Abstract: In 2010, Auckland’s ‘super-city’ governance reforms created Australasia’s largest (in area) unitary metropolitan authority by merging eight territorial councils into a single Auckland Council. This paper investigates the background to, debate over, and significance of the new Auckland Council, in the context of contemporary governance of major Australasian cities. We argue that the Auckland reforms demand critical scholarly attention because of their emerging effects on spatial planning across the Auckland region, and on the wider New Zealand polity. Moreover, the Auckland super-city offers a distinctive and rich contrast with comparable Australian metropolitan governance frameworks. The Auckland governance changes demand pressing scholarly attention for several critical reasons: they (1) sharply re-scale the relationship between central and local governments in context of weak national urban policy guidance; (2) re-assert local government roles in local and regional development; (3) attempt to strengthen spatial planning in response to a dominant long-run pattern of automobile-based transport planning driven urban development; (4) stress an urban design paradigm that pushes against expansive land-use planning in Auckland; and (5) raise questions over democratic gaps in the collaborative governance of the region while offering opportunities for new modes of regional political action. Given the reciprocal planning exchanges and current trajectories between Australasian cities, comparing Auckland reforms with recent regional planning developments in Brisbane/South East Queensland, as this paper does, offers considerable insights for urbanists; particularly, the strategic management of rapidly-growing second-order Australasian cities within the context of a shifting locus of global urbanisation to the wider Asia-Pacific region.