THE COPENHAGEN OF THE SOUTH
Henriette Vamberg still remembers what it was like setting up Wellington’s plan to turn itself into Copenhagen.
And, she remembers the city and what it looked like: ‘‘Parking, and very wide roads.’’
In 2004, Wellington had 15,833 parking spaces in its CBD compared with Copenhagen’s 3100.
Over six months, Vamberg and world-famous cities expert Jan Gehl, who is now 83, would fly between Denmark and Wellington putting together one of the city’s most comprehensive reports on how pedestrians move around the city.
The bill for the report would come to $72,500, relatively cheap for a firm regarded as the world’s foremost experts on ‘‘pedestrianisation’’ and a price property developer Ian Cassels thinks likely came at a ‘‘discounted rate’’ with the thought that more work would follow.
But much of that work didn’t follow. Vamberg has barely visited Wellington since and many of the report’s boldest suggestions sit undelivered – although Wellington City Council staff and the mayor say they will re-emerge in the city’s long-awaited Let’s Get Welly
Moving plan.
The 88-page report came with more than 20 pages of recommendations and 30 pages of observations about everything from jaywalking to the dearth of nightlife on Lambton Quay.
Behind the report was a desire to increase social interaction and retain Wellington’s title as New Zealand’s cultural capital, according to then-mayor Kerry Prendergast.
She had devoured works on cities as engines of creativity and thought more pedestrian areas might be a way to push people into collaborating with each other in a modern society where people were becoming increasingly closed off from each other.
Vamberg and Gehl would fly to New Zealand for two weeks to work on information gathered by a team of New Zealand collaborators.
The result was published to much ‘‘backslapping’’ and public excitement when it was presented in 2004, Cassels says.
‘‘It sounded right to a lot of people.’’
At the core of the plan was a recommendation to narrow those very wide roads Vamberg and Gehl had been struck by into boulevards populated by people, bicycles, and green space.
The roads targeted for the treatment included Cambridge and Kent terraces, Taranaki St, and Jervois Quay.
The quay was singled out, with its multi-laned roads, for preventing pedestrians from having easy access to the waterfront.
The creation of a central city cycle network was also part of the plans with cycle lanes taking up part of the boulevard space.
Individual streets that made up Wellington’s Golden Mile would be linked better with pedestrians taking priority over road traffic at crossings.
On Lambton Quay, vehicle access would be banned except for at night, footpaths widened, and parking removed.
The waterfront, which had car parking at the time, would be ‘‘pedestrianised’’ with developments put up on the waterfront to give people something to do as they strolled past the water.
That same focus on the pedestrian experience at eye-level was sprinkled throughout the report’s suggestions
Sixty per cent of street-level retailers and offices should be transparent at eye-level, the report said, and all should remain lit until midnight.
The street level businesses were to have blank spaces of wall but give pedestrians something to look at while they passed.
The report came to many of its conclusions by observing Wellington’s pedestrians as they went about their daily and nightly routines in the central city.
It observed how many jaywalked (answer: 576 on Vivian St during a weekday lunch hour) and proposed changes to traffic light timings.
Patrick Morgan, of the Cycling Action Network, said some of the suggestions, especially around the waterfront were implemented.
But other more important ones to connect the city to the waterfront better through the narrowing of Jervois Quay, had languished.
Cassels said the Gehl report had at its heart acknowledged Wellington as a great city with large numbers of pedestrians but with problems that needed fixing, many that still need to be fixed today.
‘‘You won’t remember driving down Jervois Quay looking at something, there’ll be no smell, there’ll be no atmosphere, there’ll be no nothing about that.
‘‘The parts of the city you remember are not when you’re sitting in a car looking at something it’s always walking somewhere, meeting someone, going around the corner and having a cup of coffee.’’
Famous cities expert Jan Gehl’s plan for the capital ‘‘sounded right to a lot of people’’.