The 30-year plan to reimagine Nelson’s city centre

The Nelson City Council has just released its bold vision to create a city centre that we all want to spend time in. It is six months in the making and is now open for public submissions. Charles Anderson looks at what it proposes.

It took a lot of cups of tea to get to this point – 273, in fact. Six litres of orange juice, 81 meetings, and 200 hours of discussion – all in service of getting to a point where Nelson City Council could deliver a proposal on the vision for the city’s centre over the next 30 years.

It took six months of engagement with 275 stakeholders to deliver the proposal which aims to present “a people-focused, place-based 30-year vision for Nelson city centre”.

The goal of that is to “attract talent, good investment, housing and jobs and promote health and wellbeing aligned with being a Smart Little City”.

This is the Nelson City Centre Spatial Plan – Te Ara ō Whakatū – which was approved by council earlier this month and is out for public feedback until September 24. Give your feedback here.

The person driving that process is Alan Gray, the council’s city centre development programme lead. He says the proposal is a starting point to get the community thinking about what they want their city to look like.

“Can we talk to the community beyond my lifetime and for your children and how do we think about that.”

The council settled on 30 years as a way to be bold.

“We thought about how long into the future the plan should look,” says Alan. “We landed on 30 years – that gives us the ability to change behaviours and be aspirational.”

And looking at some of the imagery that accompanies the plan, it is. The images are not designs – they are merely concepts to get people thinking.

There is the top of Trafalgar St with a meditative pond in the middle. There is Hardy St with wider footpaths and benches to sit and watch the world go by. There are ping pong tables, Bridge St has become a ‘linear park’ linking the green spaces between Anzac Park and Queens Gardens. It is aspirational.

“Nelsonians can visualise themselves in these images and ask ‘is this a place that I would enjoy walking about, meeting a friend for lunch, visiting here in older age?” says deputy mayor Judene Edgar.

To get there, the draft plan proposes eight “transformative actions” to achieve a variety of goals. These include increasing the number of people spending time in the city centre.

“Nelson continually changes,” says Judene. “This is not the Nelson I grew up in.”

And so it makes sense for it to continue changing. She says there are aspects of the city that have been brought up as not working for Nelsonians.

“Everyone having to drive here, everyone leaving dead on 5pm, minimal nightlife, people diving into a shop and diving out. The inability, the lack of desire to linger.”

Alan and Judene want Nelsonians to feel like they can “linger longer”.

“How can the city become a destination for more than an hour,” says Alan.

Because right now, data shows that 70 per cent of people only stay for an hour.

There are 5600 people working in the city but you wouldn't know that when the workday finishes. The key to changing the feel of the CBD is making the city’s streets better for pedestrians.

The plan wants to make those streets greener, while also providing play options to invite “users of all ages to explore and engage with the city centre in new ways”.

The plan looks to create different precincts for things like shopping and dining, building up the city’s laneway network, and setting up a range of unique “great places” within the city centre.

Part of that is the Bridge St park that could create various green spaces down the length of the street. This would require a narrowing of the road and a reduction in parking spaces.

Currently, there are about 1470 public parks in the city centre, with a further 2400 spaces on the city fringe. This plan would see about 10 per cent of those spaces lost.

The other key to the plan is getting more people to live in the city centre.

Right now in a 2km radius of the city center there are 8000 people living. However, right in the centre, within a 500m radius, there are only 100.

“We can boost that 20-fold to 2000 people,” says Alan. “That’s a 30-year aspiration.”

He says that once the city starts creating a place where people want to be, shops will open later, it will feel safer.

“It’s going to be buzzing … The idea is that residents will want to live in this space.”

The big residential plan on the table is selling council-owned land around the Bridge/Rutherford St intersection to Kāinga Ora to develop social and affordable housing complexes. That is in training and will have more detail in the coming months.

The linear park forms the backbone of that concept.

“The idea becomes a really compelling street you want to live on, with birdlife, native and exotic trees," says Alan. "The quality of that street starts to change.”

That change includes making the city centre a greener place to be. This is part of the city doing its part to adapt to climate change by planting an extra 1000 trees over the next 30 years, providing shade for residents as well as being a way to sequester carbon.

Investments in public transport and cycling facilities will aim to make-up for the loss of car parks.

There are no budgets or detailed designs yet. Alan is quick to point out this is a conversation starter – a way of putting something out to the public to stimulate discussion.

He knows and hopes things will change with what comes out of public submissions. Judene says there is always a balance with garnering community feedback.

“It’s exciting to put it out there,” says Judene. “The city centre is the heart of Nelson – it's our cultural business retail heart - if that isn’t thriving it’s a microcosm of the rest of Nelson city. We need to look after it.

“This is the start of the journey rather than the end.”

Judene and Alan both know about the conservatism that can stymy city development. They know about the myriad lost projects that started with so much enthusiasm only to fizzle out. But they are not deterred.

"If we never plan you never go anywhere,” Judene says. “You need to have the conversation with the community and yes there have been projects that haven’t gone as were intended… But if we don’t do this, we can guarantee we don’t do anything. This is the opening to the door for the future of Nelson.”

Give your feedback here

Written for Nelson Magazine