Submissions to WCC: Draft Centres Policy – Walking / Cycling
Draft Centres Policy Submission
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3 responses to “Draft Centres Policy Submission”
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A year later,( 27/11/09) I have just put in my formal submission on WCC’s Suburban Centres proposals (DPC 73) : What a ghastly and complex set of documents ! Why can’t our planners explain themselves clearly and simply, as well as fully ?
Only now have I found that WCC has NO PLAN AT ALL for the Johnsonville Centre : just one miserable little map with bloody silly height limits that totally contradict its own Design Guides. I.e: once the debacle of the J’ville Shopping Centre redevelopment was won by the DNZ developers and their Oz architects, WCC seems to have been left without a single idea on what to do with the rest of the Centre.
Turns out that WCC’s Johnsonville Town Centre Plan was not a statutory document, so could not be enforced. I.e, WCC had no formal design criteria by which to evaluate the grossly out-of-scale DNZ re-development, so the DNZ developers simply walked all over the J’ville Town Centre Plan and blithely ignored its Key Point – which is the need for a pedestrian Street / Place connecting the J’ville Rd on the east to Moorefield Rd on the West
, along the alignment of Hawea St (which WCC seems to have sold off some time ago).
The obvious objective was a two-storey pedestrian Mall on that line – but DNZ came up with a totally pathetic and obviously false argument that left the existing east-west blind-ended ground-floor mall in place, and then added a notional first floor mall ( with no lift access) displaced to the South. What an utter Shambles of a design !
Yet WCC’s planners did not put up a single argument against it !
Now we have a bloody great blind building, with car-parking desert at its roof, ( contrary to the new Design Guides) squatting on the urban centre of Johnsonville like a bloody great
white toad, with its arsehole onto Broderick Rd, opposite the pub and the library.
So much for Urban Design !
The only thing left to do is to create a new urban pedestrian space on J’ville Rd itself by curving the Road sharply east into the wasteland of the Woolworths carpark. But, are WCC’s urban designers now proposing that ? NOT AT ALL: THEY ARE PROPOSING NOTHING WHATSOEVER !!!
What the hell is going on ? -
Of course it is a poor result, but here are a few points to note:
– Are you aware of what is permitted under the operative district plan?
– Under the RMA, plan changes cannot be given much weight until they are fully adopted. Plan Change 52 was notified about three years before the J’ville mall hearing, yet the commissioners gave very little weight to even the fairly weak urban design controls in that plan change, because there were still outstanding appeals.
– The hearing documents should make clear that council’s urban designers wanted major changes, but that the planners knew that the DP gave them very little discretion to reject it.
– PC73 is the first time that a design guide has been introduced for suburban centres.
– PC73 is also the first time that the district plan would acknowledge that town centres are different from industrial parks & quarries.
– You can bet your boots that every large landowner & developer will be submitting against PC73 because of its strengthened urban design controls. If you want to stop this plan change being bogged down for years in appeals and legal wrangling, submit in favour of it (or suggest something better). -
but the DPC 73 has closed now, and so its too late to make submissions….
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