Goal 6

A Quality Compact Urban Form

Auckland's compact urban form features a network of well designed urban and rural centres and neighbourhoods. Centres have distinctive roles and functions reflecting their place within the region and the needs of the people and communities they serve, both now and into the future. Surrounding neighbourhoods provide a range of housing and lifestyle choices and are designed to build strong, inclusive and sustainable communities. Future development will be focused around centres that are liveable, walkable places with a wide range of jobs, businesses, housing, recreation and other services and facilities, connected along major corridors with high quality public transport.

This goal is about where people live and work, where new retail and business will locate, and where and how key infrastructure will be developed.

This goal provides an emphasis for the future on:

  • Managing future urban growth by promoting more compact development in well-designed and accessible intensive regional and town centres.
  • Avoiding spreading the effects of urbanisation over the greater area.
  • Remodelling existing low-density suburbs to improve their resilience to future change.
  • Improving urban design and development quality.
  • Protecting valued natural landscapes, biodiversity and heritage features.

Opportunities

High quality, higher-density, mixed-use development in and around centres and transport corridors provides the following opportunities:

  • Greater housing, business, employment, transport and lifestyle choices.
  • Improving Auckland's urban design quality and public spaces.
  • Opportunities to encourage people to walk, cycle, and be out and about in centres and neighbourhoods which can directly benefit people's health, perceptions of safety and their connection to their community.
  • Each transport and land use decision is potentially ‘city shaping' and provides an opportunity to move towards a more sustainable region.
  • Neighbourhood scale projects provide opportunities for people to be involved in decision-making processes that directly affect them.
  • Improving the quality of buildings and local environments.
  • Auckland's famously low density suburban lifestyles and high car ownership and car dependency can be reversed, over time, by committing to developing quality intensification and liveable communities integrated with passenger transport.
  • Sustainable building design and construction allows more resource efficient development.

Challenges

The region's low density urban form is particularly resource hungry. As critical resources (such as transport fuel) become more expensive, we will be challenged to transform the way we live. The impacts of climate change, including coastal erosion, flooding, instability and extreme weather events could threaten the viability of some of the region's centres and neighbourhoods, as well as the infrastructure that connects and supports them.

Some of the main challenges relating to Goal 6 are:

  • Moving into the future, the region will need to accommodate more people and provide for an increasingly diverse population. This will require providing places for more housing, more employment, and more social activity. 
  • Demographic changes will alter settlement and activity patterns in the region, for example, with increased demand for accessible housing from the growing cohort of older people. 
  • Widening disparities between communities could see concentrations of deprivation in some neighbourhoods.
  • Limited opportunities for comprehensive development of significant sites.
  • Lack of infrastructure capacity and investment.
  • Community resistance to change.
  • Lack of alignment of policy, funding and implementation across councils and central government.
  • Pressure on rural and coastal areas from development and changing land use practices.
  • Planning and regulatory processes that discourage, rather than enable, desired development.

Indicative Strategic Responses

Shift required to meet goal  Indicative Strategic responses which will contribute to meeting the goal
Put people at the centre of our thinking and action
  • Shift the focus from simply ‘accommodating growth' towards achieving quality development outcomes for Auckland's residents.
  • Plan deliberately for social objectives in centres and neighbourhoods and ensure that planning and investment reduce and avoid geographic concentrations of deprivation.
  • Increase connectedness within the suburbs and between suburbs and centres.
  • Take an integrated multi-agency approach to neighbourhood development which considers social, economic, cultural and environmental factors collectively.
Build a carbon neutral future • Integrate urban design, land use and transport planning in a manner that reduces reliance on private vehicles.
• Develop walkable mixed use, intensified centres linked by passenger transport.
• Enhance transport choices and prioritise walking, cycling and passenger transport ahead of cars.
• Ensure new buildings are designed to be energy efficient.
Reduce our ecological footprint • Continue to develop compact settlements along passenger transport routes.
• Protect the region's finite natural resources and biodiversity by reducing land take for urbanisation and managing rural growth.
• Support, promote and demonstrate sustainable building practices.
• Ensure commercial, industrial and retail building retail design encourages the efficient use of urban land.
• Collaborate with adjacent regions to ensure policy alignment for managing land use and development on regional boundaries.
Integrate thinking, planning, investment and action
  • Increase large scale public sector led urban redevelopment, which has positive sustainability outcomes.
  • Provide greater certainty for future planning and investment by better understanding the region's centres, corridors and business areas' roles, functions and inter-relationships.
  • Increase the use of whole of government place-based approaches that are combined with multi-disciplinary master planning.
  • Ensure land use decisions take social and economic considerations into account, particularly access to transport choices, employment opportunities and essential services.
  • Prioritise resources, assemble land and provide incentives in a manner that focuses quality development in preferred areas.
  • Improve planning processes to enable redevelopment and intensification in centres.
Value te Ao Māori • Ensure urban form and design embrace Māori culture and values.
Think in generations, not years
  • Ensure that short and long-term decisions support the delivery of a quality compact settlement form.
  • Plan for having an increasingly diverse community in the future
Create prosperity based on sustainable practices
  • Promote economic development that uses land and resources sustainably.
  • Intensify development in town centres.
  • Redevelop under-utilised ‘brown field' land.
  • Increase productivity by supporting business agglomeration and research.
Activate citizenship
  • Provide opportunities for communities to influence the design of their centres and neighbourhoods.
  • Encourage stewardship by ensuring that physical design promotes social connectivity and community cohesion.