Aro Valley, peg o' my heart

I live in an urban-design utopia.

You know those urban-design or architect's drawings that show idealised settings where everything is tidy and beautiful and there are small knots people walking down the paths, sitting on the artfully designed seating and wandering on the grassed areas? And you know how you expect the reality to be desolate and windswept with clots of rubbish around the base of the trees and no people except a couple of squinty-eyed fourteen-year-olds shiftily smoking cigarettes?

When I walk out into Aro Valley, it actually looks like the drawings.

There are people on the basketball court playing basketball, toddlers playing in the children's playground with their parents, groups of people sitting on the grass in the park hanging out with their friends, more groups of people lingering next to the community centre because they've run into other people they know and stopped to chat.

I've heard that it's the most used public space in Wellington.

I walk three mins to the dairy, cafe, video shop. Stop in at the community garden. Nip across the road to the vegetable market on Sunday mornings, stopping on the way home to pick up a baguette at the bakery. Walk 10 mins more to work or into town.

Imagine if everyone could live somewhere like this. Then we'd really get somewhere on climate change without anyone even feeling like they were giving up anything (except being stuck in traffic).

And on a day when the our government's taking its "emissions reduction" intentions to Copenhagen while simultaneously announcing a $2.4 billion roading project, that's a vision I've got to hold on to.