‘World’s Most Liveable City’ rankings, compiled by the sorts of magazines that sell very well in airports, are among the stranger neoliberal phenomena. The sort of ‘global cities’ we’re all meant to celebrate, centres of tech or financial booms, such as London, New York, San Francisco, Moscow, or Mumbai, always score poorly.

Those that do well, by and large, are cities in residual European welfare states like Copenhagen, Munich, or Vienna, heavily controlled East Asian capitalist cities like Seoul, Tokyo, or Singapore, or, usually, the big cities of Canada and Oceania – Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, the latter of which has just been awarded ‘world’s most liveable’ by The Economist. Fancifully, you could argue this shows a sort of suppressed desire for the social peace of a welfare society among the people—like The Economist—most responsible for discrediting that very idea.

The first-place award was immediately criticised by some who know the city; for ignoring the disproportionate poverty of its Maori communities, or for ignoring its housing problems. Having spent a little time in Auckland a few years ago and learning of its ‘liveable’ status, I found it incredibly puzzling, and searched in vain for the vaunted ‘liveability’ in a sprawling suburban city—in extent comparable to London, but with around an eighth of its population—with rudimentary public transport, gridlocked traffic, and unaffordable housing, a problem that has only gotten worse, with Auckland now the fourth most expensive city in the world for housing, and recently claimed to have had among the highest levels of homelessness in the world.

It seemed that its ‘liveable’ appeal—aside from the glorious light, the sea, and the relaxed multiculturalism—derived at least in part from it being a place for tech billionaires to stash their money, expecting an On the Beach-style future where only the antipodes survive the apocalypse; and this has surely been exacerbated by New Zealand’s relative insulation from Covid-19, with people there managing to live a ‘normal’ life at the price of completely sealed borders.

Central Auckland is an ultra-high-density cluster of offices and luxury flats, often built on top of more modest Victorian and art deco buildings, which almost immediately gives way to an ultra-low density expanse of modest, single-storey, single-family houses beyond its tightly drawn inner motorway. But at its edges are two clusters of flats built as an experiment in socialist modernism comparable, in a small way, to anything happening at the same time in Europe.

Next to the steep fall of the Grafton gully, near the University, is the Symonds Street flats, and at the other end of the centre, next to Myers Park, the Greys Avenue flats. Both of these were designed in large part by exiles from Nazi Germany who had escaped, after some convoluted journeys, to New Zealand at the turn of the 1940s; both of them were part of the programme of what was then the world’s most radical Labour government; both of them show a vision of ‘liveability’ that has nothing to do with the tastes of tech billionaires or neoliberal rags.

New Zealand Labour first won a parliamentary majority in 1935, and governed until 1949. In the account of one of its supporters, the economist and historian W. B. Sutch, in his Penguin Special The Quest for Security in New Zealand, one of the great books about the formation of a social democracy, Labour ‘had taken office at the end of the worst depression in the twentieth century. It had provided housing, hospital treatment and social security at a level which for a time led the world… above all, it had produced in colonial New Zealand the Western world’s nearest approach to economic and social equality; the first experiment in making the average income typical income’.

Part of this was an immense programme of state housing, usually in suburban estates designed by the government architect Gordon Wilson, using local materials, and with a ‘cabinet policy that no two houses would look alike’. This legacy is well known and often celebrated, a combination of Labourism and suburbanism that has always been popular in this part of the world, in a country where land has—despite Maori protests—often been treated as an infinite resource. But what Gordon Wilson did in the inner city was more daring.

Famously, many architects and designers trained in modernism fled Nazi Germany and the countries it annexed, like Austria and Czechoslovakia, to Britain during the 1930s. Regarded by a xenophobic and ignorant British government as ‘enemy aliens’ at the start of the war, many of these were deported to ‘the dominions’, especially New Zealand and Australia. Among these were the famous Viennese architect Ernst Plischke, and lesser known figures like Friedrich Neumann, who renamed himself Fred Newman.

Many were initially unable to practice in New Zealand—their continental qualifications were not recognised—and were subject to deep suspicion, but Wilson snapped them up to work for the housing department. Plischke is often credited with the stunning, monumental Dixon Street Flats in Wellington while in Wilson’s team (though this is disputed), and Wellington became a testing zone for a New Zealand architecture that would move beyond the ubiquitous dream of a suburban—council or otherwise—house on a ‘quarter-acre’ lot, propagated by figures like W.B. Sutch (for whom Plischke designed a house) at the Wellington Architecture Centre.

But in Auckland, much larger and more sprawling than Wellington, these places were subject to widespread suspicion. Wilson and the Labour government intended Symonds Street flats to be propaganda for a new socialist way of living in the inner city. As Lauren Speer and Julia Gatley point out, they were widely publicised; ‘at the time of construction’, they write, ‘the Labour Government worked to overcome… negative presumptions through newspaper advertisements and opinion columns.’ The year after the completion of the Symonds Street Flats, an article in Home and Building emphasised the positive aspects of the scheme, concluding that the building provided ‘healthy, convenient accommodation… in the heart of the city’.

The flats consist of one curved low-rise block facing the street, connected by walkways to another, more linear, in the bosky green space of the Grafton gully. In a city where buildings habitually ignore their topography, sometimes looking like they’d desperately prefer to be in Surrey than in the south Pacific, it was thrilling to chance upon this building when I visited a few years ago—something that has noticed where it is!—yet it was at the time worn-out and half derelict. Despite the dire need for affordable housing in the city, it has been recently restored as student flats, not as state housing.

Greys Avenue, meanwhile, was a slum clearance scheme in Auckland’s Chinatown – New Zealand Labour was relatively progressive for its time and place (it supported the Spanish Republic and had overwhelming support from Maori), but was deeply racist towards the Chinese population; rather ironically most of the interesting things about central Auckland today come from its large Chinese presence. The flats that replaced this place, by Wilson’s international team, closely resemble the pre-Nazi housing schemes in Berlin – low-rise, green, modest, and cubic.

Lower Greys Avenue flats were designed in 1941 but not opened until 1947, with the long gestation ascribed to opposition to the notion of high-density housing – their construction was an executive decision from the government, over the heads of a local council that considered detached housing more suitable for Auckland, despite this being right in the heart of a big city. Lower Greys Avenue flats are in good condition, on a tree-lined, sloping street, but Wilson’s later, slightly more Brutalist but equally elegant and crisp nine-storey Upper Greys Avenue flats were recently demolished. The plan is apparently to build council housing on the site, but this time much more dense, despite there being a huge amount of (private) low density housing nearby.

This sad fate might stem from the hostility towards these buildings at the time, in a country which overwhelmingly favoured suburbia; something Plischke summarised by saying that New Zealanders believed flats were only ‘for prostitutes and intellectuals’. Ironically, Auckland city centre is now full of—usually very basic—20- and 30-storey blocks of private ‘luxury flats’, with the much more humane solution offered by Wilson’s team, of mid-rise social housing blocks around pleasant green squares, being rejected in favour of an alternation between ridiculously low density suburbs and a ridiculously high density centre, each equally unaffordable.

The current Labour government, which has recently gained the biggest mandate since the ’40s, has often proposed returning to mass state house-building in modest blocks of flats, and Jacinda Ardern has even named a small estate of flats by Fred Newman has her favourite building; yet her administration has built a tiny fraction of what was built in that era. In any case, these buildings by penniless refugees from fascism, built as affordable housing for working-class people, still provide a powerful alternative to the idea of success through closed borders that open only to the super-rich. The Economist might not like it, but there’s no reason why the many people in Auckland in need of decent housing should care what they think.