When I returned to Auckland in late 2025, I expected to feel nostalgic. Instead, I felt proud.
What struck me most was not the projects I remembered but actually the ones I didn’t. The continued evolution of Wynyard Quarter. The maturity of Commercial Bay. The remarkable civic transformation of Te Komititanga. The steady greening, beautification and humanising of Queen St. The extraordinary quality emerging around the City Rail Link stations. New offices, homes, public spaces, artworks and trees. And new confidence.
The city had continued to evolve quickly during my absence and that deserves recognition.
It’s easy to forget just how difficult the past five years have been. Covid fundamentally changed city centres around the world. Office occupancy declined, tourism disappeared, construction costs rose, businesses struggled. Yet at the same time, Auckland undertook the largest infrastructure project in its history directly beneath its principal streets.
Few cities would emerge from that combination without scars.
Auckland kept building, imperfectly and not without debate. Transformation didn’t stop even though it became harder.
That continuity really matters and reflects successive mayors, councillors, chief executives, public servants, mana whenua, businesses, developers, institutions and communities who, despite different priorities and styles of leadership, broadly maintained the long-term direction. That is one of Auckland’s quiet achievements. Cities succeed not because leadership never changes but succeed because purpose survives those changes.
The next debate
Of course, every generation inherits new questions.
One of today’s debates concerns Queen St and the proposal to reintroduce vehicles during evening hours.
I understand why that conversation is taking place. Concerns about safety, evening activity, business confidence, and perception. These are all legitimate issues but the question I have is whether introducing vehicles addresses the underlying challenge.
For me, Queen St has never lacked traffic. It has lacked reasons to stay. The long-term ambition has always been to create a city centre where people come because they want to be there, not simply because they have to pass through.
Great city centres are powered by people. People and pedestrian life generate economic activity. People create safety. People create vibrancy. Cars don’t shop.
The challenge is therefore less about vehicles than about activation. More people living in the city, more evening retail, more outdoor dining, longer or adapted trading hours, culture spilling into the streets. Events, markets, performance ad unexpected moments.
The opening of the City Rail Link will bring a significant increase in people arriving on foot. My Auckland Design Office described the CRL stations as enabling “fountains of people”. I loved that.
Surely our first instinct should be to understand how those new patterns of movement reshape the city before fundamentally reconsidering the long-term vision?
Pilot projects absolutely have a place. Cities should prototype and they should experiment and learn. But pilots should absolutely test how to accelerate the long-term vision, not prototype a different one just as a city sets a new path.
Once a city begins drifting from its long-term direction, it can become surprisingly difficult to recover. And in the rush to get back to normal you have to be very mindful of what you are rushing back for.
Identity and belonging
Perhaps the most profound change in Auckland has been less visible than streets, buildings or transport. It has been the growing confidence to express its own identity.
One of my earliest conversations after arriving in Auckland has stayed with me ever since. Ngāti Whātua asked me a deceptively simple question: “Why can’t we see our faces in our places?”
It was one of the most important questions I have ever been asked.
It didn’t mean decoration or motifs. It was about belonging and whose stories are reflected in the city and whose values shape its future.
Over the years, Auckland began answering that question. The Te Aranga Māori Design Principles fundamentally changed the way many public projects were conceived and delivered. Rather than treating Māori identity as something applied at the end of the design process, it became embedded within it.
Today, that influence can be seen throughout the city. From the waterfront to Te Komititanga, to Te Wānanga and the City Rail Link stations. To the New Zealand International Convention Centre and to countless public and private developments.
The result is a city becoming more comfortable expressing who it really is, and growing into its own identity. That may prove to be Auckland’s most enduring transformation of all.
Cities need confidence
Cities often underestimate the importance of psychology.
We often talk about transport, housing, infrastructure, economics and governance, but beneath all of these sits something harder to measure: confidence.
Confidence attracts investment and talent. It encourages innovation and gives people permission to believe that tomorrow can be better than today.
I was in London recently to be part of an international peer review group considering plans for Oxford St and the West End, and heard Mete Coban MBE, the deputy mayor, outline a famous Nelson Mandela quote “it always seems impossible until its done”.
Like many places, Auckland’s confidence has waxed and waned. Perhaps that’s part of being a young city, or simply human nature.
This is not the moment for Auckland to diminish what has been achieved but to build on it.
People sometimes ask me what my greatest achievement in Auckland was and I never quite know how to answer.
Cities are never transformed by one person or one council or one administration.
They are transformed by thousands of decisions made by thousands of people over many years: politicians, public servants, mana whenua, designers, engineers, developers, businesses, community leaders, artists, academics and residents. Every one contributes something.
That, perhaps, is Auckland’s greatest lesson. Cities change when enough people fall back in love with their city and decide they are worth changing.
Planting a field of tall poppies
New Zealand has long wrestled with the idea of tall poppy syndrome. We are often quicker to criticise than to celebrate. Cities can suffer from exactly the same habit.
We become so focused on what remains unfinished that we lose sight of how far we have travelled.
Of course Auckland still has challenges. Housing affordability, city centre recovery, public safety, economic productivity, climate resilience. No serious observer would pretend otherwise. But recognising progress is not the same as accepting the status quo. In fact, confidence is often the foundation upon which further progress is built.
It’s said that living a good life depends on recognising the good around us. Cities are no different. This is therefore not the moment to diminish what Auckland has achieved but the moment to build upon it.
Perhaps our challenge now is not to cut down tall poppies, but to plant a whole field of them.
Cities flourish when they celebrate people willing to lead, invest, imagine and persist over the long term. Every successful city has champions who quietly keep believing long after others have become cynical. Auckland has been fortunate to have many of them.
Some worked in public office. Some in business. Some in design. Some in the community.
Most would probably feel uncomfortable being singled out, but perhaps that is precisely the point. City making is ultimately a collective endeavour. It’s a team sport. Its greatest achievements are rarely owned by individuals. They belong to the city itself.
A lesson beyond Auckland
Looking back now, I think Auckland occupies a fascinating place in the global story of cities. It was small enough to change but big enough to matter.
That combination made it one of the world’s most instructive laboratories for contemporary city making.
The lessons extend well beyond New Zealand.
Long-term vision matters, so does governance, design, implementation, infrastructure and identity. But perhaps most of all, belief matters.
Cities are not transformed simply by spending money. They change when enough people believe in a shared future and continue building it, even when progress feels slow and painful.
That may be Auckland’s greatest gift to other mid-sized cities around the world.
I remember hearing Janette Sadik Khan, former transport commissioner of NYC, speak at one of the Auckland Conversations events where over 2000 Aucklanders turned up to hear her speak about New York’s transformation under the leadership of mayor Michael Bloomberg. Janette said “If it can happen in New York, then it can happen anywhere”.
Perhaps the same can be said for Auckland and perhaps Auckland, too, can inspire the next generation of mid-sized cities to be better and more liveable.
The next chapter
The opening of the City Rail Link [due in August or September] represents one of the most significant moments in Auckland’s modern history. The project being completed is one thing, but more importantly the city now has an opportunity to begin again.
Too often we celebrate infrastructure as though it were the destination. It is absolutely not.
Infrastructure is the platform but what matters is what we build upon it: homes, businesses, public spaces, institutions, culture and confidence. The everyday life that grows around it. That’s the next challenge and the next opportunity.
In summary: When I first arrived in Auckland 20 years ago, I saw a city with extraordinary potential that had not yet fully recognised itself.
When I returned late last year, I saw a city that had travelled further than many of its residents perhaps realise. Every ambition wasn’t yet achieved, nor was every problem solved. But the direction remained changed.
Auckland taught me that cities change when they believe they can. The City Rail Link is not the end of Auckland’s story. It is the beginning of its next chapter. And perhaps that’s the greatest lesson of all.
The best cities are never those that believe they have arrived. They are the ones that never stop believing in what they can become.
The roots have been planted and the trunk is strong. But Auckland’s canopy will keep on growing.
