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Urban leader - A newsletter for urban design champions

Issue no. INFO 243 | 18 December 2007

Welcome

This regular newsletter will help you champion good urban design in New Zealand. It contains relevant and useful information about urban design.
In this issue we have:

Merry Christmas!

The Ministry for the Environment would like to thank you for all your work supporting and implementing urban design in New Zealand this year. We wish you all the best for the festive season and look forward to working with you in 2008.

Have a safe and relaxing Christmas!

NZ Urban Design Protocol Signatories

A big welcome to the latest signatories to the Protocol: Warren and Mahoney, Paris Magdalinos Architects, and Carterton District Council.

It is wonderful that twenty-eight organisations made a commitment to creating quality urban design in New Zealand by signing up to the Urban Design Protocol in 2007. We now have 148 signatories! The 2007 signatories are:

Action Plans

This is just a quick reminder that 2008 is a monitoring year. This means that if your organisation signed up to the Protocol before September 2007 you need to have an up-to-date action plan with the Ministry for the Environment by February 2008. For further information on submitting your action plan please contact Janna Murray janna.murray@mfe.govt.nz.

Thank you to those of you who have already submitted your action plans – you make our job so much easier! Champions can access current action plans on the Champions webspace.

Potential National Policy Statement on Urban Design

As you may be aware the Ministry for the Environment has been investigating the desirability of a national policy statement (NPS) on urban design under the Resource Management Act. This work was first signalled through the New Zealand Urban Design Protocol in 2005 and since then the Ministry has undertaken a series of pre-scoping and scoping exercises to determine the viability of a NPS on urban design. We would like to thank those of you who have taken part in this work. As we have a new Minister this work is still being considered. We will be in touch with you when it has progressed further.

For further information please contact: Brent Limmer, Manager, Liaison and Review brent.limmer@mfe.govt.nz.

Changes in MfE Urban Design Staff

Sadly we bid farewell to Erica Sefton who is moving to Dunedin with her family in early January 2008. Erica has been a vital part of the Ministry’s progress on urban work since 2003 and will be missed by us all. We wish Erica and her family all the very best.

Urban Design Conferences and Events

The 13th International Energy Congress & Exhibition is being held in Vienna, Austria from 6–10 July 2008. The conference, themed Energy for Human Development and the Protection of the Environment, will focus on four major areas – Energy for Sustainable Development, Techonolgy Options, Markets and Policy Issues, and Actors and Stakeholders. Keynote speakers include Dr. Kandeh Yumkella, Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation and Prof. Jose Goldemburg, Secretary for the Environment of the State of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

The 11th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments is being held in Oxford, United Kingdom from 12–15 December 2008. Themed ‘Interrogating Tradition: Epistemologies, Fundamentalisms, Regeneration and Practices’ the conference is aimed at academics and students from various disciplinary backgrounds.

Useful Links to Current Information

  • According to the Quality of Life project, released on 27 November 2007, life in New Zealand cities is getting better. The report, run by the local authorities, paints a comprehensive picture of life in the country's 12 biggest cities. It provides data on people; knowledge and skills; health; safety; housing; social connectedness; civil and political rights; economic standard of living; economic development; the natural environment; and the built environment.
  • A recent research report from the United Kingdom shows that their urban professionals recruitment crisis is set to get worse in the immediate future. The report predicts that within five years 46 per cent of planning posts will lie vacant and up to 91 per cent of landscape architecture, urban design and architect positions will be vacant. The problems could be worse in the public sector. These predictions will have implications on New Zealand.
  • Children are segregated out of our public spaces and excluded from the community itself, warns Demos. The study ‘Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people’, commissioned by Play England and based on investigations of public areas and interviews with children across England, finds public spaces are actively antisocial to children and built around the convenience of the car and the shopping trip. The You Tube video done to support this publication is also worth checking out.
  • The USA Charlotte Department of Transportation’s Urban Street Design Guidelines are intended to create 'complete' streets – streets that provide capacity and mobility for motorists, while also being safer and more comfortable for pedestrians, cyclists, and neighbourhood residents. The Guidelines include information about why this new approach to planning and designing streets is necessary, how the guidelines should be applied, and how specific design features should be used for different types of streets.
  • The International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity has recently published an interesting article on the relationship between environmental factors and reported walking and vigorous physical activity for residents of low-income public housing developments.
  • Following the release of Building in Context: New Developments in Historic Areas in 2002, a pilot programme was launched in the south east region of the United Kingdom to promote the Building in Context Toolkit. As a result of this an updated version of the Toolkit was just been released by the UK’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, English Heritage and the Architecture Centre.
  • An Environment Canterbury report investigating projected climate change and peak oil impacts on council services and operations (over the LTCCP period 2006–2016) is now available on their website. The report provides an update on the issues surrounding carbon and emissions trading. The climate change aspect of the report builds upon the Environment Canterbury report “Canterbury, its people, its resources: Climate Change – an analysis of policy considerations for climate change for Review of CRPS” released earlier this year.
  • A new guide entitled ‘Global age-friendly cities’ has just been released by the World Health Organization. The guide is intended for a wide range of audiences and is one of the first research studies on ageing across culturally diverse countries/cities from an active ageing and public health perspectives.
  • The Green Playbook is a web-based resource that provides strategies, tips, and tools that cities and countries can use to take immediate action on climate change. The Playbook is designed both for communities that are considering taking the first steps toward action, as well as for those who want to take existing efforts to a new level. A consortium of more than 20 local governments, non-profit organisations, government agencies, and utilities have produced the first phase of the Playbook to help promote the goals set out in the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

Do You Want Your News in Here?

We are going to take a short break over the Christmas period and will be back on board with the next newsletter at the end of February 2008. If you have something you would like to share with the champions in the February newsletter please email Janna Murray janna.murray@mfe.govt.nz by Friday 15 February 2008.

Note: articles submitted may be edited by the Ministry for the Environment.

Last updated: 14 January 2009