Puhinui Warkworth Centre Plan
Puhinui, Warkworth | 2022
Community Think worked alongside Rodney Local Board, Ngāti Manuhiri and Motu Design to create a town centre plan for Warkworth. Community Think project managed the community engagement process which built from the rich knowledge of all the people who live, work and play in Puhinui Warkworth to generate new ideas for what the centre plan could look like in the future.
Community Think were approached to lead a process in partnership with the Rodney Local Board, Ngāti Manuhiri and Motu Design to collect community voices to inform the Warkworth Town Centre Plan.
We formed a core project group across the urban design team, mana whenua, Council and their community engagement team to coordinate the project between them. Our first phase of the process engaged with community leaders to map out the key community stakeholders of Warkworth and understand the best ways to reach them. Informed by the core project group and community leaders, we developed a multifaceted approach that offered several ways for the people of Warkworth to have their voices heard.
Our approach resulted in over 500 people from Warkworth participating in the creation of the Town Centre Plan. Broad activations focused on the whole town; including a Festival of Ideas held in the town hall, a custom board game that locals could check out from the library, and an online platform. For those groups we identified as having barriers to participating in these activations, we worked with them to hold smaller and more targeted workshops.
The 500 participants were invited to a further session that focused on bringing together all the feedback received from the first round of engagement. These sessions presented back the key themes, ideas, and then ran a process to make meaning of the data. The urban designer then took these ideas and considerations to start to transform them into designs. We then went back to the community and did guided and self-guided walks around the areas in the community where ideas might be activated to present back visually the community’s ideas. Further feedback was gathered for the urban designer to incorporate into the centre plan.
Key outcomes:
Collaborative and participatory planning process, departing from the traditional urban planning process of feedback on what is already decided.
The partnership with Council, mana whenua and the urban design team from the beginning meant that everyone was joined up and could feed into every stage of the project collaboratively.
Working with community leaders from the beginning meant that they were able to co-create the ways the engagements happened and let us know how best to connect with the different communities and groups in the area.
The different forms of interactive engagements, including targeted and wide reaching, meant that many people from the community were able to participate, including those who experience more barriers.
The community board game as part of our engagements was hugely successful, including have 80 students from a primary school be able to participate. This idea could be reproduced in other community town planning projects.
