The results are in: the second annual State of the City report shows how Auckland ranks against 10 global cities. Tātaki Auckland Unlimited's John Lavery talks about how the city is shaping up – and the areas in which it needs to improve.
It’s a report that’s arrived with a bit of a thud, because it puts in plain black-and-white text a feeling that a lot of people have had recently about Auckland: that it’s low on cash, energy, and a clear vision for its future.
The report is entitled The State of the City, and it compares Auckland with nine peer cities in other parts of the world, a list comprised of Brisbane, Fukuoka, Tel Aviv, Vancouver, Portland, Austin, Dublin, Copenhagen and Helsinki. It was commissioned by the Committee for Auckland, Deloitte and Tātaki Auckland Unlimited (Auckland Council's tourism, events and economic development agency), and written by The Business of Cities, a London-based urban intelligence and advisory firm.
The intention is for the report to be issued annually, and this is its sobering second edition. Last year’s report noted Auckland’s challenges such as the high cost of living, the housing shortage, and a lack of transport connectivity, but that its natural and cultural advantages still made it a very desirable place to live and work.
The new edition of the report shows that Auckland has slipped in the rankings against its competitive set in key measurement areas. These include Prosperity (no surprises there, as everyone is aware of the cost of living issues), Opportunity (rising unemployment and low productivity are part of this) and Sustainability (slow progress on emissions reduction meant the city received a lower ranking this year).
But the biggest gaps are in the areas of Innovation, Knowledge and Connectivity. Better transport connections would help enormously with Connectivity, but the areas of Innovation and Knowledge are tougher to pin down, as they rely on an ecosystem of talent, investment and attractiveness that is the secret sauce of successful cities. “Auckland needs to be vigilant about its business model if it wants to continue to succeed,” the report says.
Conversations like this inevitably come back to a call for greater investment by council or central government in making the city great again, but this report is being issued at a time when the council is cash-strapped and the government has asked councils to focus on delivering the basics.
The basics are essential, of course, but John Lavery, the head of Economic Transformation at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, says the basics aren’t going to supply the “sparkle” the city needs to battle its way back up the rankings in the State of the City report. Here, he talks to Britomart’s Jeremy Hansen about the report’s findings and the options for the city.
JEREMY HANSEN So, we've actually got two reports here. We have the Auckland Economic Monitor, and we have The State of the City: Benchmarking Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s international performance. What do they tell us about where we’re at as a city?
JOHN LAVERY The Auckland Economic Monitor is a document which seeks to understand how Auckland's economy has performed largely since the COVID period. And this is the second year of the State of the City report, which compares Auckland in a number of areas to other peer cities around the world. With those two reports combined, you've got a holistic picture of where we're at as a region, which I think is important for everybody who has a role in wanting to make this city better.
If you just look at the Economic Monitor, it says Auckland actually weathered the COVID storm quite well, but when you compare us to other international cities, they've come out of COVID stronger. The author of the State of the City report describes Auckland’s recovery as fragile and incomplete. I think this is quite interesting because it can feel a bit like that in Auckland today and some say “this is like a year of survival: let's just get through 2024” but we have the knowledge that there's stuff we can be doing, can be refocused on and that our economy is resilient and we have the ability to emerge stronger.
JEREMY HANSEN What kinds of things can we be doing as a city?
JOHN LAVERY The State of the City report shines a light on a number of areas. Some of them we already know, like housing and infrastructure challenges, but we also need to build our professional services sector, and our tech and creative sectors to be more competitive internationally. These are areas of strength, but when compared to other cities, we're probably just not as strong as we could be.
The other thing the State of the City report highlights is that we are less well-perceived internationally as a city than we were 10 years ago, particularly around business and investment. Ensuring that we are competitive in these global markets is critical, so building our reputation internationally again for visitors, for investment, and for talent is key.
JEREMY HANSEN As you mentioned, this is the second State of the City report, and Auckland has slipped against some of its global peer cities, with quite dramatic declines in some areas. It also talks a lot about the importance of attracting talent from other countries. I wondered if you saw a risk of a downward spiral, in that you need to attract talent to be competitive, but if you're perceived as being less attractive as a city, you’re less likely to attract it. Does this mean the city needs a kind of circuit breaker to avoid that downward spiral?
JOHN LAVERY I think it's an obvious risk. The line that Tim, the State of the City author uses, is that we've lost a bit of sparkle. So if we have lost that sparkle, that's a challenge to get that back, so how do we polish ourselves a little bit?
JEREMY HANSEN Sparkle seems like quite an elusive concept for an agency like Tātaki Auckland Unlimited to pursue.
JOHN LAVERY We have a role to play in leadership and delivery, but it’s not all down to us. As the region’s economic and cultural agency, we’re seeking ways we can highlight Auckland’s positives, which there are plenty of. One of the areas we’re quite focused on is how we attract more investors in, because investment into Auckland benefits not only our region, but all of New Zealand.
JEREMY HANSEN Of course, this call for sparkle is coming at a time when Auckland Council has talked quite frankly about its own financial constraints, and the Prime Minister has also admonished councils for not focusing on basics such as water reticulation. There's also a suggestion in the State of the City report that a lot of the issues that Auckland faces are going to require policy change or financial input at a national level. And I wondered how you felt about the city's ability to overcome its constraints in that environment that we find ourselves in?
JOHN LAVERY I think that's the question of the moment. There's also a lot of conversation within the government around the drive for productivity. How do we leverage Auckland, our most productive region, and make sure that Auckland is fulfilling its potential, for the benefit of all of New Zealand? There needs to be a response from a policy perspective and a funding perspective. We understand that the council's finances are facing challenges. We also know that Auckland doesn't really get the financial benefits of its growth in the short term, but it is faced with funding and accommodating that growth largely through its existing funding. So, it's a real challenge. The majority of funding within council goes to hard stuff, the hard infrastructure, transport primarily. Some of the things that we at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited do is the icing on the cake. Nobody likes a cake without icing, and that's the policy conundrum. If you've got infrastructure challenges, how do you make sure that you continue to invest and grow your infrastructure? But also, we're all humans: people want to enjoy events, people want to have opportunities, people want to have fun. That mix is required.
JEREMY HANSEN The State of the City report highlights connectivity and transport as one of Auckland’s greatest challenges. We know that the City Rail Link is eventually opening, but that’s probably not going to be enough to fully address this shortcoming.
JOHN LAVERY Better transport is fundamental to our economy, to allow it to function more effectively, but we know that the transport infrastructure just isn't there to the standard that we need. There's also a bigger land-use question: how do we incentivise more people to live in the right places, and as we grow, make sure that the growth occurs in those right places to leverage the infrastructure we already have?
You mentioned City Rail Link. I think it will be massive, a game changer for downtown Auckland and people that live along that line. In terms of opportunity, I think we're already seeing some of it: you have investment in the Symphony Centre in the Aotea Quarter and Bledisloe House, for example. The connectivity that City Rail Link will bring to the city centre will make the place feel a lot more vibrant and livelier.
JEREMY HANSEN We're talking a lot about Auckland, which is of course the purpose of this conversation, but in the State of the City report, you're comparing it to other cities, some of which Auckland has fallen behind in some measures. And I wondered if there were good ideas from those cities in the competitive set that Auckland could follow? Or if you wanted to talk about it in a different way, how have some of those cities have gone about lifting their own performance in those rankings?
JOHN LAVERY The one that stands out for me is our near-neighbour, Brisbane, because 10 years ago, I think Auckland was comparing itself to Sydney and Melbourne, and Brisbane wasn't even on the radar. That's changed. Brisbane has a confidence and a mojo about it, which is largely driven by their build-up to the Olympics [in 2032]. They've got plans around industries, plans around land use, infrastructure programs, and there seems to be an alignment between central and local decision makers around a common goal. I think that's a gap here in Auckland: we just need to get an agreement on the future and what we're working towards.
Of the other cities that are included, some of the Scandinavian cities, like Copenhagen and Helsinki, have policies they've put in place around high-value sectors that are really coming through. Seeing what some of them have done in their public realm, enabled by infrastructure, has been impressive. So, there are learnings from all those cities, and I think the more we look to learn how we can apply some of that thinking here, the better.
JEREMY HANSEN This may be a reflexive Auckland or New Zealand thing, but when you mentioned Brisbane, for example, and some of the Scandinavian cities, I think a lot of people would say, "Well, it's easy for them, they're rich." Is that necessarily the case? And if it is the case, how does Auckland react if it is more economically constrained than Queensland, for example?
JOHN LAVERY I choose my words carefully here. Are we poor? Do we feel poor? It is relative, but Auckland, to me, doesn't feel like a poor city. We may not be as prosperous as we used to be according to some metrics, and we do have challenges in terms of how productive we are per head of population, but some of this again comes back to prioritisation decisions. So I would challenge that view. I would say that if we can get the right funding system in place for some of these things, we can make them happen. One of my favorite economists, David McWilliams, quite often talks about how in many developed economies, they are rich, but people feel their countries are poor largely because of the lack of public investment in things. It's the infrastructure piece, when your day-to-day life just feels a bit harder than it needs to – like being stuck in traffic or you can’t go for a swim because of poor water quality. People feel squeezed, there's more uncertainty and disenchantment. Managing that is going to be quite important.
JEREMY HANSEN Now that the second State of the City report is out, do you think it’s having the effect you would like it to have?
JOHN LAVERY In his piece in The Spinoff, Duncan Greive described it as marking the homework. And there's a space for monitoring how our city is progressing, and the report is a really good lens on that. There are groups of people who want to get more engaged in conversations around the future of the city, and I think having this document is helpful in that sense. I think it refocuses the mind on our known challenges, and highlights that there's also other things that we need to be thinking about as well.
