What is LIVE WELLington?
LIVE WELLington is a group for people who love Wellington and want to ensure this city continues to be wonderful, for future generations to enjoy. We love Wellington’s liveability, access to nature and green spaces, strong communities, character, and diversity.
Carrara Park, Newtown
To ensure better housing for everyone and meet the challenges of the future, Wellington needs to adapt in ways that work for all of us. We want the city we love to evolve in ways that are climate friendly, affordable, and accessible, without losing what is already great.
Cities around the world do this through partnership between government, community and developers. Working with mana whenua, Wellington can do this too.
We believe:
- Everyone deserves a warm, dry home
- Great design helps deliver liveable communities and a healthy environment
- Thoughtfully planned density delivers liveability better than blanket upzoning
- Action on climate change demands joined up thinking and a joined-up city
- Living heritage and character enhance liveability and strengthen community
- Working together to co-design solutions makes for more durable solutions
- Decision-makers need to work with evidence and learn from experience
The LIVE WELLington solution
LIVE WELLington rejects the current winner-take-all, deregulatory philosophy of blanket upzoning and opposes plans to remove people’s rights to have a say on developments. Instead of this radical and divisive agenda LIVE WELLington proposes proper planning and partnerships to do density well.
Throughout our city are many sites that sit idle or under-utilised. Huge tracts of land are crying out for leadership to develop the homes, green spaces and small business facilities we all deserve. LIVE WELLington advocates for thoughtful upzoning that prioritises underutilised land. We want to see proper protection for sunlight, character, and urban quality to ensure liveability into the future.
Underutilised land, Adelaide Road
Carefully designing our future urban environment is a far better solution than removing all controls and letting developers do what they want. We support participatory design processes and strong civic leadership to drive rapid growth in good quality housing on underutilised land throughout our city. We advocate for fixing the homes that need fixing now and ensuring new builds are well-designed and provide durable housing for the future. Together these steps can house forecast population growth and more, and make sure existing and new residents have great quality of life.
Thoughtful planning coupled with partnerships between developers, community and council is the fastest way to provide a diverse mix of high quality housing with great urban design across the city. This approach provides greater certainty for everyone and will speed up development without damaging the essence of what we already love about Wellington.
Read our Vision for Wellington document.