Auckland city limits need to grow, draft city plan says

Auckland city limits need to grow, draft city plan says

By Pattrick Smellie

March 23 (BusinessDesk) – Auckland will need at least 330,000 new dwellings and another 780 hectares of industrial and commercial land over the next 30 years, meaning it will need to expand its city limits even if it pursues a denser population within its existing boundaries.

That’s a key finding of the Auckland Plan discussion document, published by Auckland mayor Len Brown to coincide with today’s day-long “Auckland Unleashed” strategic planning symposium.

“Auckland may need to transition itself to a new way of doing things and think of alternative growth options as it heads towards creating a quality compact city,” says the document, which appears to favour a continued intensification of the Auckland urban population, but with greater emphasis on provision of urban facilities and higher quality urban and housing design rules.

“One of these transitional options may be to allow for some future lands at the edge of the existing urban areas to be developed from scratch” and some consideration of more intensive development of coastal areas, because of their popularity as places to live.

The plan suggests there are three key areas of opportunity to concentrate on developing Auckland, which coincide also with areas where the city limits might be allowed to expand. The document does not propose abandoning metropolitan urban limits altogether, as some government Ministers have appeared to propose.

Urban limits are seen to have pushed up urban land prices, making inner city living less affordable without achieving intensification goals.

The three key opportunity areas are identified in the north-west of the city, based roughly on the old Waitakere City boundaries, an “international city centre” opportunity based on the current Auckland central business district, and a southern opportunity area to the west of the main highway south, and around the international airport.

On top of this, the Plan proposes four areas of possible growth beyond the current Metropolitan Urban Limits (MUL) in South Auckland – one around the Takanini/Flat Bush area, and others spreading south and west along the southern coast of the Manukau Harbour, close to Papakura.

And for communities inside the existing MUL, the Plan proposes re-categorising as many as 74 currently identifiable population centres across the isthmus under categories including: emergent, market attractive, regeneration, rural village, satellite, and urban village.

It also strongly pushes greater investment in public transport, and suggests the city’s old tram routes – all built to avoid hills while serving major parts of the city – could be exploited again in planning new forms of public transport.

(BusinessDesk)

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