To a casual visitor, the City is forever on the move, with its motorways and roads jammed with traffic, suburbs bespeaking a quiet culture of the past and young men and women in noisy conversations in pubs and bars.
An out-of-towner from a small town or village would be keen to get into the City of Sails and make it his or her home.
But for a majority of 1.25 million Aucklanders, it is a City that is in eternal pain.
Oh, is it not a City that we would love to hate and yet stay on because, there is nothing like it anywhere in the world!
Now a new book titled, 11 Views of Auckland tells it all, perceived by academics and researchers at the Massey University.
We have not read the book yet but Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey said, “It is today’s time capsule of Auckland that will become a valuable reference point for how the city changes and evolves.”
Associate Professor and Public Policy Lecturer Dr Jack Ross has edited the book, which carries 11 essays, which according to him “are by no means gushing endorsements for the Metropolis.”
With murders, migrants and their problems, pedestrian crossings that end abruptly and drivers who seem to think that there is no one else on the road and a 1.25 million other problems, you would perhaps think that like all major cities of the world, Auckland is unliveable.
Groan but go on
“But each essay is a unique exploration on an aspect of Auckland’s past or present, its complexities and contrasts, penned by academics from sociology, history, English, linguistics, public policy, anthropology and political studies at the University’s Albany campus. That the writers all live and work in Auckland is pertinent to the spirit of these essays, which evoke personal experiences and insights within the framework of their particular discipline,” Dr Ross said.
Dr Isabel Michell of the School of Social and Cultural Studies describes the pleasures and perils of being an inner city pedestrian as a person, who suffers “near hits, noise and air pollution, and the annoying experience of what might be called ‘pedestrianas interruptus,’ meaning the sudden cessation of footpath in favour of road.”
Her essay reflects the need for “life in or between buildings” and laments the lack of appealing public spaces through which a diverse muster of humanity can flow or congregate.
Her colleague and Anthropologist Dr Graeme MacRae traced the history of Freeman’s Bay in his essay titled, ‘The Bay that Was, a Park that Isn’t and the City that Might Have Been,’ saying that its evolution from community-oriented council housing to the hub of commercial development, it had become a victim of ‘social cleansing.’
Rotting and hostile
English and Media Studies Lecturer Dr Jennifer Lawn said, “Auckland is scarcely fit for human habitation; it is waterlogged, slimy, rotting, hostile to the scale and pace of the human frame – yet curiously sublime, even daemonic.”
Other essays in the book explain the emergence of gated communities, the link between aesthetics and economics in relation to the glass-walled Metropolis building in Downtown Auckland.
“It is a symbol of precarious corporate ethos.”
The authors of the Book are Ann Dupuis, Cluny Macpherson, David Ishii, Eleanor Rimoldi, Graeme MacRae, Grant Duncan, Isabel Michell, Jack Ross, Jennifer Lawn and Warwick Tie.
