Some things are too important to demolish, argues architect Caro Robertson.

Toby Morris once wrote, “The value of what our artists contribute is clear. It is inspiration and identity. It’s mental wellbeing on a national scale.” The City to Sea Bridge is a publicly accessible series of large-scale artworks, first and foremost. Secondly, it is a generous connection between the civic centre Te Ngākau and the waterfront of Pōneke Wellington – the city’s rec room, if you will. Watch people stop unintentionally on their way from here to there, mesmerised by the harbour view or the tamariki clambering over rough-hewn timber shaped into ngā manu, and I defy you to say there is not something extraordinary about this place. The materials are earthy, the artworks solid in their abstracted elements of Aotearoa’s landscape, flora, and mātauranga. The whole experience is grounding – ironic for a bridge.

Places like this are hard to create. Name a handful if you can. I can’t think of a civic space where I have enjoyed more hours than the City to Sea Bridge. Wellington City Council is set to make a decision on the future of the earthquake-damaged bridge: to demolish it or invest in extensive repairs, which the council estimates will cost between $90 to $230 million. In Joel MacManus’s recent Windbag column, On the City to Sea Bridge and the power of letting go, he relates some of his magical experiences of the spaces and then says we should… let it go. But where else will we have these moments? If there were even one other space in the city that provided this quality, I could have mustered a sigh and said goodbye. There isn’t. And there’s so much more to it.

Partly, it is a matter of use. At least the Central Library is frequented by city residents from all walks of life, but only a comparative handful will see the inside of the town hall. The bridge is a far more visible, accessible civic experience. I am not a die-hard builtscape conservationist, having submitted in favour of a more cost-effective replacement plan for the library. The built heritage of Pōneke largely tilts European, and generally, in Aotearoa, city-making by Māori artists and architects has been rare. So, in my view, it is criminal to save the library in its entirety – arguably one Athfield building among many – and even more so the town hall, an Italianate import, and then write off the bridge as one step too far.

This year, I convened the Te Kāhui Whaihanga National Architecture Awards and toured Aotearoa, looking at the range of recent architectural outputs. Seeing so many projects in a short time, it is crystal clear that where the client group is coming from te ao Māori, values differ from those mainstream Pākehā values that usually dominate the built realm. This results in a different – and, I would argue, more grounded – built outcome.

The genesis of the City to Sea Bridge was an optimistic time at Wellington City Council. Their keenness to make a social, artistic place befitting and reflecting our city identity overrode other priorities. The timing was such that, through Māori advocacy to have agency in the design of the city – specifically the development of the square (embarrassingly in response to tikanga missteps by the original Pākehā designers involving tuatara) – the procurement processes for the design work had Māori leadership.

The selection of Māori architect Rewi Thompson and contemporary Māori artists Matt Pine, Toi te Rito Maihi and Paratene Matchitt, along with other talented and open-minded team members, resulted in a particular expression of place through their design. The fishing net flung over in the form of patterned brick paving, the split mountain, a pair of seabirds, a stand of tall poles with symbols evoking navigation and the flag of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, Te Wepu – these are relevant here. This expression of Māori stories is also somewhat astounding if you know what you’re seeing.  “Matchitt’s ‘celestial pou’ made a stand for tino rangatiratanga in the present moment,” wrote Anna Marie White, a principal adviser at Toi Māori Aotearoa/Māori Arts New Zealand, in a report titled The Significance of the City-to-Sea Bridge. By using this iconography, the complexity of our history is written here.

Walking through artworks is a very tectonic experience. It affects us residents at a subconscious level – particularly those of us who have spent hours there watching the day, with kids totally absorbed, looking out to sea from a sheltered place. It is rare to have this experience in Wellington; usually, our civic spaces are energisingly windswept.

This wonderful combination of art, comfort and connection is not a guaranteed outcome. Look closer at the comparatively soulless alternative put forward in the Te Ngākau master plan – a narrower footbridge and a wider ground-level pedestrian crossing. While I know in theory that it is possible to recreate the bridge’s magic in a contemporary form, I can’t see any sign of the governance and strategic planning steps that led to the excellence of the City to Sea Bridge. I appreciate that Pōneke is beset with beleaguered pipes and poor historical choices weighing us down, meaning the council is not in a place of fiscal optimism. Belts need tightening. Hard choices need to be made. But this is not just another building. To demolish this functional and truly specific civic experience would be a loss to our storytelling and our daily experience of the city as art.

In concert with the City Gallery and library, the City to Sea Bridge is a wonderful outing, specific to Wellington in a new era of international Instagrammability – and exactly the sort of day that makes me love being a Wellingtonian. I think it will identify my kids as Wellingtonians. They, at 10 and 12, both fully back this swell of support, mystified that the bridge’s removal would even be contemplated.

As cities get denser, they rely on public open space to provide civic living rooms and yards. Functioning public spaces are rare and hard to design. Te Ngākau is designed to copy the experience of an Italian piazza but without quite enough of the civic pedestrian network and throughways that typically activate such a space. Te Ngākau is particularly suffering at the moment from the closure of the library and the town hall, the demolition and rebuilding of the Municipal Office Building, and the temporary closure of the City Gallery. But I would make the case that the City to Sea Bridge has functioned much more effectively as a town square than the square itself. People flow across it coming from various directions, meeting in the middle, and heading on their way.

There is always a tension between design for public safety and shelter, and in this case, that tension is nicely resolved by allowing a bridge and public furniture to coexist. The City to Sea Bridge acts as a lookout, a place of shelter, a playground, a series of public artworks at a scale you can interact with, and a connector of spaces and people. It is too special to take down thoughtlessly. Recreating the conditions to bring about another space like this is unlikely. The aliveness of connection between sea and city was a hard problem to solve and took a team of exceptional talent to do it. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, though.

The critical point here is the shortsighted removal of something world-class in its local expression, with no decent plan to put something as good or better to express our civic heart. Floating around this discussion are allegations made about the cost of strengthening the bridge. The research to date, in my view, is not solid enough to act on. The lead contractor of the bridge’s original construction, Trevor Griffiths, told the council he was sceptical of the estimated costs and he believed there could be cheaper repair options. Our city’s creative engineers are experts in shifting ground and are proposing solutions that would cost and disrupt less than the one presented in the consultation, which notably lacks supporting information. They point out that much of the work, such as the sea wall strengthening, would be required anyway.

In the meantime, work is going into revisioning Te Ngākau, and to me, the published proposals are underwhelming. Proposing more buildings on reclaimed land that is known to be slipping is a bizarre response to any risk they have identified in the City to Sea Bridge’s structure. I won’t even bring the existing embodied carbon load into this – carbon pricing would throw this whole discussion out the window. Restoring biodiversity and shore ecosystems that double as public spaces – as per Waitangi Park – looks a lot more sensible to me.

Until a similarly Māori-led procurement process has been carried out, a design team gathered, and funding guaranteed, the decision cannot be made. At this rate, we will end up with a years-long Arlington-like hole in our city, while civic money continues to go towards the protection of unremarkable colonial hand-me-downs.

To have an expression of localness at our centre is both inspiration and identity. Until Wellington City Council can prove they have what it takes to bring together another extraordinary feat of coordination and design excellence – which isn’t free – the bridge needs to stay. Fixing it is likely to be both the easier and cheaper option if we still want a city with a beating heart.