I never became a medical doctor, although for a time I thought I might. Instead, I became something close, a kind of doctor for cities. For more than three decades, I have worked with governments, mayors, businesses and communities helping cities including Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, diagnose what is holding them back and, more importantly, helping them imagine what they could become.
Cities, like people, can lose confidence. They can lose direction. They can become trapped by old habits, short term thinking or a failure to recognise their own potential.
But cities can also recover. Sometimes remarkably.
Across my career I have had the privilege of working with places as diverse as London, Cape Town, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi and Perth. Each has taught me something different about how cities evolve. Yet no city has shaped my own thinking more profoundly than Auckland, where I worked in the early decades of this century, before moving abroad.
When I returned in late 2025 to lead a study tour of Australian design leaders for Design Matters National, I expected to see familiar projects, catch up with old friends (like my dear friend and mentor Sir Bob Harvey) and revisit places that had occupied much of my professional life for 15 years.
But instead I found myself reflecting on something much deeper. Not simply what Auckland had built, but what Auckland and its people had taught me.
Because this was never just a story about streets, buildings or transport. It was a story about belief.
A city that did not believe in itself
When I first arrived in Auckland in 2005 for my interview as first ever design champion and group manager, urban design at Auckland City Council, I was struck not by what the city and city region was, but by what it was not.
It felt grey, dull, underwhelming, and underdesigned. It also had one of the highest levels of car ownership per capita in the world and more carparks in the central city than I had experienced throughout my career, it felt like a city of cars rather than a city for people.
Here was one of the world’s most spectacular natural harbours, yet the city seemed strangely disconnected from it. Queen St functioned primarily as a traffic corridor rather than the civic heart of the country. The waterfront was broken and fragmented and largely locked behind a red fence. Public transport carried little prestige. Walking and cycling were marginal activities rather than everyday choices. Density done well was something other cities did. The bustling trams and street cars of the 1950s when Auckland had one of the highest public transport levels per head of capita in the world, were a distant memory.
It was clear to me the city possessed extraordinary natural advantages but appeared uncertain about how to translate them into urban quality. Even Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, is said to have visited Auckland in the 1990s and described it as “shut”.
Whether or not those were his exact words, they captured something many visitors said, or Aucklanders quietly recognised. This was a beautiful city whose confidence had not yet caught up with its potential. And yet, strangely, that was precisely why I wanted the job. Possibility and potential.
Cities already convinced of their greatness rarely change, but cities prepared to question themselves often do.
From urban shame to shared ambition
During the years that followed, Auckland began to confront some uncomfortable truths.
Writers, architects, business leaders and global commentators like Jan Gehl or Prof Peter Newman increasingly questioned whether the city was living up to its promise. Metro magazine, among others, became an important voice in challenging complacency and asking bigger questions about Auckland’s future.
At the same time, something much more significant was happening beneath the surface.
The creation of the Auckland Super City in 2010 represented one of the most important governance reforms in New Zealand’s modern history. Bringing seven local and one regional council together into a single unitary authority created something that had never previously existed: the ability to think, plan and invest at the scale of the city/region itself. That institutional reform cannot be overstated. Without it, much of what followed would simply not have been possible.
Two years later came the Auckland Plan 2012. For me, this remains one of the defining documents in Auckland’s modern history.
It was far more than a planning strategy. It was a declaration of intent. A 30-year vision that recognised Auckland’s future would depend upon becoming more compact, more connected, more productive and more liveable. Within that wider, audacious vision to be the world’s most liveable city sat what became one of its most influential delivery frameworks – The Auckland City Centre Masterplan 2012.
While the Auckland Plan established where the city wanted to go, the City Centre Masterplan described how the heart of the city could begin leading that journey and inspire the rest of the region. Looking back, its greatest strength was not necessarily the eight key moves or the individual projects it proposed. It was that it changed the conversation.
Changing the trajectory
People often ask whether the City Centre Masterplan has been delivered but I think that is the wrong question. The masterplan was never merely intended to be a checklist of projects. Nor was it a fixed blueprint to be implemented regardless of circumstance.
Cities evolve, economies change, political priorities shift and major infrastructure projects emerge. But good city plans must have enough certainty to provide direction to partners – and enough flexibility to adapt. The purpose of the masterplan was not to prescribe every future decision but to change Auckland’s trajectory.
It sought to shift the city from traffic dominated streets to people centred places. It would be a shift from isolated projects to integrated precincts and from a CBD that largely functioned between 9 and 5 to an internationally competitive city centre that would increasingly support living, learning, culture, hospitality and business throughout the day and evening.
Most importantly, it recognised that successful city-making is not simply about vision but about implementation.
That required institutions capable of holding a long term direction beyond electoral cycles, such as the Auckland City Centre Advisory Board, to provide independent advice and to challenge.
It required annual investment decisions by the Governing Body of the council and required collaboration across multiple parts of council and with government agencies, mana whenua, developers, academia, businesses and the wider community.
Dedicated funding also mattered. A vision without funding is after all, a hallucination.
The City Centre Targeted Rate, with broader public and private investment in housing, commercial development, transport and civic infrastructure, created a level of certainty that many cities struggle to achieve.
In hindsight, perhaps the masterplan’s greatest achievement was not any single street, square or building but demonstrating that city transformation is less about isolated projects than about creating an enduring system capable of delivering change over decades.
Cities rarely change because of one brilliant idea. They change because enough people commit to the same direction for long enough and once that begins to happen, something even more powerful starts to emerge: belief.
Proof a city was changing
The evidence that Auckland was changing did not arrive all at once. It accumulated, one project, street and decision at a time.
The transformation was rarely dramatic from one month to the next, but over time the cumulative effect became unmistakable. The goodness crept up on the city.
Shared spaces began to redefine how Aucklanders experienced the city centre. Britomart evolved from a transport interchange into one of the southern hemisphere’s most successful mixed use heritage precincts. The waterfront gradually reconnected people with the Waitematā Harbour. New laneways emerged. Public spaces became greener, more generous, more inviting and more alive.
People started lingering rather than simply passing through. The city was beginning to rediscover its hidden public life.
The recognition also followed. In 2016 Auckland received a special mention at the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, one of the world’s most respected awards for urban transformation. I call it the Nobel Prize for cities.
That same year another milestone quietly passed. For the first time since the 1950s, more people entered the city centre by public transport than by private car.
To many, it appeared little more than an interesting statistic but to those of us who had spent years working to rebalance Auckland’s transport system, it represented something much deeper and profound. Behaviour had changed and the city had begun changing the way people chose to move.
By 2019 another remarkable indicator appeared. More construction cranes stood across Auckland’s skyline than in any city in the United States. Investment was following confidence. Developers, businesses and institutions were beginning to believe in Auckland’s future.
Then, in 2021, Auckland was ranked the world’s most liveable city.
Awards never tell the whole story and nor should they, but collectively these moments signalled something important. The trajectory had changed.
Cities rarely transform because of one iconic project. Instead, they transform because hundreds of decisions, made consistently over many years, begin reinforcing one another. Momentum replaces hesitation and confidence replaces doubt. Optimism becomes contagious. As Henry Ford once said “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
Cities change through deadlines
There is another lesson Auckland taught me. Cities rarely transform through plans alone. Instead, they transform through moments.
Major events create deadlines, deadlines create focus and focus accelerates delivery.
The Rugby World Cup in 2011 became one of Auckland’s defining moments as it gave urgency to waterfront improvements and public realm investment that may otherwise have taken decades longer.
The America’s Cup played a similar role. First through the initial Viaduct transformation and later through Wynyard Quarter, it projected Auckland onto the global stage while giving Aucklanders renewed confidence in their own city and a chance to host the world at the water’s edge.
Events really matter because they force cities to imagine themselves through the eyes of others. They become rehearsals for the future and they challenge institutions to work together. They also encourage faster decision making. Most importantly, they build pride and belief.
Crucially also if you are not visible, you are invisible. Cities compete for talent, investment, visitors and ideas. Global visibility matters more than ever.
Auckland gradually learned that telling its story was every bit as important as building it.
Narrative was never about vanity; it was a strategy.
The waterfront, the spine and open heart surgery
Not every part of Auckland’s transformation proved equally straightforward.
The waterfront enjoyed advantages that Queen St never had, such as large landholdings, clear governance and a compelling public narrative that was the opportunity to reconnect the city with one of its greatest natural assets.
Having worked on the Victoria and Alfred waterfront in Cape Town, Canary Wharf District in London’s Docklands and The Docklands in Melbourne, I can confidently say that today, the Auckland waterfront stands comfortably alongside many of the world’s great urban waterfronts.
It is difficult now to imagine Auckland without Wynyard Quarter, Te Wānanga, Silo Park, the Viaduct or the succession of public spaces that stretch eastwards towards Commercial Bay.
Yet the city centre spine has always presented a more complex challenge. Queen St carries the accumulated expectations of an entire country.
It is simultaneously the nation’s High Street, Auckland’s main address, commercial corridor, transport route, civic space and symbolic heart.
It also has multiple landowners, historic buildings, transport infrastructure, retail, hospitality, education, housing and politics. Every intervention becomes more difficult because every decision affects somebody else.
Then came the City Rail Link. For nearly a decade Midtown has lived through extraordinary disruption. Businesses have endured prolonged construction, pedestrian routes have shifted repeatedly and public patience has been tested.
Describing it as construction hardly captures the experience. It has been open heart surgery. Absolutely necessary, complicated and painful. But ultimately undertaken to ensure the long term health of the patient.
The roots of the next city
The City Rail Link is often described as Auckland’s biggest transport project. I think that fundamentally misunderstands its significance.
CRL is not principally a transport project. It is a city-shaping urban design project.
Its greatest value is not the tunnels beneath the ground. They are of course remarkable feats of engineering and design but it is the opportunities created above them that matter more. The City Rail Link fundamentally lifts social, economic and cultural productivity by reshaping accessibility across Auckland.
By doubling the capacity of the rail network, it changes how people reach the city centre and how the city centre reaches the region, how businesses access workers, how residents access opportunity and how investment begins responding to new patterns of movement. Its value extends well beyond the stations themselves. The corridor becomes the city and around those stations sit opportunities for new housing, employment, education, culture and public life.
That has always been the deeper logic but less well understood. The business case was never simply about trains. CRL was far more than a railway line and a tunnel. It was about productivity, accessibility, choice and creating a more connected and inclusive metropolitan Auckland.
Cities around the world demonstrate that transformative infrastructure succeeds when it is accompanied by equally ambitious city building above ground. That is now Auckland’s opportunity.
The opening of CRL should not be seen as the completion of a project but understood as the beginning of Auckland’s next chapter. Because cities are not transformed when infrastructure opens. They are transformed by what they choose to do next.
On Friday: Part 2 of Ludo’s essay – A city still in transition
