How Auckland’s growth came to be officially denied — (Chapter 20 of The Utopia Thieves) IN 1977, Professor John L Roberts, head of the school of government at Victoria University of Wellington, wrote, of Auckland’s growth, that: . . . there is widespread uneasiness about this concentration of political power away from Wellington. It is now a political orthodoxy…

The End of the Settler Contract — (Chapter 20 of The Utopia Thieves) ONE of the most interesting things about the Maori and Pasifika protest movements of the 1970s was that they did not strive to re-establish or re-normalise old folkways in the face of modernity, so much as to assert a ‘right to the city’ on…

The Unexpected Revival of the Pastoralists — (Chapter 18 of The Utopia Thieves) IN 2014, the Māori-issues commentator Morgan Godfery put up a perceptive blog post about the impact of a growing multiculturalism, and neoliberalism’s painful adjustments, on New Zealand society since the 1960s. I’ve kept a careful note of the following paragraph: When you peel away…

How the Kiwi Riviera became a Pākehā Riviera — (Chapter 15 of The Utopia Thieves) IN FACT, if we look at New Zealand and Australia and the way that the great majority of those countries’ colonists inhabit something akin to a Mediterranean Riviera, one comes to be struck, eventually, by the thought that the closest parallel to the colonisation…

The Social Contract and the post-World War II Suburb — (Chapter 16 of The Utopia Thieves) PERHAPS the greatest myth of the frontier, the West, rurality and the New World is that of individualism: the libertarian homesteader and do-it-yourself farmer. Or, the self-sufficient rural laborer who can mend anything with a piece of Number 8 wire, as we say in…

How New Zealand pursued a Mediterranean form of colonisation — (Chapter 14 of The Utopia Thieves) THAT settler colonialism has gone hand in hand with urbanisation is just as true of far-flung New Zealand, Anglophone settler-dom’s final frontier, as it is of the United States. Indeed, a good case could be made for the argument that settler colonialism was more…

Was the myth of the West a pretext for the US Senate gerrymander? Even one originator of the phrase ‘Wild West’ thought so. — (Chapter 13 of The Utopia Thieves) A FEW years ago I came across an old-time book called Western Wilds, by J. H. Beadle. More fully, Western Wilds, And The Men Who Redeem Them: An Authentic Narrative, Embracing An Account Of Seven Years Travel And Adventure In The Far West, first…

Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism and the Unwelcoming City: An Introduction to Part Two of The Utopia Thieves — TO RECAPITULATE, between the Second World War and the 1970s, the world of Anglophone economics was ripe for a revolution. A revolution which, as we have seen from the last four chapters, 9 through 12, could have happened. But, ultimately, the revolution never happened. And a large part of the…

How the Textbooks Might Have Been: A brief introduction to Chapters 9 through 12 of The Utopia Thieves — IN the abstract to his ‘Credo’, Paul Samuelson recorded that “At war’s end, introductory economics textbooks were overdue for a revolutionary advance.” And yet, many of the old pre-New Deal and pre-World War II economic verities, including an atomistic vision of the economy, would ultimately be restored.