Shape of the Suburbs

Last week­end a friend asked on Twit­ter whether any­one had made a New Zealand equiv­a­lent of this poster of Lon­don bor­oughs, which took the out­lines of the bor­oughs out of con­text by arrang­ing them alpha­bet­i­cal­ly while keep­ing them to the same scale. This revealed both the weird­ness of some of the shapes, and the strik­ing […]

Where the Wild Wind Blows

We’re expect­ing some severe winds overnight and in the morn­ing, and sen­si­ble peo­ple are bat­ten­ing down their metaphor­i­cal (and occa­sion­al­ly lit­er­al) hatch­es. I saw a com­ment on a friend’s Face­book page from some­one over­seas say­ing “but sure­ly Welling­ton hous­es are built for the wind?”, and the answer is yes, but gusts of 160km/h are extreme enough […]

Miramar is hacking and wants all the developers

Welling­ton is run­ning its first Civic Hackathon the first week­end of Novem­ber to tack­le trans­port issues in and around East­ern Sub­urbs and the wider city. The Hack Mira­mar folks have got a bunch of peo­ple involved already and they’ve got spots open if you want to join in and they’re look­ing for freaks, geeks, and […]

Get Informed About Resource Consents

It’s a com­mon com­plaint: “how could the Coun­cil let peo­ple build that, and not even noti­fy any­one?” That’s part­ly down to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of what “noti­fi­ca­tion” means under the RMA: it’s not just about let­ting peo­ple know, but also the start of a long and com­plex process involv­ing hear­ings, lawyers and pos­si­ble appeals, and it only occurs […]

Under the Pollsters’ Radar

At this stage of the elec­tion cycle we are drown­ing in polls. While each media out­let treats its own com­mis­sioned research as holy writ, they all have their own strengths and weak­ness­es, and it takes some­thing like Danyl McLauch­lan’s track­ing poll charts to smooth out the noise and cal­i­brate them against actu­al elec­tion results. Even with that, there’s a grow­ing […]

Where the Voters Aren’t

You could be for­giv­en for think­ing that all Welling­to­ni­ans are obsessed with pol­i­tics. Advance vot­ing start­ed today, and already some vot­ers are proud­ly sport­ing their “YES I have vot­ed” stick­ers. Yet thou­sands of Welling­to­ni­ans have still not enrolled to vote. Who are these dis­en­fran­chised peo­ple, and why have they not enrolled? Luck­i­ly, the Elec­toral Com­mis­sion has […]