History
The Auckland CBD started to become a defined (if slightly less extensive) area from early on, starting in the 1840s with the first European colonisation of the area. This was mainly due to the increasing concentration of businesses, and especially retail, along Queen Street, which still to this day forms the 'spine' of the area. In 1841, just one year after the European founding, the census counted approximately 2,000 people, with "mechanics" the largest group at 250, and other groups of note being 150 agricultural labourers, 100 shopkeepers, 100 domestic servants, and 125 "upper class members".
Initially the area also contained many manufacturing businesses, though these started to move to other areas later on, the flight becoming especially marked around the 1950s. A beginning exodus of retailers to suburban shopping malls was halted by increased construction of parking buildings and a concentration on specialty services and retail over the type of supermarket and mall shopping that was created in places like Pakuranga from 1965 onwards.
Residential numbers in the inner city (including the inner suburbs) were also declining in the 20th century from as early as the 1920s. In the two-mile zone surrounding the CBD, there were approximately 70,000 people in 1926, with only around 50,000 in 1966 - a change made even more marked by the development of the remainder of Auckland's population, which grew more than fourfold in the same timeframe. In the 1990s, only a token population of around 1,400 was still residing within the actual CBD, though this was to grow substantially with a boom of new apartment buildings around the turn of the millennium. Around 24,000 apartment units exist as of 2010.
Read more about this topic: Auckland CBD
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)