new auckland

A radical proposal for Auckland’s Queen St

Auckland's Queen St was a river before it was paved with bank frontages. Meet the architect who suggests the city should look at returning it to that watery state.

Kai-Uwe Bergmann is a leading international architect and partner at BIG - Bjarkle Ingels Group. From Denmark, he is based in New York and is in New Zealand to headline the Design Experience series, where he's been speaking in Wellington, Tauranga and Auckland about future-proofing cities in response to extreme weather events.

After Super Storm Sandy hit six years ago, his firm won a major resilience project to protect nearly 13 kilometres of Manhattan coastline from future floods. The Big U is a protective wrap around the city, a buffer of parks and recreational spaces, and includes radical ideas such as deployable flood walls that flip down from the underside of an elevated highway. The storm caused $US20 billion of infrastructure damage - the solution came in at about $US2-3 billion. But there are more than 40 public agencies involved in decision-making and funding it, so for the moment the first four kilometres only has the go-ahead. The project, he says, is his proudest moment as an architect. "Think how big a part Central Park is to New York - this will be on the same scale for our generation," he says.

Strangely for an architect perhaps, there is not a single building in the whole 13 kms.

Not building, however, may be the future of coping with increasing numbers of extreme weather events.

"I challenge Aucklanders to think of Queen St as an open river, which it was once and could be again. It would take leadership and political will. "

Bergmann points out that the damage to infrastructure usually comes from man-made causes - where rivers have been covered, land reclaimed, water catchments concreted. "We've done this to ourselves." In Queen Street's case, city fathers paved over the river that ran there - "It makes just as much sense to uncover it," he says. It's been done in other cities - and "that is what we can give to the next generations".

Bergmann says cities around the world are looking for such flood mitigation measures, and in many cases working with nature instead of concreting over it is producing better, more organic cities. He cites a project in Austin, Texas, where a river was returned to where it had run through a commercial centre. The move let in the light and saw the area thrive. Retail was moved back two streets to run parallel to the river, and the city has seen environmental bonuses. It's all about creating a vision for a high quality of life, he says.

Surely Auckland politicians would never even contemplate such a thought? "I would love to see someone do it," he says. "I challenge Aucklanders to think of Queen St as an open river, which it was once and could be again. It would take leadership and political will.

"Maybe we should x-ray politicians to see who has a back-bone."

Flood protection as part of the Big U project - barrier walls that flip down from an underpass when required. Picture: BIG/Rebuild By Design

Bergmann says if we can't have these conversations about rising sea levels and increasing extreme weather events, we get into a cycle of capitulation where we will be re-building every time there is a natural disaster. That means if they have to, councils slapping rising water warnings on properties - in spite of the backlash from property owners. He realises that opens them up to expensive opposition.

"No money is ill-spent - the only wasted money is money spent in which nothing is learned," he says.

Even in medieval times, he says, someone had to pay for the moats and castle walls that protected people from cannonballs and invading armies. He says nowadays it's flood mitigation, berms, and levees. "The good thing about big cities is the large tax base that can be used to pay for that infrastructure."

Bergmann is not saying councils should drop everything and start making major plans for disaster now, but "I think you can chip away at it, calamity or not". But it does seem that certain moments in history can bring people together to effect change.

"They can be moments of opportunity just as much as they are moments of calamity and sadness." Napier, he says, and its beautiful post-eathquake art deco, is a testament to that.

Bergmann says architects don't have to be part of a huge firm to change things on a big scale. They can make small changes that can change a culture. One example he gives is Nelson-based Jeremy Smith's Bach with Two Roofs, adapted for a family who'd lived through a cyclone in a Golden Bay forest clearing. "He helped that family re-ground themselves."

He is also impressed by Wellington's long-term transformation of its port area.

"Ports are getting pushed out to the fringes of cities because people don't want to deal with muck and dirt and everything else that comes with them," he says. But he says first and foremost the issues taken into account if Auckland should shift its port must include the hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose livelihoods depend on it. In Denmark the government's social welfare net includes re-training for anyone who loses their career, so redundancy isn't an end of working life scenario. "People become more trusting," he says. Another big sticking point - the deep water berths needed for increasingly large ships.

He doesn't know too much about that debate but says the one thing constant in life is change ... and there's no hope for Aucklanders who think the city they were born into is going to stay the same.