed by Gehl Architects in 2010, Auckland has also just begun a similar undertaking in the quest to become the worlds most livable city. Gehl’s work demonstrates that provided that time and budget are available, top down strategies to upgrade the public realm can modify the attitudes and behavior of motorists towards pedestrians and cyclists. However, it remains unclear how pedestrianising an inner city affects broader regional mobility challenges such as congestion, or societal dependence on fossil fuels for the movement of goods and people. Current trends in contemporary placemaking also suggest that most practitioners agree with James Corner’s approach to the public realm. With a focus on brownfield sites, Corner views the current shift in ‘first world’ cities from an industrial economy toward a service economy, as an opportunity for ‘a totally new landscape of leisure’ (Rhodes, 2012). These brownfield remnants are the accepted detritus of industries left redundant as cities everywhere continue to outsource labour, materials and manufacturing to low cost, offshore alternatives. While a number of Corner’s earlier writings and theoretical designs demonstrate a refined understanding and application of ecological systemsii, his more recent built work seems less concerned with these ecological processes and ignores the broader socio-cultural systems and economic processes that create the brownfield sites in the first place. For all their appeal, these pedestrian scale, walkable, ecologically considerate, ‘leisure-scapes’ are unquestioning of the societal behaviours and values of economic growth, globalisation and fossil fuel dependency. In many cases these ‘best practice’ public realm strategies prescribe pedestrian priority and urban renewal in order to improve the economic competitiveness of the city and are justified on the basis of economic growth through increased consumer spending. For example, the ‘Pedestrian Pound’, a recent report commissioned by British charity organisation Living Streets, claims that making places better for walking can boost footfall and trading by up to 40% (Lawlor, 2012). Increasingly, these projects appear not as life changing innovative public spaces but as stage sets for high-end global retailers and corporate headquarters that provide few benefits to residents and fail to trigger the more effective leverage points within the system – Auckland is no exception.
Corporate financial headquarters that are entirely dependant on the ongoing growth of the global market place appear through veneer of green (infrastructure) – literally i
Søholt, H. (2004). Life, spaces and buildings: Quality criteria for good public spaces and the working methods dealing with public life. Paper presented at the Walk21-V Cities for People, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Because these strategies rely on centralised, top down approaches to planning, design, funding and implementation, they engage the least effective leverage points in a system. Worst of all, public realm strategies that fail to recognise underlying causes unwittingly contribute toward a positive feedback loop that continue to reinforce the economic processes that generate brownfield sites and will continue to undermine efforts towards designing a public realm that can contribute towards sustainability in any meaningful way. ii
Terra Fluxus in: Waldheim, C. (Ed.). (2006). The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Or various writings in Corner, J. (Ed.). (1999). Recovering Landscape. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
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