For more than 30 years, shipping activity within historic ports has been in rapid decline. Facilities are often relocated to larger and more modernized harbors where the machinery is bigger, the roads are closer, and the waters are deeper. Left behind is a postindustrial waterfront that’s seen by the city as an opportunity for a glamorous maritime makeover. But in the effort to maximize development profits, these face-lifts often erase the industrial beauty marks that make these places unique. In their place, generic recipes are followed for creating comfortable waterfront living: one part cobblestone street, two parts pedestrian walkway, a healthy dose of waterside eateries, with a dash of history through a moored two-mast schooner. The experience may be clean and comfortable, but it’s also terribly bland.

The Wynyard Quarter waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand, is different. It’s a landscape that has been mopped, but not sterilized. Active maritime industries cling to the edges of the site and activate it with a purpose that isn’t sugar-coated. The discord of a lunchtime stroll can include the smell of raw fish being loaded into delivery vans, the cacophony of passengers boarding a ferry to Devonport, the thunderclap of dump trucks towing loads of sand, or the shrill of an orbital sander against the hull of a private yacht worth more than my house. Old rusted rails splice through a patched concrete promenade and veer off to unobvious end points. Industrial silos stand as relics on the site and reinforce the scale and purpose of the surrounding machinery and equipment. While there’s a smell and sound to the site that isn’t always pleasant, it’s anything but dull.

The atmosphere of this working waterfront is unapologetic about the day-to-day operations amid latte-drinking onlookers. It brings to mind how genius loci—the spirit of a place—relies not just on physical form, but also the way people engage with and validate the authenticity of its features.