Cities and signatures

You could sense the surprise when I went down to the waterfront last weekend. Thousands of Aucklanders were enjoying the sunshine and new vistas, walking the new spaces. Who knew this part of Auckland belongs to us?

But there’s that Cloud – peeping out from behind the still-closed red gate.

The opening up of this waterfront is good timing: an attractive place for visitors for the you-know-what black jersey thingy.

Aucklanders explore the newly opened part of the Wynyard Quarter, also known as the Tank Farm

What’s the message? On Saturday Auckland was open, friendly, even sports-mad. The waterfront is a nice start to giving definition to Auckland.

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Cities have signature messages, and they matter. New York
says, make money. And all of the world’s bankers, accountants, publishing
houses and media moguls seek to join the frenzy of the Big Apple.

Los Angeles says, be beautiful, be famous. The A-List attracts
all the other alphabet lists. Go there to make your name.

Paris says chic. People care about how they look, hold
conversations about art or music or philosophy or la technology with the same stylish consideration they give to a red carpet runway. Go there for Culture with a capital C.

Boston says erudition. Go to Harvard or Yale or MIT to be
stimulated by the greatest minds of the western world. Go there to think.

Like a magnetic force-field, people line up to be part of a scene. Once, Florence was an arts centre. Artists went there to paint. In it’s Habsburg heyday, Vienna danced to class and money. Musicians and power brokers went there.

Smart Singapore today speaks savvy consumption in an Asian world: the clean commerce capital of the region.

Where you live does seem to rub off.

So then there’s Auckland. Ahem. There’s almost something naive about our symbolism as the “big little city”. Despite this interesting park of
industrial tanks, the waterfront isn’t distinctive. It won’t define us in a world of Sydneys and Seattles.

Our front to the water needs some special quality – perhaps a starring role in a South Pacific city with a proud voyaging history, from Kupe to Cook, via stars and sextants, reflecting people who today remain intrepid travellers and adaptable, even innovative and creative.

Somehow downtown Auckland, despite an extended waterfront as
fresh as a new car not yet run in, doesn’t quite say that – yet.

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Auckland is beginning to think differently, about to invest in a distinctive economic and social pattern that could position the city as the hub of the South Pacific.

Downtown Auckland reflects a very diverse community. International students are a youth services business, and institutions of learning here are thriving in a competitive global market. Like car yards, financial districts and restaurants, concentration in this business is healthy. This business is built on Auckland’s reputation for quality education for the rising middle classes; and there is even better business to be done in working collaboratively to shape an Auckland pitch for more of the market. There’s a huge economic impact already: $1,342.8 million of foreign exchange earnings.

These punters don’t live with cars, though. This business needs the downtown rail loop, a convenient connection to the social hotspots and dormitories of the city – a place for the brightest and
best to study and play, to begin a working life here in the restaurants and
libraries and crucibles of innovation that the city’s economic development plan will propose.

The learning opportunity does not have to be exclusive to the well-educated middle class, who freely travel the world, and settle lightly in the world’s hot-spot cities.

For the ones that stay here, we need to develop new kinds of belongingness; messages in our physical downtown and along our waterfront that say, You are part of the Pacific mainstream: part of the learning world.

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Related articles

• Auckland reveals transformed waterfront (3news.co.nz)

On Keeping it Simple

Getting teenagers ready to move on and up seems to be the topic du jour. The New Zealand Institute released a report last week More ladders, fewer snakes on this theme. While its conclusions were no surprise – we need more e-learning in low-decile schools; and somebody taking responsibility for youth transitions – its weight of independent conclusion is satisfying: we should be paying attention to the skills of young people.  School-leaver readiness was also central to a Symposium hosted by the Centre for Studies in Multiple Pathways at Manukau Institute of Technology two weeks ago, and was a theme at the Industry Training Federation conference at SkyCity last week.  Picking a school-exit “readiness” goal is pretty critical to Auckland’s economic planning; it will be no surprise to see it emerge as part of the consultations to start in the next month or so for the Auckland Plan.

But planning is getting a bad name. Yesterday’s opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald from Michael Barnett (The best plan, keep it simple) about the plethora of plans and why Auckland has to have them should remind us that the world of planning and social policy has to become grounded at some point.  Only on-the-ground action can address the complexities of issues like school-leaver readiness in socially disadvantaged communities; and long-term unemployment and dependency for the poorly skilled.  

For a long time now, we have in New Zealand shaken our heads at the growing disparity between those that have skills and those that do not – and it’s effect on incomes and economic opportunity; and have taken only baby-steps towards change. Emerging, though, are some practical innovations that have stepped past the bureaucratic barriers and into new territory, with promising results. The secondary-tertiary high school at the Manukau Institute of Technology is one such. Other schools describe innovative partnerships that bring learning closer to the work place; evidence of a policy direction with jobs in mind becoming translated into school practice.  

Most of the practical innovations discussed at these conferences over the last two weeks are focused on the youth space. Because that’s important. What is not there, however, is consideration of the effect of disengagement many years after these youth have theoretically grown up. Successive tertiary education policies in New Zealand have left a legacy: a gaping void in learning opportunities for low-skill adults that translate into careers pathways, resulting in employability issues that doom them to long-term dependence on either the state or on poorly paid work which traps them in a cycle of poverty.

Like youth, these adults have economic potential; if only there were late-start entries into careers pipelines that helped them to grow their confidence in learning and to resurrect their ambitions for personal and family well-being. It’s like a ladder with the first rung missing: in Auckland we could pathway many Pacific people into jobs, for example in the health services, if only the pre-requisite learning was accessible to the adults.

Foundation learning services for adults in Auckland – literacy, numeracy and digital skills in particular – need to be reviewed.  Michael Barnett’s argument for less planning and more doing has relevance in this way: if we leave planning for learning only to Wellington, we miss the opportunity to really affect the social dynamics of Auckland and get the best value for money from the government expenditure on education. Planning for learning won’t need a shiny document or a complex consultation process. I agree with Mr Barnett. We should keep it simple. We don’t need yet another plan for education in Auckland. What we must do is embed within the Auckland Plan a set of goals for education and skills and develop a framework in which stakeholders can meaningfully collaborate to make a difference.