Finance, food, and future urban zones: The failure of flexible development in Auckland, New Zealand

As the pace of urbanization across the planet accelerates, planners and policymakers in the world’s fast-growing cities are faced with an intractable conflict between the endless demand for more land to be released for development and the need to preserve ecosystem services and productive agricultural land close to urban centres. Auckland is by far the largest and fastest-growing city in New Zealand, and the rapid pace of residential and commercial development onto greenfield land is putting pressure on less profitable land uses in peri-urban areas. Despite good intentions from city planners to create a high standard of compact urban development in the existing urban footprint, urban sprawl and land fragmentation continue to envelop the rural communities that lie at the edge of Auckland. This paper examines how the policy of flexible development – where zoning provisions for current and future development can be overruled by government and by private applicants in the name of accommodating the ever-greater demand for new residential development - enables developers and landowners to circumvent zoning conventions for the sake of profitability at the expense of long-term quality of life for all of Auckland’s residents, with questionable positive effect on addressing Auckland’s housing crisis as property prices increase at unprecedented rates. To demonstrate this, this paper draws from planning documents, court decisions and fieldwork in Northwest Auckland. it argues that New Zealand’s crisis of housing affordability and urban sprawl is explicitly financial in nature and benefits some parties as much as it causes great detriment to many others, and therefore must be confronted as such.