There seems to be little argument that our planning system is struggling to cope with the tensions and some of the substandard urban design spawned by our current arrangements. And it’s not just in New Zealand.

Lamenting the demise of good public architecture in our contemporary cities, UK columnist Jay Merrick, writing in The Independent (April 4, 2011), lays the blame not with the usual scapegoat, developers colluding with local body politicians, but squarely at the feet of the design profession: ‘Across two decades of helter-skelter economic change architects have simply failed to get a hugely important message across to the public, to planners and those in government. It is that architecture of unmistaka ble quality is absolutely crucial to the future intelligible meaning of our cultural and commercial landscapes.’

Clearly Merrick recognises that more hands-on intervention by those of us trained in the skills of planning, designing and constructing form and public space ambience is well overdue.

And Merrick may be right but has he missed another important ingredient of town building?

Entrepreneur and the city
Worldwide, central and local policymakers are turning their attention away from programmes like subsidies to entice business relocation, for example, towards measures aimed at promoting entrepreneurship. The role of entrepreneurship in economic growth and development is beginning to receive official recognition.

New Zealander Stephen Tindall, founder of The Warehouse retail stores and the Tindall Foundation (a philanthropic family trust that provides monetary help for social entrepreneurship) makes this street-wise observation on ways to achieve systemic and sustainable change in society: ‘Very often, fresh approaches to development and community work can be traced back to inspired self-starters, who understand instinctively the who, why, what and how. They sweat blood to make an idea happen. You can’t buy that sort of enthusiasm − you can only try and support it when you find it.’

The people Tindall is speaking about are the entrepreneurs. Tindall defines them this way: ‘Entrepreneur means someone with drive and ideas, a person with the potential and passion to create something new where there was nothing before − someone with the knack for making a lot out of very little.’

The flamboyant British business entrepreneur Richard Branson concurs: ‘Entrepreneurship isn’t about capital; it’s about ideas.’

‘Our genes may build us humans but our civilisations are built from ideas,’ concurs Professor Tim Flannery of Australia’s Macquarie University.

Recall that the word ‘civilisation,’ deriving from the Latin, means city or city-state, and these albeit laconic observations coming from three idiosyncratic characters, Tindall, Branson and Flannery, begin to tessellate a symbiotic pattern of interrelationships between city building, economy and entrepreneurship.

Since entrepreneurial activity appears to be what attracts venture capital into a place (and not the other way around) clearly one way to encourage entrepreneurship is to focus on creating a policy environment where individuals are free to innovate.

However, it is also becoming evident that entrepreneurial support requires more than just a sympathetic policy. Community-based support is critical to the success of new business. Unfortunately, organisations that encourage social entrepreneurs and awareness of entrepreneurship, and build community support for them, are rare. Entrepreneurs need community; community needs entrepreneurs.

All politics is local
A recently published report, ‘Initiatives for Hamilton: A Blueprint for the Future’, published by the New Zealand Property Council is an example of the conversations we need to be having – the embryo of a memorandum of understanding between the Hamilton community and the entrepreneur-developer. ‘Initiatives for Hamilton’ quite quickly delivers a sharp message: ‘The (Hamilton) region is over-governed but poorly planned. It lacks a vision that has the buy-in of a wide constituency of local and regional interests.’ The economic stall of Hamilton’s central business district, concludes the report, is a symptom of that malaise.

The Property Council New Zealand is a not-for-profit organisation of around 550 of New Zealand’s real property owners, managers and investors. ‘Initiatives for Hamilton: A Blueprint for the Future’ is a collection of recommendations for the city and its region put together by the Property Council’s Waikato branch.

There are sixteen key prescriptions: ten of these call for local government reform in one way or another. The other six suggest how a different planning model might galvanise development and promote Hamilton’s image.

(What Hamilton most urgently needs, counsels ‘Initiatives for Hamilton’, are more cranes on the skyline. Forget the ‘events city’ moniker, one new high-rise in Hamilton’s CBD populated with workers would inject more into the city’s economy than any events centre could reasonably hope for, suggests the Property Council.)

At its core, ‘Initiatives for Hamilton: A Blueprint for the Future,’ is an entreaty to government and business to invigorate CBD development. Its message is plain: we must reform and consolidate local government in the Hamilton sub-region into one unitary authority. We must make district planning more permissive; we must populate Hamilton more intensely and boost its city centre, the report says.

Hamilton is the centre of New Zealand’s fourth-largest urban area. Approximately 130km south of Auckland, the city sits at a major road and rail nexus in the centre of the Waikato basin. Initially an agricultural service centre, Hamilton has a diverse economy with education and research and development now playing an important part. Future Proof, the sub-regional growth strategy, predicts that there will be nearly half a million people living in Hamilton and the immediate hinterland by 2061. That means almost doubling the city’s population in the next 50 years. ‘Initiatives for Hamilton: A Blueprint for the Future’ questions the competence of the present local body structure as the optimum form of local government to handle such growth.

An effective governance system need not be ruthlessly centralised, but merely be capable of sending messages that effectively influence the system it seeks to control, suggests Tim Flannery in his 2010 book, ‘Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope’. Throughout the world’s history, at least up until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the scale of most social and economic institutions was at the local level, as opposed to regional or inter-regional.

Curiously, while some parts of our familiar world have gone the way of local body amalgamation, this is not the case in other places. Accompanied by a revived appreciation of local history, culture and identity, the last couple of decades have seen a rekindling of interest in ‘localism’ – growing support for local production and consumption of goods and local control of government. The argument is that by shrinking democratic and economic relationships back to the local level, environmental problems may well become more definable, and solutions more easily resolved. As we learned to our chagrin after the recent events in Canterbury and northern Japan, water, fuel and power supply lines are disarmingly fragile. Self-sufficiency of food and water are critical to our survival. Those personal issues, rather than big and intangible ideas, are often what voters care most about.

Long-time resident of Howick and Borough Council mayor from 1974 to 1989, Morrin Cooper, would agree. \He maintains increasing the size of local body units is destructive to the heart of community; the big autonomous authorities are taking the local out of local government. Howick is one place that has jealously guarded its intimacy. An eastern suburb of Auckland, Howick Village’s motto is ‘Shop Howick first, where people matter’.

Controlling change
In the end, good governance is about carrots and sticks. Any deal with a chance of success must focus on incentives and disincentives. Game theory indicates that carrots are several times more effective than sticks.

Is relaxing our planning rules going to help? In our rush to create jobs, shopping and housing we do have to be vigilant that our planning rules do not just passively encourage compromised design and architecturally dumbed-down places. This is a battle that needs to start in the places where it matters most – in the ordinary, relatively unremarkable parts of our towns and cities.

Starting with Hamilton’s CBD, there are ideas we draw on from ‘Initiatives for Hamilton’ and build on, to make this urban centre more vital, more people friendly; a place where people really want to visit, to conduct business and enjoy. Here are a few suggestions:

• Interpose more small public green spaces as a relief from the commuting mode of the street. This ingredient is what characterises many successful cities. These spaces do have to be of high quality and be safe. To this end it is important to maintain active frontage around the internal perimeter, with small retail unit frontages, outdoor café seating and the like. This may require acquiring pockets of land or just employing existing public land such as road reserves more creatively;
  
• Hamilton’s CBD is extensive rather than intensive. Blandness can be overcome by judicious partitioning into ‘neighbourhoods’ each with its own identity and focus and clearly definable from the perspective of the pedestrian;
  
• Flaunt the architecture with subtle night lighting;
  
• Encourage and maintain a high standard of shop frontage and retail display through the perseverance of a talented and persuasive CBD manager;
  
• By all means populate the CBD. More residential activity in the central city encourages more small-scale retailing, cafes and restaurants, small professional offices. To achieve this may require an extent of intervention in the housing market to favour inner city living;
  
• Gradually contract the amount of off-street car parking to discourage the presence of cars in the CBD – but don’t ban them. They provide 24/7 eyes on the street; and finally
  
• Encourage more social activity by making the CBD a sequential walking experience, between and within an anthology of alluring city neighbourhoods and destinations.

A conversation begun
The eminent British urban designer, Francis Tibbalds, had this to say about designing and managing our towns and cities: ‘It has always been easy to identify past mistakes. It is altogether more difficult to prescribe better ways of approaching the problem of making urban areas more user friendly.’

There is no reason Hamilton could not be the business model for other provincial cities to emulate. We can argue about the transparency of development contributions, the logic of constraints on built form and the fairness of differential rating, but these are after all merely instruments devised to help pay for and protect our built environment. We can argue about the how, when, where and why, but it is the ‘who’ we urgently need to get beside and engage with. These are the social entrepreneurs who are creating a better New Zealand by combining inventive ideas with energy and resources. These are also the developers, the property owners and investors. ‘Initiatives for Hamilton: A Blueprint for the Future’ initiates such a dialogue.

(Photographs courtesy of Hamilton City Council).