We get it, rich people want to live on the waterfront – how ‘visionary’
Simon Wilson has paused in his militant crusade rage for cyclists to fawn all over a delusional vision for Auckland’s waterfront…
Four new inner-city beaches, a 40m-wide canal, parklands and a lagoon with a boardwalk around its edge all feature in a new plan for Auckland’s container port.
It’s not an official plan. But it is the first really big attempt by anyone to think through how the land could be used if it wasn’t full of used cars and containers.
The plan also includes 4000 apartments, offices and a hospitality strip, an underground Maori historical and cultural centre with its own “volcano” and even a new stadium.
Billions of dollars you say? Decades to build it you say?
Isn’t this just delusional?
Because building an enormous billion dollar playground for rich people on the waterfront – when the planet is melting and sea levels will rise – is a GREAT use of public land!
The utter denial needed to think that a decades long re-creation of our waterfront minus any extreme weather events or rising sea levels is so outside the realities we need to actually plan for now it should be held up as proof positive of how flawed our planning process has become.
This is a joke and the punchline is climate change.
I’ll agree to this death zone only if rich people, Simon Wilson and the NZ Herald offices are forced to live/drown there.
Same with Shelly Bay on the Miramar peninsula. Developers keep touting “public use” and “recreational hub” while anyone with the vaguest insight into human nature knows it’ll become a no-go zone to all those who don’t have annual subscriptions to the NZSO. Meanwhile we’ll all be expected to pay for the seawalls they’ll have to keep building over the coming decades.
The surreal plans for beautiful tranquil Shelly Bay are developers’ greed at its ugliest.
It’s called progress, but it is regress, regression to when men thought
that they could control and plunder beautiful mother earth just like every other sort of rape we have inflicted upon a planet which we are simply not good enough for.
They become almost gated communities of snobbery. Thats what you get. The well to do have not got their gated communities which they are longing for. But i bet they are not to far off now…
That’s the thing about gates — if there’s enough angry people standing outside one, it doesn’t hold up for very long. All your fenced enclosures and private security won’t save you from the simmering rage of the perpetually disadvantaged forever.
Or get a couple of retired but still functional IDF tanks and park them outside the gates – muzzles pointing in?
Stop the residents from getting out and we could have our very own Gaza complete with beaches?
Yes the sea will come and the climate scientists all say its happening a lot faster than they predicted…and they keep revising that….so this is not a great idea for future planning. Maybe the future is so catastrophic, there isn’t any point planning for it…not many projections beyond 2100, and we are now over the tipping point of carbon in atmosphere, so even if all carbon emissions stopped right now it is too late to stop climate change and rapid sea level rise, and other very dire things that go along with that. Apparently.
Yep and when it gets flooded we will be paying for it
That is precisely what crossed my mind, Lucy. Those property owners will be making private profits when they onsell those beachfront deathzones, ooops, i mean, much “sought after homes”. Bit they will have their hands out wanting ratepayer funding to build flood mitigation barriers for their multimillion dollar palaces in a few years.
Fuck that.
it does have a whiff of the old seasteading thang….one persons canal is a anothers moat….
Yep the gated community for the well to do…