11 Views of Auckland (2010)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher /
Cover design: Brett Cross & Ellen Portch

11 Views of Auckland. Edited by Jack Ross & Grant Duncan. Preface by Jack Ross. Social and Cultural Studies, 10. ISSN 1175-7132. Albany: Massey University, 2010. ii + 210 pp.

Contents:

1. Cluny Macpherson, "Auckland’s Pacific Narratives"


2. Graeme MacRae, "The Bay that Was, a Park that Isn’t and the City that Might Have Been"


3. Ann Dupuis, "Shutting the Gates: Auckland’s Urban Development in Transition?"


4. Warwick Tie, "Between Itself: The Political Economy of the Metropolis"


5. Eleanor Rimoldi, "Auckland City: Public Life and Civil Society"


6. Isabel Michell, "Auckland City: Becoming Places"


7. Jennifer Lawn, "Soft-boiled in Ponsonby: The Topographies of Murder in the Crime Fiction of Charlotte Grimshaw and Alix Bosco"


8. Peter Lineham, "The Religious Traditions of the North Shore: Pluralism and Unity"


9. Jack Ross, "The Stokes Point Pillars"


10. David Ishii, "Immigration settlement: Never Just about Language"


11. Grant Duncan, "The Making of the Super City"

Samples:

Social and Cultural Studies

Available:

Dot Cavanagh
School Receptionist
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Massey University
Private Bay 102 904
North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland

RRP: $NZ 20 (+ $2 postage & packing)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Graeme Beattie, "11 Views of Auckland." Beattie's Book Blog (7 February 2011):
   

   
   The College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Albany Campus, Massey University, are happy to invite you to celebrate the publication of 11 Views of Auckland: An anthology of essays by members of the College, Volume 10 in our ongoing Monograph Series "Social and Cultural Studies."
   
   The book will be launched by Massey University’s Vice-Chancellor, The Hon Steve Maharey, at a special launch price of $15 [RRP: $20], in the Study Centre Staff Lounge, East Precinct, Albany Campus, Auckland, on Thursday 17th February from 5.00-6.30 p.m.



2. Jennifer Little, "Urban myths and marvels evoked in Auckland essays." Massey University Website. (18 February 2011):
   

   
   Murders, motorways and migrants are some of the subjects of a new book, 11 Views of Auckland, by Albany-based academics from the University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
   ...
   Each is a unique exploration on an aspect of Auckland’s past or present, its complexities and contrasts, penned by academics from sociology, history, English, linguistics, public policy, anthropology and political studies at the University’s Albany campus.



3. Steve Matthewman, "Review: Jack Ross and Grant Duncan (eds.) (2010) 11 Views of Auckland. Albany: Massey University." New Zealand Sociology vol. 26, issue 2 (2011): 117-19:
   

   
   This co-edited book is the tenth in Massey University’s Social and Cultural Studies series. The series aims to collect high quality multidisciplinary work organised around a particular theme or research methodology. Here we have eleven scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, education, fine arts, literary and religious studies, social policy and sociology, offering their views of New Zealand’s most multicultural city. Each chapter has its specific point of entry and object of study: a people (tangata o te moana nui a Kiwa), a suburb (Freemans Bay), an architectural style (gated communities, skyscrapers), an island (Waiheke), literature (crime fiction, commemoration), an activity (city governance, immigration, religious practice and walking).
   ...
   As with any multi-authored collection there are a range of writing styles displayed. In this publication some are straightforwardly academic (Peter Lineham), others more personal reflection (Graeme MacRae), while yet others merge these two positions (David Ishii). Still, all fall within the scope of Massey’s series which is to offer arts scholars interesting material which avoids unnecessary jargon. Inevitably your judgement of a book will be marked by what you bring to it and what you want out of it. Approaching it as a teacher I was immediately gratified to see chapters like Cluny Macpherson’s one on ‘Auckland’s Pacific Narratives’ that I can use when stood in front of cohorts of visiting American students. Although I hope this comprehensive overview reaches a wider audience because some popular myths deserve to be punctured. As Cluny demonstrates, the Pacific migration of common sense knowledge is actually the sixth migratory wave. As a researcher I was interested to see Ann Dupuis’ work on gated communities (although my own “Gated Life” project remains stubbornly in the bottom drawer). I should also add that I found this volume as easy to read for pleasure as it was for work. Jack Ross promises the reader a ‘quick fix’ rather than ‘a complete immersion’, but I found it much more satisfying than that.



4. Sarah Coddington, "Lecturer wants poems written on bridge pillars." North Shore Times (Tuesday, 15 March, 2011): 30:
   

   
   It seems poems gracing pillars of the mighty Auckland Harbour Bridge and telling tales of North Shore's past were never meant to be.
   
   Massey University English lecturer Jack Ross spent many hours collating poems for a Shore art-based project that never went ahead.
   ...
   "The first criterion to qualify for a spot was you had to be dead. It was very hard to choose poets and you needed a diversity of people with a connection to the Shore," he says.

[Sarah Coddington, "Lecturer wants poems written on bridge pillars"
(North Shore Times (Tuesday, 15 March, 2011): 30]

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Authors Graeme MacRae, Grant Duncan, Jack Ross, Eleanor Rimoldi, David Ishii, Cluny Macpherson and Warwick Tie at the book launch yesterday. (Absent were Ann Dupuis, Jennifer Lawn and Isabel Michell)
[17 February, 2011]

Complete Review:
Jennifer Little. "Urban myths and marvels evoked in Auckland essays." Massey University Website. (18 February 2011):

Murders, motorways and migrants are some of the subjects of a new book, 11 Views of Auckland, by Albany-based academics from the University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Edited by English lecturer Dr Jack Ross and public policy lecturer Associate Professor Grant Duncan, the book is printed and published by the University.

The essays are by no means gushing endorsements for the metropolis – home to an estimated 1.25 million people, or about a third of the nation’s population.

Each is a unique exploration on an aspect of Auckland’s past or present, its complexities and contrasts, penned by academics from sociology, history, English, linguistics, public policy, anthropology and political studies at the University’s Albany campus.

That the writers all live and work in Auckland is pertinent to the spirit of these essays, which evoke personal experiences and insights within the framework of their particular discipline.

Thoughtful commentaries on urban experiences include Dr Isabel Michell’s Auckland City: Becoming Places. She describes the pleasures and perils of being an inner city pedestrian who suffers “near hits, noise and air pollution, and the annoying experience of what might be called pedestrianas interruptus: the sudden cessation of footpath in favour of road.”

She reflects on the need for “life in or between buildings”, lamenting the lack of appealing public spaces through which a diverse muster of humanity can flow or congregate.

English and Media Studies lecturer Dr Jennifer Lawn delves into crime fiction set in Auckland as pathway into the links between real crime, place and urban experience in Soft-boiled in Ponsonby: The Topographies of Murder in the Crime Fiction of Charlotte Grimshaw and Alix Bosco.

Real crimes, reported and sensationalised in the media, can provide a backdrop or echo for imagined ones. "Grimshaw's Auckland is scarcely fit for human habitation; it is waterlogged, slimy, rotting, hostile to the scale and pace of the human frame – yet curiously sublime, even daemonic...” she writes.

Anthropologist Dr Graeme MacRae traces a fascinating history of his neighbourhood in Freeman’s Bay in The Bay that Was, a Park that Isn’t and the City that Might Have Been. He traces its evolution from community-oriented council housing to hub of commercial development and victim of “social cleansing.”

Sociologist Associate Professor Ann Dupuis reflects on the emergence of gated communities, and Dr Warwick Tie explores the link between aesthetics and economics in relation to downtown Auckland’s glass-walled Metropolis building as a symbol of precarious corporate ethos in Between Itself: The Political Economy of the Metropolis

Associate Professor Grant Duncan adds a poetic touch from the vantage point of a bus passenger in his essay The Making of the Super City. "The bus climbs steeply to the apex of the Bridge, a place where every traveller gets a fleeting million-dollar view, and this ride impresses itself as one of the great ways to experience the brutal velocities, the pounding sensations and the beautiful vistas from unexpected windows that create the way the hapless denizen takes part in the life of the city – just another body going along with the city's great lava-flows of traffic that congeal and contest within the channels designed for them by anonymous planners."

He asks the reader to look beyond the potentially "sleep-inducing boredom" that the subject of local government may invoke to the basic relevance of urban policy making; ""How do people, politics and social trends shape the places we inhabit and the ways we experience life, move about and get things done in the city?"

The book is the 10th monograph in a series started by the former School of Cultural and Social Studies.

Dr Ross’ quirky essay describes his involvement in a thwarted art project to engrave poetry on Auckland’s harbour bridge supports. He says he hopes the book will provoke readers with its “truthful depiction of how the city seems to each of us right now,” that will “grow in value as Auckland’s various futures unfold and interlock.”

Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey, who launched the book, praised its rich, diverse content and described it as “a time capsule of Auckland today that will become a valuable reference point for how the city changes and evolves.”

[Graham Fletcher: "Untitled,"
from Lounge Room Tribalism (2009-2010)]

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