Urban Planning - making decisions for the community

Driving through Taupō at the moment you don’t have to go far to be caught up in the big changes that are happening in the town centre. We looked at the council plans for this development and discussed how the decisions for the development may have been made and the reasons behind these changes. 

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As part of our #LOVETAUPŌ inquiry, we decided to use some of the strategies and processes that a council would use to make decisions, when developing our town - Elevenville.

Our surveys asked people what they would like to do in a town.

Some people asked how people would travel around our town - if no one said cars then we wouldn’t need a road.

We need to include animal shelters and pet stores because the people I asked like spending time with animals.

3 out of 4 people I asked think that we should learn about our history in a museum.

The layout of a town can affect how its resources are used and also the people that use them. The new Taupō Town Centre plans have taken into account how the business and those that use them will interact with their surroundings - utilising the amazing lake views. In order to make sure that our town would function efficiently we planned out our town space as a class on our mat area. We also decided which businesses would need a bigger area in our town and where our town would be placed in the environment. A class vote decided that our town would be on the coast and some businesses would utilise the pedestrian traffic and ocean views.

When we planned where things would go in our town we had to think about everyone's opinions. We had to think about how business would affect their neighbours and if it would be good for the town to be there.

Students placed their businesses on the town blueprint and worked with those around them to decide if that was the best place for it.
It also gave us the opportunity to identify anything we may have forgotten or not thought of.
It also gave us the opportunity to identify anything we may have forgotten or not thought of.

I thought that we should include a wharf in our town so that we could fish and swim off it.

The result is a well thought out town where the community will benefit from the decisions that were made as a class.

We created logos, websites, brochures and models of their businesses ready to place in Elevenville as an extension to their town planning experiences.


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