Shaping Adelaide

The Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil is seek­ing pub­lic input on how to guide the future growth and change of the Adelaide Rd area. This is a vitally import­ant part of town (espe­cially now that the Wel­ling­tonista seems to be turn­ing into the New­townista), and I invite you all to have a look at the detailed draft frame­work and ima­gine for your­self what this cur­rently some­what neg­lected dis­trict could become.

But first, let’s clear up a few of the mis­con­cep­tions which could have been gleaned from the brief art­icles in the press:

• The “Adelaide Rd” area does­n’t cov­er all of that road, just the stretch from the Basin Reserve to about John Street.
• On the oth­er hand, it also expands to include the side streets, from Wal­lace St to Gov­ern­ment House grounds, so that the issue of how to blend between a large arter­i­al road and smal­ler-scale his­tor­ic res­id­en­tial streets can be addressed.
• Don’t take the artists’ impres­sions too lit­er­ally: they are just rough ideas of the scale and type of growth anti­cip­ated over sev­er­al dec­ades, rather than actu­al designs.
• It’s not just about wider roads! Yes, it sug­gests that Adelaide Road will be widened in parts, mainly to accom­mod­ate bus/cycle lanes and a planted medi­an, and with an eye to poten­tial light rail lines in the future. But there’s also been a huge amount of invest­ig­a­tion and com­munity con­sulta­tion to invest­ig­ate all the aspects that make up a city: her­it­age; eco­logy; pub­lic spaces; bal­an­cing res­id­en­tial, com­mer­ic­al and retail uses; walk­ing and cyc­ling con­nec­tions; com­munity facil­it­ies. These maps show just some of that think­ing.

You have just under a month to get involved, as sub­mis­sions close on the 10th of Octo­ber. Even if you don’t live there, com­mute through it or hang out at The Adelaide or Space Thing, it’s worth tak­ing some time think­ing about how this dis­trict could live up to its full poten­tial.