Anchor organisations in Auckland: Rolling constructively with neoliberalism?

Abstract

The city of Auckland has recently been reconstituted through the amalgamation of eight territorial authorities and their constituencies. The new city was designed to provide coordinated economic, infrastructural and resource management for a territorial social economy given form and meaning by economic and infrastructural connections and daily movements of people and things. In this paper, we examine how this rationale has been translated into a vision for making and performing Auckland as a unitary space and ask whether the initial excitement over the new city has been captured as potential for delivering a more progressive city. We explore the shift from sustainability to liveability as a guiding imaginary for a new Auckland and the formation of the Auckland Anchors network as a group that might play a leadership role in shaping it. We conclude that whilst the process of amalgamation undermined much of its potential to achieve a more coordinated metropolitan governance, it has revealed possibilities for the practice of a new constructive urban politics.