Is urban design an art and do people really notice its achievements? I think it is and although people are pretty foggy about it, they do. They can be passionate about it as reactions to the proposed waterfront hotel show.
The term ''urban design'' is new. Wikipedia says it refers to ''an inter-disciplinary subject that unites all the built environment professions, including urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture, civil and municipal engineering''. Ian Munro is an urban designer, the Aucklander hired to review the waterfront hotel proposal for the commission hearing the application for a resource consent.
Mr Munro has probably never designed a whole city, but for a time in New Zealand there were people who had. They were usually called ''surveyors'' and often put ''CE'' after their names, signifying Civil Engineer. Among them are Felton Mathew (1801-1847), who designed Auckland; William Mein Smith (1799-1869),Wellington; Edward Jollie (1825-1894), Christchurch; and Charles Kettle (1821-1862), who designed Dunedin.
What was in their minds as they set about their tasks, apart from producing practical arrangements for siting streets and buildings, and what happened to their plans anyway?It seems likely Mathew was influenced by his earlier experience in Sydney, when it came to laying out Auckland. But his plans for central squares were abandoned and his concentric crescents centred on Albert Park only minimally realised. The result was the central city has no obvious designed focus or feature. Aotea Square was created much later, trying to remedy this.
Mein Smith is regarded as a poor designer and his blueprint was defeated by Wellington's topography. His dull grid was centred on what is now the Basin Reserve, intended to be a dock, with a canal linking it to Lambton Harbour. None of this was realised, while his meandering coastal roadway, Lambton Quay, ended up being the city's principal thoroughfare.
Much later,planners have tried to create plazas in spaces left over from urban development.
Jollie had a large, flat site. He surrounded a central cruciform plaza, the Square, with rectangular streets relieved by sinuous terraces along the Avon. There was also Hagley Park. This was a good plan, well-realised, but the Avon is a minor geographical feature compared with the Waitemata or Wellington Harbour.
For Dunedin, Kettle was told to reproduce so far as possible the characteristics of Edinburgh, a unique direction amounting to a specific aesthetic brief. He did not, as some think, simply impose Edinburgh's plan from afar. He visited Edinburgh but made large concessions on the site.
Also, despite another belief, he did not take Edinburgh's Old Town as his model but the New Town, by the early 19th century the most admired urban development in Europe.
That was a ''formal, Italian-inspired, urban planned development'' in the words of James Curl, a modern architectural historian. Its characteristics are formality, regularity, symmetry and proportion, relieved from monotony by some special features. In the case of Edinburgh, and also Dunedin, it is made Romantic by its juxtaposition to a bold and rugged nature.
The keys are: a planned appearance - it doesn't seem like a series of unconnected developments like the older towns of Europe; certain relationships with natural features; the contrast of built formality with untamed nature.
I mentioned this was a Romantic design to a gentleman originally from Scotland, who pointed to utilitarian industrial structures on our foreshore, suggesting they were the opposite. So they are, but not part of the plan which is the pattern of sites for streets and buildings.
While Edinburgh's New Town is on the top of a ridge, analogous to Dunedin's Roslyn, Kettle's central city is a low-lying harbourside parade, set among bold hills, where the distant views are harbour steeps, bush-clad ridges or lofty heights. It is intended as a Claudian seaport, a park of orderly temples, lapped by water, all in a rugged terrain.
Kettle placed a central grid at sea level relieved by plazas such as the Octagon, echoed by Moray Pl. He enclosed it on the landward sides by the Town Belt curving round to the harbour at the Oval and the bush-clad gully below Brackens Lookout, where that joins Harbour Terrace.
It was a good plan, ambitious and was substantially achieved. A mixture of Presbyterian determination and gold-rush affluence saw it largely built by the time Kettle died. Others modified and extended it.''
Mr Surveyor Thomson'' (1821-1884) widened some streets and Samuel Mirams (1837-1911) gave us Queens Drive. But the unplanned railway made a barrier betweencity andsea.
That's still a problem but people who have never heard of Kettle recognise the value of the views he created, from and of the city, and object to things which disturb them.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
