Auckland’s One-Stop Shopping Centre

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31112, 15 July 1966, Page 2

Auckland’s One-Stop Shopping Centre

One-stop shopping centres—places where a housewife can park her car, do all her shopping and have her purchases taken to the car—are a step away from the supermarket and a retail shopping development that are the envy of some women who read about them overseas.

Shopping malls have reached most of New Zealand’s major cities; but it is only in Auckland that a true one-step centre has been buijt There, at Pakuranga, the centre has been built ahead of residential and commercial development It is the nucleus of a town of the future and its promoters prefer to have it called the “town centre” rather than “shopping 'centre.”

Shops usually follow population. Pakuranga’s shops have come first, but they are already besieged by customers, as four Christchurch City Council members saw recently. The councillors, in the course of a fact-finding visit to Auckland, were not on a shopping spree when they went to Pakuranga, but were seeing it as an example of a planned centre. Mr D. W. Simsion, the regional planning officer of the Auckland Regional Authority, who took the visitors to the centre, was almost as enthusiastic about it as the promoters. Before going to Pakuranga the party was shown a “strip” shopping centre developed at Panmure by the Mount Wellington Borough Council, one of the most progressive local bodies in the country’. It has gone into the shop-owning business and even runs a trust hotel, ail of which helps to save the ratepayers money. But Panmure had its problems, the visitors were told, not the least of which was parking. They saw themselves that every space in a

car-parking area was occupied early on a Thursday afternoon, and in the main street angle parking added to traffic difficulties on a busy highway. At Pakuranga parking spaces were hard to find, but they were there in an area ithat provides parks for 1200 cars. This, according to the promoters, allows more than 6000 cars to use the centre on a busy day. Suburban “City” The shopping centre itself is a “city” in the suburbs, providing two department stores, two supermarkets and a variety store and 45 other shops. All are in enclosed malls or have covered walkways, enabling shoppers to shelter from Auckland’s showers. Children can play in open I spaces, there is modern sculpi ture for adults to admire or decry and a totem pole that : has more affinity with the North Island than North : America. In support of its claim to be i a town centre, the area has i a post office, banks, doctor’s : and dentist’s rooms, solici-

tor’s and accountant’s offices, special bus services and a taxi rank. A church, a community hall and a hotel will be built on the site, Plunket rooms have been opened and a child-minding centre is planned for harassed mothers. The promoters estimate that the centre has a “captive” area with a population of 20,000. At present the centre is on its own, relying on motorists from several suburbs to provide its customers, but high-density housing is planned for the land around. The centre was developed by the Fletcher Trust, which built and owns the shops, and which owns and is developing residential land in the district, all a part of the new Manakau city. It may be the first of similar developments in other cities. Mr Simsion, as a town planner, would like to think it is. He told the Christchurch visitors that it was not often that a planner could have a part in and see a centre developed to create a demand rather than to meet it