Urban design controls and city development in a New Zealand context: reflections on recent experiences in Auckland's urban core
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the effectiveness of the Resource Management Act (being the statutory context within which all urban development in New Zealand takes place) in promoting high quality urban planning and urban design outcomes. Following a brief history of planning legislation, the broad purpose of the RMA is indicated and recent concerns in respect of the Act’s capacity to cope with the urban environment outlined. The way in which the RMA deals with urban development approvals is then summarized. The paper then focuses on the changing context of urban development in central Auckland, and the pressures that have led to a much greater focus on urban design issues within New Zealand’s largest metropolis. In response, a number of recent initiatives aimed at achieving high quality urban design outcomes, introduced by Auckland City Council, are outlined. A key question then becomes how effective might these measures be in securing high quality urban development? In order to address this question the paper turns in more detail to the provisions of the RMA, and identifies a number of impediments to achieving high quality urban development. Particular attention is given to the process adopted for considering the effects of development, this being the de facto technique of design assessment for all development, including that in an urban context. Recent examples of significant urban developments are discussed in respect of this assessment process, and other RMA related matters. The paper concludes by briefly comparing the New Zealand situation with aspects of urban planning and urban design processes that have been developed with notable success in Vancouver, a city with many similarities to Auckland.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".