The Study addresses the North District Plan and its actions to limit urban development in rural areas and undertake place-based planning to deliver targeted environmental, social and economic outcomes.
Place-based planning is a way to shape the future of our rural areas by concentrating on the look and feel of places, their form and their character, instead of focusing only on conventional categories of land use, such as suburb, zoning, etc.
The first step in a placed-based planning approach is to establish ‘landscape areas’ and a character statement for each. A landscape area is a place with shared characteristics such as landform, vegetation, land uses and other unique qualities.