Dunedin "has good bones" but needs a "series of micro-interventions" to improve certain areas, an urban designer charged with developing a vision for Dunedin's central city says.
Urbanism Plus director Kobus Mentz is leading a team of designers from New Zealand and Australia to help create the concept for the Dunedin City Council.
Their work began on Monday when they met retail, community, environmental and property groups to "dig down and see what the issues are".
It was the turn of DCC staff yesterday as they workshopped and surveyed to develop ideas and gather information, while the public put forward its suggestions last night.
"We are spending four days doing this to develop options and propositions to bring back to the community in August," Mr Mentz said.
The vision from the "informal process" will be fed into the council's draft spatial plan, "Dunedin towards 2050", which is due to be released in October; and a more detailed action plan for the CBD will be developed to go into the long-term plan 2012-13 to 2022-23.
From his time in the city so far, Mr Mentz believed Dunedin's "townscape set piece is pretty cool", but questioned if Crawford St could be "softened".
"You've got good bones. You've got a strong city centre with strong potential - so much heritage has been preserved [and] the city centre is still dominant . . . these are attributes to be treasured.
"The few bits you could change of the structure is the few things traffic engineers have done in the past," he said.
However, he did not think there were "big radical solutions", rather "a series of micro-interventions" which looked at how pedestrians, public transport and parking could work better together.
"I really don't believe in any of those winning out over the others."
A focus of his was the harbourside area and southern end of town.
"We need to look at the southern warehouse area down to Jervois St because that's an emerging CBD area which the council really needs to get a good plan for, otherwise it could end up a mess," he said.
His instincts also told him the council's plans to install a pedestrian bridge over the railway line near Queens Gardens was a good one.
However, he questioned other public calls to close part of the Octagon to traffic as "pedestrian-ising" areas in other cities resulted in those places losing their vitality and becoming dangerous after dark.
"We are going to draw those options, just to have a conversation about it [but] I would be very surprised if there was a radical option to shut things off permanently," he said. He even suggested moving some events from the Octagon to other parts of Dunedin, such as Queens Gardens, or creating new spaces, could be good options to ease traffic congestion when it was closed.
Other areas the team would look at were roading design and how public movement could be eased; options for art in the public realm; and making the city easier for visitors to navigate.
"We will come back with a whole lot of options for people, but also say which options we think may be more preferable," Mr Mentz said.
