Your ideas for the Central City are in the mix

Work is underway writing the draft Central City Plan using the thousands of ideas contributed by the Greater Christchurch community.

More than 90,000 ideas had already been read and manually coded by a team of specialist data analysts by the end of last week.

"All the ideas we have received from our community have been entered into a data analysis program and coded under one of the more than 130 topics, under eight themes," says Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker.

"The program allows us to search for common themes, topics and words. The information is able to be sorted and grouped to find emerging themes, and even great one-off ideas.

"All your ideas are now in the mix, being used by the team writing the draft Central City Plan to identify the key projects the community wants to make Christchurch's Central City one of Australasia’s great cities of the future."

Mr Parker says the strongest emerging theme is that people must be placed at the centre of the redevelopment.

"The community wants the Central City to be a destination for them to live, work and play, with specialist shopping, indoor and outdoor venues for performing arts, public art, water features, children’s playgrounds and youth spaces."

He says greening the Central City has been a strong theme coming through, making the area more people friendly and aesthetically appealing. "There has been a clear desire for greening of our transport networks, especially walkways and cycleways, general streetscape and squares and building design.

"Interconnectivity between activities to make it easy to move around the Central City is also a common theme. There are many ideas around an integrated affordable transport network with priority being given to pedestrians and providing for a range of options for walkways, cycleways and public transport."

Mr Parker says other common themes were creating precincts for a range of activities; extending the life of the Central City into the evening; developing the Avon River as a key asset; having high-quality, well-design, low-rise buildings; restoring and earthquake-proofing iconic heritage buildings; making the Central City accessible and inclusive for all ages, ethnic groups and people with disabilities; and ensuring there is a business friendly environment to attract business back and make it easy for new businesses to become established in the area.

Staff will have a draft Plan written towards the end of July for a three-day Councillor Workshop in early August to review and debate the content of the draft before the document is finalised for formal consultation from 22 August for a month.

"At this stage we want our community to tell us what they think about the content of the draft Plan – good and bad."

The draft Central City Plan will provide a framework for the redevelopment of the Central City based on the ideas shared by the community, key stakeholders and to complement the work already undertaken by Council.

"We have received thousands of ideas which have a price tag of billions of dollars. While we would love to adopt and implement everything our community wants, we won’t be able to because of the cost and differing ideas," Mr Parker says.

"What the Plan will aim to do is meet as many of our community’s wants as possible, at the same time ensuring we develop a Central City which supports future generations and can serve the needs of our city for the next 150 years."