History of Auckland City

Chapter 4: Thinking and being metropolitan (1945-1971)

The City Council's attitude to the surging expansion which characterised post-war Auckland was ambivalent. As a proportion of the metropolis its population steadily declined from half in 1945, when two-thirds of employment was already outside the central core, to less than a quarter in 1971. Yet the coordination and leadership needed to address a variety of urgent metropolitan needs heavily depended on the City Council. Its vision was necessarily bifocal -- inwards on its own citizens' needs and outwards towards the wider and widening setting of which it remained the heart.

Better roads, better road management

Although the Council did construct the Dominion Rd interchange (part of the planned Governmental motorway network) in 1967, its primary concern was with managing street traffic. In the fifties both horse troughs and horse-drawn street-cleaning carts disappeared and tram tracks were lifted after the tramway system finally closed in 1956. Generally the Council was an enterprising provider of streets trees, which numbered 9,000 in 1955. Rubberised bitumen street surfaces were laid from 1958 and a decade later Vulcan Lane pioneered the conversion of streets into pedestrian malls. Although measures to control traffic -- automated lights (1946), compulsory stops (1952) and driving in lanes (1962) -- were constantly being improved, they were overshadowed by `the parking problem'. The first off-street parking lot appeared in 1947, the first parking meters in 1953 and the first municipal parking building (Britomart Place) in 1958. However, not even the Council's excellent Traffic Department could actually stem the onset of ever-worsening congestion.

Water for all of Auckland

Although the 1948 opening of the Lower Nihotipu Dam (then the biggest in New Zealand) enabled recurrent water shortage crises to be survived, it reinforced the Council's determination to `head to the Hunuas'. In that catchment, the Cossey's Creek Dam, opened in 1955, yielded a daily flow equal to half the output of all the Waitakere sources, and by 1959 nearly all local bodies were purchasing water off Auckland City. It was followed in 1965 by the huge Upper Mangatawhiri reservoir, the largest headworks which the City Council ever constructed. By then, however, the Council had without coercion agreed to transfer control of its bulk supply to the nascent Auckland Regional Authority, although it continued managing the undertaking until 1967. No doubt the Council was mightily relieved to have got shot of the emotional issue of whether to fluoridate the water supply in the interests of dental health.

The regional dimension of parks and libraries

The portfolio of parks was further diversified and enriched. It included the 100 acre tract of Churchill Park (1945), the resumption of Motuihe Island (1948), the popular Hauraki Gulf picnic venue, Brown's Island (1954), a gift of former mayor Sir Ernest Davis, and -- after flirting with a Coney Island playground -- the sensitive redevelopment of Western Springs. Although the advent of motels made resurrection of the Western Springs motor camp redundant, the Chamberlain Park Golf Course hosted 75,000 rounds in 1966, the same year a massive conversion of the zoo into a spacious, open `garden' was announced. The Council also pledged in principle to transfer its extensive holdings in the Waitakere Ranges to the Auckland Regional Authority. As regards the library system, improvements in access such as the introduction of mobile facilities (1950), and the opening of a new branch in Glen Innes (1961), were transcended by the commissioning of Stage I of the superb new Central Library in 1971. Although the Old Colonists' Museum became a victim of overcrowding back in 1957, relocation of the Central Library would give the Art Gallery, already pre-eminent nationally, the space to flower even further.

Mirroring the mores of society

Even in relatively recent times, the Council's power to undertake, regulate and prohibit activities was quite prodigious. In 1959 it completed a massive revision of its by-laws, one allowing the unrestricted use of pinus radiata as a building material. It presided over the liberalisation of Sunday entertainment from 1953, but was somewhat flummoxed in the late 1960s when unauthorised street protests became a favourite activist tool. Its attempts to curtail the growing cacophony seemingly inseparable from urban existence were earnest but generally unavailing. Although its sewage disposal farm was closed in 1932, nightsoil collections only ended in 1969, and the Council ran a highly-profitable sheep farm on Motuihe. With half its area serviced by combined sewerage-stormwater reticulation, the mammoth task of separating the two commenced in 1969. Until the mid fifties it organised annual 'Rat Week' campaigns. More positively, the abattoir doubled its killings between 1947 and 1967 and major modernisation was pending and rents from the city's fruit and produce markets helped the Council's income, although a 1956 experiment of a retail open market badly foundered. A compost plant which processed suitable refuse commenced commercial production in 1963, although its principal mission was to reduce the volume of the stream of waste, not trade at a profit.

At last giving planning its due

The chief consequence of the passage of the 1953 Town & Country Planning Act was that responsibility for the production of physical order and amenity finally had to be taken seriously. The City Council set the pace: by 1958 its provisional district scheme reached the gruelling objection stage and became fully operative in 1961, among the very first in New Zealand. Its first five yearly review, commenced in 1968, again led the field in breaking new ground, especially in environmental protection. As to planning on a metropolitan scale, the Council was only indirectly involved after the body concerned, the Auckland Metropolitan Planning Organisation, acquired its own staff in 1949, although two decades on Auckland Regional Authority's first master plan provocatively ventured into what the City Council considered its rightful planning domain.

Alleviating the housing shortage

At war's end slum housing or even homelessness was the lot of many thousands of Aucklanders, and their evoked an inventive practical response -- transit camps utilising unwanted American military buildings located in city parks. By 1948 three complexes were accommodating 3,000. More plentiful housing in the early 1960s led to their phasing out. Another example of the Council's acceptance of broader social obligations was pensioner housing, later restyled housing for the elderly, and even later, housing for senior citizens. Pushed by Roy McElroy, later to be mayor (1965-68), the Council erected four blocks by 1958 and then powered by Government subsidies accelerated the programme, catering in all for some 500 needy citizens. Most dramatic of the housing initiatives was reclamation and renewal of blighted inner-city residential zones. And in Freeman's Bay controversially, because it meant the clearance and demolition of slums and the decanting of their residents into distant and alien state housing areas. This pioneering project was immense and complex, the first new flats not being occupied until 1954, and after twenty years only twenty acres had been reclaimed. Government grants and loans were rarely generous, and views moved away from multi-storey blocks towards town houses. In retrospect the Council bit off more than it could readily chew, but in the context its motives were wholly worthy.

Boosting community effort

Despite occasional misgivings, ideological rifts and backtracking, the Council progressively extended the frontiers of community development. Where halls were attached to branch libraries, they were quasi-community centres in embryo, but a short-lived drive in the late 1950s to develop fullscale community centres petered out in the face of ratepayer opposition and the advent of television. The Council then switched its efforts to crafting a more modest variation, the community house, the first two appearing at the end of the 1960s in conjunction with the groundbreaking appointment of a community adviser and establishment of citizens' advice bureaux. It was no accident that their siting in areas of high Polynesian and Maori population was accorded the top priority.

Confronting mounting metropolitan issues

Metropolitan problems, shelved because of rabid parochialism or wartime exigencies, could no longer lamely be ignored. Imprisoned within nonsensical boundaries by the intransigent insularity of suburban local bodies which even the revolutionary Local Government Commission area scheme of 1970 could not overcome, the City Council instead sought to exert cooperative leadership in replacing talk with action. In devising workable approaches to major metropolitan issues, the leadership contribution of the City Council -- whether directly or through the Metropolitan Council it created in the 1950s -- was invariably prominent, and often crucial. The formation of political and operational responses to the interwoven barriers to Auckland's progress entail mostly complex stories which preclude anything better than a brief reference, but generally, having being material in shaping both regional policies and institutions, the Council returned without booty to its home-base duties.

Crossing the harbour

In the time between 1929 and 1946 commissions of enquiry on the need for a crossing of the Waitemata Harbour the Council remained unvaryingly lukewarm. However, mayor Sir John Allum then took up the cause so forcefully that by 1950 the Government had been persuaded not only to help fund the harbour bridge but to place its construction and operation under a special purpose authority. Allum was a `natural' as its inaugural chairman and held that post until well after the road-only bridge opened for traffic in 1960. Rather quaintly, the Council in 1953 envisaged that the bridge would entail `no special expenditure' on its part.

Robbie's sewerage crusade

Although sewage disposal was the responsibility of a board of local body representatives, the majority came from the City Council and its mayor was usually the chairman, making the relationship extremely close. The Drainage Board hitched itself to a controversial scheme for discharging essentially untreated sewage off Brown's Island, thus precipitating the greatest political cause celebre in Auckland's history. Diehard opposition led by Dove-Myer Robinson twisted and turned to thwart the project, but it was only when control of the City Council changed dramatically following the 1953 local body elections that the policy was overturned. In a compelling irony, Robinson, now a councillor, was not only appointed to the Drainage Board but unanimously elected its chairman. and oversaw early development of the Manukau oxidation ponds.

Waiting -- and waiting -- for a train

On no project of metropolitan benefit did the Council labour longer, if not always consistently, than a modern electric railway system featuring a central city tunnel. First proposed in 1923, the scheme languished until 1950, when it received unqualified endorsement in the Halcrow-Thomas report. Mayor John Luxford (1953-56) championed it until 1955, when the Council, its head turned by the motorway 'solution' to congestion, adopted a Master Transportation Plan resting on a motorway network and relegating an upgraded rail system to the sidelines. However, when the De Leuw Cather report of 1965 rehabilitated the idea of modernised rail transit, the City Council readily endorsed it, but then participated in a unresolvable wrangle over apportioning liability for meeting the then $42,000,000 capital costs. Robinson, mayor again from 1968, and resolute pro-rail advocate, nearly boiled with frustration.

Auckland gets its airport

More fruitful but scarcely less abbreviated was pursuit of an international airport. By 1938, when the Council got itself gazetted an aviation authority, it had already participated in several searches for suitable sites. Eventually opinion coalesced behind Mangere, and pushed by the City Council the National Government in 1954 agreed to a 50-50 Government-local bodies split in funding the construction and maintenance. Little then transpired until the Council in 1959 initiated the procuring a report from American airport consultants. So armed, the Council herded the other local bodies into a joint management committee, obtained their signatures, and until the Auckland Regional Authority assumed control in 1964, remained the `party of the second part' in the binding deal with Government.

A region needs regional government

Important as was the Council's role in developing other metropolitan amenities and services such as civil defence, the War Memorial Institute & Museum, and the Museum of Transport & Technology, it was only peripheral to the farseeing creation of truly effective and elective regional government. The genesis of metropolitan control over metropolitan matters was a submission by Clr.Thomas Bloodworth to the 1928 Royal Commission on Transport. Into the 1950s, however, even voluntary cooperation was perfunctory, and the best possible was a spindly plant called the Metropolitan Council. What changed the ground-rules were a powerful series of Herald articles extolling regional government and Robinson's masterfully manoeuvring thirty-six local bodies into backing legislation, in the City Council's name, setting up an Establishment Committee charged with drafting a measure to establish an elected regional authority. Despite the cause being boosted by the City Council voluntarily agreeing to transfer its water supply undertaking, it had to survive several years of political diversionary tactics. That even a rather patched regional flag was run up the masthead by Robinson as a fitting inaugural chairman in 1963 can be attributed primarily to the City Council's unswerving commitment.

The strains and gains of growth

In the 1944-71 period the Council was never out of the Citizens & Ratepayers' Association control except for a three year break 1953-56. For all the extraneous inordinate demands made on its energy, concentration, resources and staff -- including a heavyweight battle with the Government and the University in the late 1950s over the latter's permanent siting in a choice central location -- the City Council still managed to improve the quality of its management and service delivery. In 1957 the first Organisation and Methods Officer was appointed, and between 1956 and 1959 the inner workings were critically analysed by an Australian firm of management consultants, probably a New Zealand first. Pressure on office space in the Town Hall forced the gradual dispersion of staff over six locations: they were re-centralised when the 16 storey Civic Administration Building was opened in 1966, a facility matched by the opening of the massive combined works depot several years later.

G.W.A. Bush 5.8.98