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)
