Land surveying and strategic planning vital for addressing NZ housing crisis

Since being all but completely decimated by an earthquake just over a decade ago, Christchurch has become a beacon for what is possible when it comes to redesigning and rebuilding a city. Using Christchurch as a kind of benchmark, then, it’s possible to believe that NZ, as a whole, has the wherewithal to address the country’s persistent housing crisis.

While Christchurch is still rebuilding a decade on and, in its own way, has yet to fully reconfigure itself to promote increased residential accommodation – since the majority of its rebuild to date took place under restrictive governmental building policies – the city’s approach to redesign for the purpose of promoting better city living could prove useful for other NZ cities’ urban residential planning endeavours.

Now that Government has updated its building policies to allow for more floors and to do away with minimum parking requirements, along with promoting other solutions that better accommodate higher-density residential living, it is possible for NZ cities to actively begin providing more housing options.

In order for such provisions to be effective, however, surveyors in Christchurch, who have been key players in that city’s rebuild, note that land surveying and exceptionally detailed planning will be vital to ensure that land is used most economically. It is necessary, therefore, for NZ cities to learn from Christchurch’s mistakes, particularly when it comes to things like poor communication between different entities that led to delays in construction or cases of recently laid roads having to be dug back up to run piping or electric cables.

By identifying newly available land that’s best suited for high-density urban accommodation through land surveying, as well as reassessing existing urban structures and utilised land for the possibility of redevelopment towards higher-density housing, Christchurch and other NZ cities can begin confronting the housing crisis.