Those problems are not just external, like traffic. At council, they're also internal. Council agencies that don't work well together. A governing body that's too weak, with too many councillors beholden primarily to their wards and not the city as a whole. Officials who are, far too often, risk averse. A planning process that has too often put good urban design – the organisation of spaces to achieve a range of people-focused goals – to one side, favouring instead the narrower values of engineering and accounting. One example of that? Auckland Transport has KPIs (key performance indicators) to keep the buses moving, which is good. But they don't have KPIs for trees in streets. And running through all of this, it's rare that Auckland planners, their consultant designers, their managers and the politicians they answer to, come up with genuinely great ideas and have the skills to make them happen in reasonable time. It does happen, for sure. You can't look at Silo Park and North Wharf in the Wynyard Quarter and not admire the triumph of creative determination. But the executive who drove those projects lost his job. Too many good ideas, or something. - www.nzherald.co.nz