Rod Oram: a legacy to live up to Greater Auckland

Yesterday we had the very sad news that business and climate journalist Rod Oram had died after having a heart attack while cycling through Ambury Park on Sunday.

Rod was one of the absolute best at being able to communicate the connections and paths between how we live and how we could live – most especially and urgently in recent years, on the need for climate action and the abundant opportunities to achieve it in realistic and rewarding ways.

He was also a kind and generous mentor to many, a witty and thoughtful interlocutor, and a builder of bridges – between different points of view, and towards a future that would be better for everyone. As he wrote only a few short weeks ago:

We, along with the rest of humankind, must figure out how to achieve an utterly unprecedent speed of change, scale of change and complexity of change. Everything, everywhere, all at once – to borrow from the multiverse film that scooped last year’s Oscars.

The first step is to own up to the crises we’re creating; the second is to admit the failure of our current ways of trying to fix them; and the third is to find ways to discuss, conceive, commit to and achieve rapid and deep systemic change that will give us a future.

But we can only do that if we transcend our short-termism and our social and political divides.

It’s terribly poignant to read the sentence that followed: “That’s the new focus of this column, which henceforth will be longer and monthly as I embark on a big overhaul of my knowledge.”

His contributions will be sorely missed.

Heartfelt obituaries and reactions poured forth yesterday, among them:

• Newsroom, where he wrote a regular column, and where he had “just stepped back from writing weekly, to make time to research and write longer, on bigger issues.”
• Radio NZ pulled together many reactions, summed up by Eloise Gibson as “a ‘true gentleman’, a top business journalist and a tireless advocate for climate action.”
• An obituary in the Herald, where Oram was the paper’s inaugural business editor, notes that “in all [his] work, he had the remarkable gift of remaining polite and patient, while always seeking to push home his big message: climate action is urgent.”

One thing we at Greater Auckland will remember him for was his vision for what Auckland could look like in 2060, which formed part of his submission to the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance back in 2008.

The whole piece is worth reading, and covers a wide range of topics. I’ve highlighted some of the parts that cover transport and urban form:

Auckland Anniversary Day, Monday, 26 January 2060

Dawn

After the vicious cyclone overnight, dawn breaks gently to the ebullient calls of the birds. The light spreads rapidly across the huge city and its beautiful hinterland of bush and beach. Any of the volcanic cones offers a good view of this sweeping panorama across our thriving Auckland region. Mount Hobson, though – close to the historic heart of the city where water and land, our two abundant sources of wealth, meet – has a special place in the region’s story.

Today is Auckland’s Anniversary Day. And Mount Hobson is named after the man who decreed it an annual holiday for the Auckland Province. That was 218 years ago. But if Hobson were standing up on this namesake cone this morning, he would still readily recognise this wide vista across the Waitemata Harbour and to the scattering of islands beyond.

If his eyes were sharp, he’d spot small boats drifting in the lee of Rangitoto. If he thought those people were fishing, he’d be right. Over the years, we’ve learnt lots about restoring the ecosystem of our Hauraki Gulf Marine Park.

But he’d be puzzled if he looked down below Mount Hobson. When Ngāti Whātua, the first settlers here, offered him the pick of the harbour’s land to build a new city, he chose a graceful string of little hills and bays at the foot of this volcano.

Now, a flat, angular shoreline reaches out into the harbour. Landfill a century or more ago formed the extra land to accommodate a booming city. It remains today home to many people, businesses, and recreational activities. In recent decades, though, we’ve made it one of the most admired waterfronts in the world.

Last night’s storm, though, had the emergency services out. As expected, climate change has brought a 40-cm rise in sea level in the past 50 years. And weather events are more extreme and frequent. The good news is temperatures are only a couple of degrees higher.

[…..]

These days Whangarei is only 50 minutes by train from Britomart. And that’s with a couple of stops on the North Shore. The network and its interconnecting motorway system have been a big help with urban development. They’ve quite changed how and where we live. In addition to the route down from the north, a second line runs east to Tauranga and Whakatane and a third runs south through Hamilton, Rotorua, and Taupo and on down to Wellington.

This road and rail system has allowed us to develop our towns, old ones and some new ones, into beautiful, compact, eco-urban areas, each close to bush and beach. All up, 3.4 million of us live in this “string of pearls” as we call them. About 2.2 million here in greater Auckland and 1.2 million from Whangarei around to Whakatane and down to Taupo.

Another 850,000 live elsewhere in the North Island and 1.35 million in the South Island making 5.6 million for the nation. That’s a big change from the start of the new millennium when the Auckland region was only just over 1 million and the country million.

The region’s urban area had grown very fast after the Second World War. But the density was very low, lower even than Los Angeles. Everybody wanted their quarter acre. Nobody was keen to pay for the infrastructure so we always ended up expensively retrofitting it piecemeal long after we needed it.

What changed things? A whole bunch of things, really. Frustration with delays and failures, a strong sense we weren’t on top of our economic and social problems. Those were two big ones. But it was the energy and economic shocks some 50 years ago that finally brought people together. We realised we had to rethink how we lived, worked, and governed ourselves. These were issues everybody the world over was wrestling with, and still are.

A growing population over the past 50 years gave plenty of scope for reshaping the urban landscape. We’ve doubled the number of homes in Auckland and we’ve replaced about a quarter of the old, badly built ones. New building materials have helped, particularly the timber laminates and composite bioplastics that have displaced much of the steel and concrete even in tall buildings.

Given all that new construction, we’ve been able to remake this into a very liveable, eco-city. Getting a high concentration of homes and workplaces around the rail and road networks has allowed us to keep the urban area relatively compact.35 This has helped us develop more diverse neighbourhoods with more amenities and more opportunities to work at home or in local businesses.

This vibrancy across the region ensures people still do plenty of travelling for work, entertainment, education, socialising, and recreation. And that in turn has helped develop a stronger sense of regional identity.

The remaking of much of the urban area has also given us the chance to create more open spaces and green corridors. Lots of regeneration of native plants in those places and in people’s gardens has attracted flocks of native birds from the island sanctuaries out in the Hauraki Gulf. Even kiwis nest on Mount Hobson and the other volcanic cones we turned into true nature reserves protected by predator-proof fences.

The city has evolved in many other ways too. For example, buildings and neighbourhoods do some of their own power generation, water capture, and waste treatment. These partially self-supporting local systems are linked through automated networks for the rest of their needs.

This has taken a lot of pressure off the highly centralised services, freeing them up in part for other uses. One showcase is the Mangere water treatment plant. From the algae it grows in its waste-processing stream, it makes enough biofuel for one-third of our vehicles. The other two-thirds, of course, are electric.

[…..]

The Mayor is standing far above the boats on the bridge of one of the city’s fast ferries. These whisk people up the harbour, almost as quick as the train, to North City, the new centre for the north shore built three decades ago at Whenuapai.

And we’ve done well revitalising this old part of town where Hobson staked out Auckland more than 200 years ago. Beginning early this century, we started opening vistas through the city right up to the ridge at K Road. This helped re-reveal the topography of the city, it’s natural skeleton and form. Studded with art works and other delights, they help integrate the old city on a very human scale.

Viewed from the water, the city offers fine vistas. One is the diagonal from Viaduct Harbour past the spire of St Matthew-in-the-City to the top of Symonds Street. It took 30 years to create as buildings along its line were gradually redeveloped.

People are thronging the waterfront by the old ferry building, as they are all the way from the iconic entertainment complex in the Wynyard Wharf park right along to the new ocean passenger terminal in Mechanics Bay.

Rod will be greatly missed, and our thoughts go out to his family.

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