Stephen Brown
Consultant Landscape Architect & Director of the Environmental Defence Society
The Waitakere Ranges and West Coast have long held a special place in the heart of the Auckland regional community. While the rather somnolent form of the actual ranges with their covering of native forest, has long provided a backcloth to a burgeoning Auckland, the dynamism and even danger associated with the West Coast, and its surf, provide an equally eloquent counterpoint to New Zealand's largest metropolis. Stands of re-emergent kauri forest and the remains of log dams down the Pararaha Valley hark back to both the colonial settlement and early development of this country and natural heritage values that have long been lost across most of the Auckland Region. At the same time, the general patina of hills, ridges, and gullies - capped by the likes of Mount Donald McLean near Little Huia - are expressive of a much earlier, volcanic, heritage while the beaches of Piha, Whatipu, Bethells, etc, together with individual features like Lion Rock, contribute in a highly distinctive and symbolic fashion to the character and values of a unique endemic landscape.
At a much more personal level, my own fondest recollections of the Waitakeres (and their margins) are a collage of playing ‘cops and robbers’ in the semi-mature kauris at the back of an aptly titled Kaurilands School, traipsing through the paddocks and bush above Huia, swimming in streams and rock pools where the Lower Huia Dam is now located, being awe-struck by the majesty of the rollers at Piha and burning pre-adolescent feet on the iron sand both there and at Karekare. These early images are closely followed by trips to the Kitakita and Karekare Falls, Goldies Bush, journeys down the Pararaha Stream and Chateau Mosquito Tracks, and even a period cutting bush tracks at kauri Park - back amid the majesty of mature and emergent kauri forest (a persistent emblem of the Waitakeres for me). It is such associations shared by much of the regional community - an amalgam of actual experiences and images - that are the essence of our perception and appreciation of the Waitakeres landscape. Part natural environment, part playground and part scenic experience, they are a core asset for this community, both at collective and individual (personal) levels.
While the Hunua Ranges share many of the attributes of the Waitakeres in a physical sense, the sheer proximity of the Waitakeres and West Coast to most of Auckland, the fact they are a living and educational environment, as well as a major focus for a wide range of recreational activities, lends them a unique status within the Auckland Region.
Hardly surprising therefore, Chapter 6 of the Auckland Regional Policy Statement repeatedly addresses the significance of the Waitakere Ranges and their foothills both as a critical physical and biological asset under threat and as a nationally recognised ‘signature landscape’ that frames Auckland City. Under the broad umbrella of ‘Heritage’, the significance of the Waitakeres and other key ecological assets is described, together with relevant policy platforms for protection of the Ranges resource:
“…………..The rate of species extinction in the Auckland region since human occupation is not certain. However, in the Waitakere Ranges, an area -with extensive indigenous vegetation cover relative to other parts of the region, at least eight bird species have been lost in the last 150 years. It also has 43 threatened plant species, the highest number in the Auckland mainland. ………….
§ the forest covered hills of the Hunua and Waitakere Ranges;
§ the contrasting expansive vistas of the large western harbours (Manukau and Kaipara) and the exposed Tasman Sea coastline.
Urban expansion affects visually sensitive landscapes around the urban edge. lnfill suburban development, and high rise buildings in the city centre, affect the visibility of Auckland's volcanic cones. Hilltop transmission towers punctuate the skylines of major hill ranges. Rural residential development modifies many of the rural landscapes, and coastal settlements affect the visual quality or sensitivity of coastal and island landscapes and seascapes in the region.
The visual effects of development and change must be considered in the process of managing the region's natural and physical resources in order to protect the quality and sensitivity of the landscape.”
Clearly, therefore, this landscape is far from wholly natural. Part and parcel of the unique character of areas like Oratia, Titirangi, Big Muddy Creek and most of the West Coast beaches is a unique blend of human development and occupation amid the structure and texture of natural features and elements that still define these varied landscapes. Indeed, for many decades this has been the essence of much of the Waitakere's character, with bush, re emergent scrubland, streams and coastal margins interwoven with pockets of residential development. In locations around the Manukau Harbour and along the West Coast such interplay has been most notable for relatively discrete pockets of development framed by both sea and forest. Around Swanson, Henderson Valley and Oratia there has been a more sequenced merger of urban development with orchards, vineyards and forest margins, while the archetypal Titirangi landscape reveals an interplay of scattered housing with often mature, kauri and kahikatea forest.
In all of these situations, two key aspects of landscape are revealed:
§ the amalgam of features, elements and ecology that comprise the physical entity of the Waitakeres, and
§ the visual incarnation of these elements, that are also interpreted through our perception of composition, three-dimensional spatial values, texture, line and so on - that give rise to aesthetic appreciation of both the landscape as a whole and its individual components.
Of course, other values also influence landscape perception including environmental values, residential preferences, recreational attitudes, and even much more atavistic environmental responses that date back to humans activities as both hunter and hunted (Jay Appleton’s “prospect / refuge” theory). Hardly surprising, therefore, Aucklanders' appreciation of the Waitakere landscape is a multi-faceted thing and often leads to value conflicts.
Thus, the Waitakere ranges are appreciated both as an entity in their own right and as a living and recreational environment for a substantial proportion of the Auckland community. This also, naturally enough, leads to different perspectives on the Waitakeres as both an entity and ‘resource’. To complicate the issue, many move to the Waitakeres with their rosy-hued glasses firmly in place and a very romantic vision of living in the bush. When that vision starts to unravel, with damp, asthma and trench foot starting to set in, defensive reactions often include bush clearance, earthworks, structural development and other forms of modification of the residential landscape. Consequently, there has always been an inevitable tension between the true qualities of the Waitakere ranges and the more widely held perception of their iconic role and values.
Over the last ten or so years the landscape of the Waitakeres has also come under ever greater threat from both Auckland's burgeoning population and this country's experiment with so-called effects based planning or resource management. The rapid displacement of horticulture land and vineyards around Swanson, the Henderson Valley and Oratia has in particular started to encroach upon the margins of Centennial Park. At the same time, the appeal of a coastal lifestyle and rapidly escalating market values for coastal properties has a markedly accelerated the pressure upon both the West Coast and Manukau Harbour fringes. To the north, around Te Henga and Goldies Bush, the clamour for rural-residential development has completed the encirclement of Centennial Park and the maintenance of pressure upon its margins.
Yet, by and large, this has not lead to wholesale change; rather, as suggested in the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s 2001 report, the Waitakeres are continuing to suffer from incremental change and the so-called “death of 1000 cuts”. A combination of insensitive and poorly located development, often distributed in a sporadic fashion, is pock-marking the Ranges’ flanks with an indistinct mix of housing, residential open space, pasture and forest. Parts of the Waitakere are neither forest nor residential area, but rather an uncomfortable amalgamation of both, which ultimately does little more than compromise the core values of the ranges in their entirety. One only has to do look at the main slopes of Waiatarua from the vicinity of Titirangi Road, or from parts of Kelston, Glen Eden and Swanson, to appreciate the scale and extent of such transition.
The long term, and an inevitable, corollary of this encroachment and change must ultimately be the ‘ring fencing’ of Centennial Park by ever intensifying development which incrementally eats away at the natural character and amenity values of those areas outside the park. As a result, there is now the very real potential for that park land to become an island refuge of core landscape and ecological values, increasingly isolated from both metropolitan Auckland and at least part of the Manukau Harbour. This is despite the Regional Growth Forum’s acknowledgement of the importance of the Waitakere ranges and express desire for urban containment (largely reliant upon Auckland’s Metropolitan Urban Limits) twinned with urban consolidation.
With respect to such strategies and wider landscape management, the Resource Management Act has imposed a planning framework upon management of the Waitakeres that actually appears to accommodate the insidious effects of incrementalism and largely negates any strategic vision for the ranges and their margins. In particular, a persistent focus upon the ‘enabling function’ of the Act and the related emphasis upon ‘amelioration and mitigation’ of adverse effects promotes tacit acceptance of continual landscape change.
Two other factors merge with this planning framework to provide a pessimistic outlook for the Waitakeres under the current regime:
§ the prevalence of ‘property farming’ as an economic activity and hedge against the financial strictures of retirement, particularly on the urban fringe, and
§ the Environment Court’s apparent preoccupation with equity - the egalitarian distribution of property rights and property income - often at the expense of very real environmental effects and long-term environmental degradation.
This leaves areas like the Waitakere Ranges especially susceptible to sustained, apparently small-scale, but often cumulatively large-scale, change. For example, the Court has frequently shown itself more amenable to the concept of fragmented development, which leads to the sort of halfway house landscapes already described, at the expense of concentrating development in areas of lesser sensitivity and maintaining the existing values of areas that are effectively part of Centennial Park’s highly valued ‘apron’. Indeed, the Environment Court often seems blithely willing to scatter development, almost willy-nilly, on the assumption that such an approach is preferable to residential concentration in strategic pockets. Yet, as any landscape architect will tell you, it is the first incursion into a pristine or essentially natural landscape that triggers the greatest perception of modification and of movement towards landscapes hall-marked by human intervention.
Despite, in the past being presented with the evidence which has methodically and thoroughly addressed the physical ramifications for forests, streams and receiving catchments, the court has at times also manifestly disregarded empirical evidence in favour of a more traditional approach to, and its own views on, landscape management.
In the long-term, the absence of viable economic uses for such fringe large-lots and the common community perception that such development is always a stepping stone to ever-increasing residential intensification, leaves virtually all of the catchments that frame Centennial Park susceptible to erosion of both physical and visual environments.
And just as some recent decisions appear to show little differentiation between the qualities and sensitivities of different catchments, even the implementation of key planning strategies and policies appears to sometimes fall well short of protecting core values. Thus, as an example, the singular focus of Waitakere City’s ridgeline protection controls is upon whether or not new structures would penetrate the skyline, without apparent regard to the greater issue of impacts upon both ridge crests and the upper slopes that directly frame major ridges - regardless of the ‘skyline’ issue. Furthermore, in discussions with politicians about such controls in the middle of last year there was a complete failure to appreciate the relevance of such matters as colour to the integration of development into a bush setting.
Such insensitivity, at both levels, raises real concerns about the long-term integrity of the wider ranges and their margins. Added to this, the primary focus of Section 6 of the RMA on natural landscapes that are ‘outstanding’ and the lack of direction in relation to ‘preservation of the natural character of the coastal environment’ makes it extremely difficult to impose green belts or other forms of long-term control over development on the fringes of areas of existing residential occupation or rural/horticultural land use. Inevitably, the compromises imposed by established development and activities provide a strong launching pad for further peripheral development and encroachment into neighbouring areas of forest and coastline. While the forest dominated landscapes of the core ranges have, for the most part, been identified as outstanding (indeed since well before the gestation of the RMA), areas already subject to human activity and modification have always been one of two ‘rungs down’ the landscape value ladder, leaving the door open for incremental development.
From a landscape perspective, the situation is further confused by both the different ways in which individual divisions of the Environment Court have historically perceived natural character and outstanding landscapes, and the fact that there are clear differences within society about the natural character issue in particular. For example, Dr Simon Swaffield and John Fairweather, undertaking research for Tourism New Zealand and Environment Waikato, have established a clear differentiation between those who are sensitive to endemic values in relation to natural character and those who simply regard anything that is not man-made as being natural and - to varying degrees - significant.
The end result appears to be a planning process that actually endorses and promotes both development and landscape change apart from where territorial authorities purchase land and gazette it as reserve. Even where a particular application is rejected, either at the Council or Court level, landowners and developers remain free to try and try again with multiple permutations of development schemes. The Waitakere City Council, residents or public interest groups can often fend off such schemes for only so long. At the end of the day, it is almost inevitable that change of some kind will continue to occur and contribute to the relentless transformation of the ranges and their foothills - not just in isolated cases, but repeatedly and continually. This situation, in conjunction with the pervasive, post-colonial, attitudes of many decision makers, suggests that the RMA provides a far from sound framework for the appropriately conservation-oriented management of areas such as the Waitakeres and their coastal margins.
Consequently, with reference to both the past revolution of this area and its current management, I believe that the sort of management promulgated by the RMA cannot hope to adequately respond to the particular sensitivities, sense of place, and character values evident both within and around the Ranges. Rather, the combination of resource management legislation that is unable to step beyond the realms of conservation into preservation, and private property interests, will maintain pressure on this outstanding regional landscape and habitat. Without recourse to wholesale purchase and reservation of large tracts of land that frame Centennial Park, the Waitakere Ranges will continue along the path of ever greater residential occupation, and the sort of strategic planning tools that are so integral to management of the likes of the UK's national parks - outstanding landscapes which communities still live in - are simply not available to local planners and decision-makers.
As a result, the very essence of the ranges as the major backdrop to Auckland and Waitakere Cities will be ever more compromised and their landscape / habitat value as a major regional feature and asset further diminished. Just as important, the personal ‘memorabilia’ - images, associations and recollections - that have long shaped Aucklanders’ appreciation of the Waitakeres, will also be progressively consigned to the waste bin of history and the amenity values enjoyed by those living within them, or next to them, will be increasingly compromised by neighbouring development. In other words, a ‘lose-lose’ situation - at both strategic and local levels - is already emerging and the Heritage Area Concept is perhaps the only prospect on the horizon that offers any hope of steering future landscape management away from the path of established patterns of land management and associated degradation.