A great place to live, work and play
The Ministry for the Environment has created this guide to provide a clear process for helping to create liveable urban environments. A liveable urban environment is a place that is good to live, work and play – a place that meets the needs and expectations of the people who live there. Councils can help to create these environments by developing well-planned and coordinated strategies to achieve the things the community wants.
This guide presents a simple five-stage process for a successful strategy:
- do the groundwork
- what the community wants
- design your strategy
- measuring success
- act on your results
Throughout each stage you’ll find checklists, review lists, and icons that point you to useful resources on this website. Here’s how to use them.
Follow the 
icon to the templates you can use at specific points of the process, and to
resources like sample questionnaires for consultation.
Follow the 
icon for information sheets about technical terms in this guide. For instance,
the phrase ‘liveable urban environment’, along with other terms
in this guide, has a specific and carefully developed meaning. The icon will take you to an explanation of all these terms.
Follow the 
icon to background information about the Urban Amenity Project and the cross-sectoral
group that did a lot of the work for this guide.
Follow the 
icon for detail on the council case studies, and project trials that describe
how councils have used different stages of the process.
Within the guide itself:
- the checklists highlight important information
- the review lists remind you to review your work as you go
- the summaries of case studies and project trials highlight different parts
of the process in action. The icon will take you to more information about each one.
Reference material
Information
sheet: urban amenity
Information
sheet: liveable urban and built environments
Information
sheet: urban amenity and the RMA
The five-stage process: what it involves
A strategy draws together things that council and the community can do to help create a liveable urban environment. It clearly states what council will do, what the community can do, and who will be responsible for each activity.
Checklist
To create a liveable urban environment:
- involve the community
- plan every stage
- make sure you can measure your progress
- take a systematic and strategic approach.
Designing a strategy, then, is at the centre of this guide – stage three. But the stages before and after it are of equal importance. You need to do the groundwork and learn from the community before you start to design your strategy. And, once your strategy is in place, you need to keep measuring its success, and making changes when necessary.
Do the groundwork
Think about what you want to achieve, the urban environment you’re working with, and the community that lives there.
Learn what the community wants
Learn what the community likes about its urban environment, what it wants to change, and what it expects from council.
Design a strategy
Design a coordinated strategy to help create a liveable urban environment, based on what you’ve learned during consultation.
You need to do the groundwork and learn from the community before you start to design your strategy.
Measure the success of your strategy
Develop a monitoring programme that will tell you whether your strategy is working.
Take action on your results
Use the information you get from monitoring – change your strategy if you need to.
These five stages are based on the ten-step framework developed by the Urban Amenity Project.
Reference material
Studies,
trials, and focus group workshops
More
on the ten-step framework
Review
- Review your work at every stage of the process, and give feedback to the community and council.
