Thank goodness for Auckland City’s urban planners. Although the rest of us are unable to see past Auckland’s housing crisis, it is reassuring that they remain committed to a loftier vision. We will all enjoy Auckland becoming the world’s most liveable city and are fortunate that their proposed Auckland unitary plan – or PAUP – is going to deliver this for us.

Indeed, the PAUP’s ambitions for Auckland are eclipsed only by its length. But then, a comprehensive plan to deliver the world’s most liveable city and, at the same time, “help every Aucklander achieve the best they can,” has a lot of ground to cover.

Granted, our planners have had their critics. Auckland housing prices have continued to spiral out of control during its gestation. And after-housing-cost incomes of many of Auckland’s least well-off have fallen as rents have increased with rising house prices, causing over-crowding and poverty.

But as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Creating the world’s most liveable city is no easy task – especially when there is such a history of planning failures in Auckland to make up for.

Besides, without urban planners, Auckland would not have nearly the number of property millionaires our planning restrictions have created. Nor would we have enjoyed the huge influx of foreign capital from overseas investors wanting to commit their millions to the soaring Auckland housing market.

Indeed, instead of criticising the Auckland planning process, perhaps we should learn from it and apply the lessons from Auckland – and not just elsewhere but everywhere.

Let them loose

Nothing should be exempt from the wisdom of our planners. And since employment is even more important than housing, why not set our planners next on the labour market?

Applying the PAUP model, a proposed Auckland employment plan – or PAEP – could set out a 30-year vision of employment in Auckland, “shaping how Auckland and its communities can grow … while protecting the [jobs] we value.”

The PAEP would set rules regulating the division of labour (as opposed to the PAUP’s regulations on the division of land). It could do this by regulating the number of single-employee and multiple-employee enterprises permitted in different zones across Auckland.

These rules would be necessary to preserve the special character of Auckland’s employment market, with its characteristic small and medium-sized employers.

These regulations could be laid out in a comprehensive plan operating on a suburb-by-suburb and street-by-street basis across Auckland.

Applying the PAUP approach, the PAEP would:

(a) Make provisions for employment with special characteristics and heritage. These could preserve jobs that contribute to what makes employment in Auckland special, prohibiting employers from altering the characteristics of any jobs with the requisite special character – including traditional roles like the print media and postal and taxi services.

(b) Identify highly valuable and regionally significant areas of employment and establish policies to protect or manage them. These policies might include introducing quotas and licensing regimes and import protection to guard these areas of employment from damaging external competition.

(c)  Establish employment priorities where there are likely to be competing demands on the workforce, looking forward over the 30-year life of the plan. These would be addressed by strict allocations of the available labour among the identified alternatives.

(d) Regulate new areas of employment liable to be affected by climate change and include appropriate protections to ensure the risks of new jobs being affected by global warming would be mitigated or prohibited.

(e) Set out processes enabling mana whenua values to be taken into account in any proposals to develop Auckland’s labour market to ensure that all new jobs developed in Auckland were, as far as possible, compatible with the interests of the mana whenua of Tāmaki Makaurau.

(f)  Limit the unruly spread of employment by requiring, say, between 60-70% percent of all new jobs to be created within existing enterprises, and only 30- 40% in new enterprises.

(g) Contain detailed controls on the specifications of any new employment arrangements, including mandatory car-parking, restrictions on employee density and providing for mandatory access to outdoor space (including balconies for anyone working in multistory buildings) to preserve the well-being of those occupying any new jobs. 

Once our planners have the supply-side of the labour market sorted, we should make sure they do not stop there. Why not be more SimCity than SuperCity? 

Optimal output

Our planners can make sure our factories produce the optimal output for their customers – both at home and for export. This will avoid waste and ensure we have a sustainable Auckland. No one knows more about sustainability than our urban planners.

While we are at it, why not have them also decide what careers we should pursue? After all, if we need them to tell us whether our homes need a balcony or a backyard or how wide our hallways must be or how many car parks we need or how well we should insulate our homes, how can we safely make any of life’s other big decisions without help?

Indeed, if our planners are truly to help each of us achieve the best we can, there is much more help they could provide. Who to marry, how many children to have (and where they should go to school), what films we should watch, what books we should read, what we should eat and drink, and where and how we should spend our leisure time.

Now this might all sound a bit too controlling for some. Indeed, some might feel it a little totalitarian. But is it not just common sense? We all know our own best laid plans often go awry. But we are mere amateurs. Our planners are professionals, with university degrees. And their ambitions have no limit.

If only the Soviet Union had had planners of the calibre available to Auckland Council, then surely it would have won the Cold War.