Feelings from the heart

July 12, 2008
As our civic leaders seek a lead from the city public on how it wants the heart of Nelson to develop, Geoff Collett reflects on the possibilities. --------------------
It looked like the usual invitation to the community spirited, but bound to also be seized on by the worthy, the dull, the self-interested and the self-appointed.
"What do you like about the inner city now? What do you think needs improving?" urged the advertisement. There were related urgings to fill out a form or go to a weblog and record some thoughts, or to attend a public meeting in a draughty hall on a cold winter's night.
A nice logo with the legend "heart of Nelson" didn't hide that the hand of the Nelson City Council was heavily present. Run-a-mile words like "sustainable urban design" and "long-term council community plan" featured ominously. It struck as the sort of plea that would prompt the vast majority of the good people of Nelson to rise up en masse and ignore it.
The overwhelming temptation was to join them.
But it triggered something. An on-again, off-again relationship with Nelson over the years - from times of feeling there couldn't possibly be a better place in the world than this city of tranquility, cleverness and easy-going acceptance, and others of feeling smothered by the provincial ennui and insufferable smugness - suggested there were many, many answers that could be proffered to the two questions.
A recent return after years away produced a curious disorienting effect while wandering around this heart of Nelson and discovering that, while in some ways the place had grown and thrived at a pace, in others it seemed locked into a past decade. Some things, and even some people, didn't appear to have shifted an inch from 1998.
A weird deja vu developed, but while it could be criticised, perhaps it is simply the strongest evidence of how there are many things about being in the heart of Nelson that the locals don't want changed; that they will happily go through the same routines every day for years just because they can be here.
Whatever the wider appetite for change, a list for the council suggested itself.
Likes were easy: the sense of refuge and security. The ease of access to most places. The river, particularly between the Normanby Bridge and Trafalgar St. The waterfront, obviously, and anywhere with a view of it. The sense of enclosure offered by the hills and bush. Interesting birdlife nearby. Several of the cafes and bars. Walking down Mount St into town. Friendly people. The Queen's Gardens. The general absence of tagging and rarity of louts.
The "needs improving" list was as straightforward: Better realising the potential of the river. The vast expanses given over to cars - principally the enormous, dangerous (for absent-minded pedestrians) deserts of tarmac dedicated to parking, but also the absurd proportion of car-sale yards in the heart of the town. The mess of Waimea Rd traffic. The depressing trudge along Vanguard St, where people's homes butt up against sub- industrial grime. The selfishness of property developers who have seen fit to make a buck from building mouldering homes for poor people on hillsides that barely know the sun, and from rampant cross-leasing that deprives whole suburbs of the dignity of privacy. Much of the commercial architecture, pretty much anything built between about 1970 and 1990, it would seem. The temporary death that descends like a smothering shroud over the city from June until August.
But as simple as a throw-together list may be, an old hand and expert eye were in order, if only to gather some shape.
Christopher Vine seemed a good bet, not just for his architectural abilities and aesthete's discernment, and not just because he is voluble and opinionated, but also because he knows what he cares for and is deeply caring of his adopted hometown.
He is amusing, mildly curmudgeonly, and, most important, not paralysed by the fear of injuring some relationship with anybody terribly important, powerful or shrill. When he regards the polytechnic's library in Alton St, he can't help but swear unrepeatably. Only partly extravagantly, he calls it the second-ugliest building in the Southern Hemisphere.
This whole block of Alton St is a source of lament for him. He doesn't have far to look for a sympathetic audience. He greets a passer-by and a brief conversation develops about the student accommodation blocks neighbouring the library, presented to the passing world in a mix of grey iron and garish orange. The woman volunteers that when the colour was unveiled "we all wanted to vomit".
Vine's first-ugliest building in the Southern Hemisphere - and this time, there is no extravagance - is, surprise, surprise, the Civic House clock tower. He makes a bad-taste comment about al- Qaeda and tall buildings, and later reflects slightly more seriously that it would make a nice ruin, in the vein of the broken castles of Britain.
The brutal concrete silo is an easy target. So is the Burger King across the road. Vine is appalled. "It's crazy - the most important spot in Nelson - almost the most important spot - is just thrown away." He admits he is not target market. He has only once in his life tried to eat a hamburger, he confesses, and couldn't finish it.
But beneath the throwaway lines and shooting of fish in a barrel, he has some telling points to make. He recounts walking home from a meeting the previous night and cutting along Bridge St, past the line-up of bars that provide the city's main nightlife. It was a Monday night but the feeling was sinister - the darkened, menacing facades, the alcohol-soaked undercurrents. Even, or especially, in daylight, it is deeply uninviting, a sense that kills the vitality any town depends on.
Car yards, which sprout and bloom all around the city perimeter, have a similar deadening effect, he argues. The tendency of past years - still apparent in quarters today, if not so rampant - to tear down and scrub out all memory of old buildings and replace them in a way that suggests the past never existed has always depressed him.
It is a personal reaction, he readily concedes ("because I'm sentimental"), but he is certain that he is not alone in his sentiment, this dismay at the loss of the community's "fourth dimension".
But Vine sees at least as much that he likes.
Church Hill and Queen's Gardens are favourites, for starters ("I like my public spaces to have secrets, hiddenness"). He may be contemptful of women's fashion, but he can admire and respect what has been achieved in the Fashion Island precinct.
There are plenty of modern buildings he likes - even such unashamedly hairy- chested steel and glass statements as the former H and J Smith building in Bridge St.
Some may question what an ageing architect's opinions count for, particularly when he freely admits that none of the city shops attract his affection, not now that the last of the hardware and second-hand shops have gone. He sees things differently.
"Nelson's future lies, presumably, in making itself a really interesting place, where people will come because it's interesting, not because it's got anything particularly in the way of valuable things to sell. Because it hasn't, as far as I can see."
And don't, he might add, underestimate the importance of the natural environment: the hills and the bush, whether the backdrop of the Grampians or the view up Hardy St to the Centre of New Zealand.
They may be the source of Nelson's "sleepy hollow" tag of years back; Vine likes to think of sheltering hands, nestling the town in a protective way, but also confining it, forcing it to grow in a tiny space with the resulting closeness giving it "a sense of urbanity that much bigger places don't have".
It is a draughty hall on a cold winter's night. Duty has prevailed over commonsense. Seventy-odd others have felt the call too: community-spirited sorts all of them, it should be stressed.
Some council people and then a consultant they have hired talk about studies and strategies and plans, chuck about a bit of jargon, and then divide the crowd up into little groups with the challenge to come up with their own ideas about the good, bad and ugly bits of Nelson.
Most everyone agrees that more needs to be done to link the town to the waterfront, to improve the liveliness of the city centre, to make a better fist of the city's aspect to the Maitai, to use the parking squares more cleverly. Plenty of other ideas, from the ingenious to the flaky, get an airing. They have the inevitable likes and dislikes. The first derisive mention of Burger King provokes a noisy ripple of agreement. There will be no Whoppers at the heart of Nelson if this gathering has its way.
The consultant speaks enthusiastically about the great level of engagement. Seventy people is a stunning turnout for these exercises, he reveals.
Many of those present plunge into the brainstorming with enthusiasm; some frustrated would-be town planners reveal themselves. For those who dream of a better, smarter city, it is all very auspicious.
Outside, the air is freezing and the city centre deserted. It feels like the longest night of the deepest hibernation, although in fact, tomorrow, the locals will wake as normal, shiver in the frost, and more than a few of them will go about the exact same routines that have served them well every working day of the past 10 years and beyond. They wouldn't dream of doing it anywhere else.
A few might even wonder: why change anything?
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE The "heart of Nelson" project is the city council's first concerted effort to come up with a new blueprint for the central city in a decade. In 1999, an "enhancement" project was launched, which led, directly or otherwise, to changes from the minor (planting some trees and putting down some pavers in the carparks) to major (developing the Miller's Acre visitor centre complex and Wakatu Square). The last "strategy" was put together in 1995, when the council was wrestling with the rewrite of its main town planning document.
The project manager for this effort, senior planner David Jackson, reckons that the city centre today has got the fundamentals right - changes around the 1980s (principally developing the Montgomery and Buxton carparks, reorganising the roading network to get cross-town traffic out of the city centre, and making Trafalgar St more pedestrian-friendly) gave the place "good bones". In the mid-90s came some overdue focus on protecting worthy heritage buildings and precincts, and imposing design guidelines on key city street frontages.
The consultants who have secured the $150,000 project to produce the next strategy have said that "Nelson's got the best provincial CBD in the country", Jackson says.
"We could rest on our laurels, because it isn't broke . . . But there are always threats and opportunities, and some of those threats if we just sit still could become a reality, " he says.
The council is trying hard to be open-minded: opening up the scope of its study to take in an area stretching as far as Victory Square, the marina and Botanic Reserve, bringing in various employment, economic and retail experts to help draw up a masterplan, set up a blog encouraging people to spout off about what they like and don't. Draft plans will be drawn up based on initial feedback, put out for further consultation, then incorporated into the council's wider long-term planning process. Whether it ends up as an exercise in herding cats, or is met with a solid wall of indifference, Jackson says the council has made its determination to move clear. "The council is determined that it's not just another report that sits on the shelf." Nelson Mail