“Hey Arch-GPT, can you generate a re-designed Auckland for me? And make it more amazing than any person possibly could? And produce a render I can take to the client?”

Reader, I promised you in my last piece a review of the Great Debate, the peak of the 2025 Tāmaki iteration of the Aotearoa Festival of Architecture. Uncharacteristically, I have kept my word and was in (or rather, around) the audience on Friday 26 September as our panellists converged to debate the motion: “AI would design Auckland better than us.”

It’s a topical question, given the panicked picketing surrounding PC120, the harbour crossing hullaballoo, the ailing Auckland Light Rail aspirations, the discussion around de-porting the port, floundering flood recovery and the ever-present saga of sewage in our seas. Tāmaki Makaurau has spent decades mired in infrastructural, architectural and planning issues (and despite it all, remains an absolutely gorgeous place to live), and so the motion proves its relevance: could AI do it better than us (I would like to preface this recount with an emphatic declaration that I support the opposition: that is to say: no. But you’re not here to hear my view on the matter!)?

As is now tradition, six speakers were gathered and assigned to an opposing or affirming side. In a round of 1-2s, each speaker presented their arguments in three minutes before a brief huddle followed by a one-minute summation of the team position. They represent a broad cross-section of the built-environment industry — architecture, urbanism, engineering, publishing, commentating. Our discoursing divas were kept at bay tonight by moderator, timekeeper and slightly corrupt dictator Wallace Chapman (of RNZ fame).

Broadcaster, reporter, generally theatrical speaker, Gordon Harcourt, opened the debate with an impassioned speech for the affirmative side. According to Gordon, Artificial Intelligence isn’t the Terminator, it’s more like… a labrador. In its unending desire to please us, AI will create an Auckland that astounds, our hedonist utopia. Immediately following his populist posturing, some surreptitiously bribe-shaped chocolates made their way from the opposing team’s table into Wallace’s hands.

“He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.” What is the most important thing? It is people. This collectivist maxim formed the foundation of Nicole Stock’s opening salvo for the opposition. AI can’t do like people, and cities are for people. AI can’t negotiate the very human values that go hand-in-hand with the technical problem-solving of citymaking. Nicole has experience as an editor and publisher and it was apparent in the flair of her narrative: the cities we love; the Venices, Tokyos and Lisbons of the world, they are not characterised by the ruthless efficiency of the computational algorithm, but the layers upon layers of history, of happenings and mis-happenings, the sheer humanity of habitation — a palimpsest, to borrow Gordon’s collective noun for a group of architects.

Of course, humans have been in stewardship of our urban environment since the first settlement of the isthmus. Since Auckland has become a teeming world city, what have we done with the place? It took us 70 years to gestate the City Rail Link, we dumped Robbie’s Rapid Rail in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we built the motorways that choke under the weight of our love affair with private automobiles every morning and evening. We built the harbour bridge in ’59, extended it in ’69 after the original scheme was shrunk down (and still didn’t put footpaths or bike lanes or railway tracks on it!), and according to ChatGPT, started discussing a second Waitematā Harbour Crossing in the ‘70s — and we’re still fighting over that today. This was the gist of Mike Quirk’s affirmative rebuttal — people have been designing this city for centuries and what do we have to show for it except infrastructural schemes undergoing brutal public vivisection by value engineering? Mike is diversifying from his engineering background and using his business skills to set up a new office in the city: Artificial Architects R Us are accepting CVs and promising a bold new future where things actually get built rather than just talked about!

Stephanie Miller is an engineer and project director at Holmes, and doubled down on the affirmative’s position that it is in fact all about people — AI is trained on data (about each other) that we collect, and AI will reflect the biases inherent in our collected statistics: exacerbating and creating economic, social, cultural, and political divides and inequities. Do we really need our cities designed by yes-men (Yes-devices? Yes-algorithms? Yes-GPT? The jargon is still nascent) who amplify our mistakes rather than correct them? Humans can right our wrongs — AI will tell us we haven’t made any, and make our problems worse. Miller presented a maxim from engineering school (maybe we do have something to learn from our frenemies from across the disciplinary divide): “garbage in is garbage out” — and the implication was clear: that’s what we’d be faced with if Artificial Architects R Us start winning contracts.

But are we not already faced with a garbage outcome? “Our skyline is monument to economics and ego, our suburbs consume fertile farmland like a malevolent biohazard, we’ve designed motorways as though cars are sacred and yet the traffic fails to flow.” Lindley Naismith, an architect, NZIA fellow and industry legend, doubled down on Mike’s position: we’ve done it for so long and screwed it up, perhaps the computer might do a better job? “We have let profit masquerade as planning,” she said to raucous applause, before loudly declaring that “AI is immune to egos: it doesn’t get the old boy’s network, it cannot be seduced by campaign donations.” Lindley enamoured us with visions of a fairer city, designed not by the public-private profiteer (not designed by a person at all), one where we all live in warm, dry, dense homes well-connected by reliable transport in a compact city filled with clean air, clear water and clean streets: he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. A city of fails turned back into a city of sails by the glorious algorithm, and I have to say that for an inkling of a moment, she nearly had me over to her side!

At some point in the debate, the opposition produced and donned three papier-mâché bird heads: a Red-billed Gull for Nicole, an Australasian Crested Grebe for Stephanie, and a Takahe worn proudly by Jon Rennie, principal at Athfield Architects, who immediately cast a portentous air over Lindley’s promised paradise. The construction process is tedious enough, why would anyone want to add the horrors of a hallucination-prone handbrake to the process? Rennie referenced the neologism “workslop”, a phenomenon where employees are using AI to create low effort output, that then requires more time and input to correct. We design by iteration, by reflection, we choose, we make choices that reflect our values. Immediately after this passionate declaration, he demonstrated the creative potential of the human mind by turning a banana into a penguin and challenged AI to replicate the feat — truth is stranger than fiction. It is surprising how convincing someone can be whilst wearing the disembodied head of a native bird — it seems that the opposing team intended to underscore their humanity with a chaos that only people could come up with.

My clearly declared biases aside, it seemed the audience agreed with me. The applause-volume verification method clearly demonstrated the room was aligned with the opposition — that people are in fact the future and will design the Auckland that tomorrow needs — a climate-friendly Auckland with diverse housing options, with safe and reliable and frequent public transport, welcoming urban realms, clean waterways and with a thriving local economy (for what it’s worth, this writing is brought to you entirely by a human being and proud JAFA). The mutual agreement of the night was here — both teams imagined this glorious future for our shining city (whether we get there through people power or AI action remains to be seen).

On this night, some of our brightest minds (and some engineers) came together on the stage to enthrallingly debate a motion that highlighted some of the pressing issues facing our city and our future to a full house. Our built environment is shifting massively, and there are long-overdue projects happening around Auckland that promise us a better, brighter future in a more people-friendly urban realm — despite our national reticence to build efficiently, it is getting done. We would be remiss to hand it all over to an AI model now, wouldn’t we?

The festival party followed the event in the Q Theatre foyer, a hotbed of post-debate discourse and drinks. When I say this event is the peak of the festival, I really do mean it. After a week and a half of very prim-and-proper lectures, drawing, gawking at buildings, popping into each other’s studios, movie-watching, and networking, the Great Debate bookends the festival proceedings with an intellectually light-hearted evening.

This year’s event was sold out (no surprises, riding on the coattails of last year’s motion: “Queen Street Must Evolve!”), and a room full of slightly tipsy people provided the perfect audience for this year’s piles of paper planes and confectionery corruption. I have given you the slimmest of pickings from each debater’s speeches here. To those of you who missed out or want to hear it all (or those of you wondering how a banana can be turned into a penguin using only the human hands), I can only say I hope you get your tickets in time next year.