WISE - Waipa District Growth Strategy

Waipa District Council recently reviewed their District Growth Strategy. Given WISE was recently used to project future land use outcomes to support the development of census area unit level projections for demographic and economic growth indicators in the Waikato it was straight forward to create scenarios in WISE to represent the plausible outcomes of the draft Waipa District Growth Strategy 2050.

The key questions that were of interest to Waipa DC with respect to draft Growth Strategy were:

  • Would residential growth stay within the expected criteria of:
    •  Always having at least 3 years of residential land supply available across Cambridge/Te Awamutu area
    • There are always at least three growth cell area available for residential development across Cambridge/Te Awamutu area
  • To understand infrastructure demands based on how quickly proposed growth cells might develop under population projections
  • How might different demands for residential land use types (particularly lifestyle residential land use - a.k.a large lot residential) affect the development behaviour in growth cells?

Scenario Outputs

The first scenario set up in WISE used the starting “Reference” and incorporated the proposed growth cells in the draft Growth Strategy into the model. This scenario was run to represent the Reference for this case study.

Under this scenario it was noticed that there was a lot more lifestyle (large lot) residential growth than there were zoned areas in the current District Plan and draft Growth Strategy (~800 ha occurs outside ‘preferred’ zoned areas).

Therefore a second scenario was developed which reduced the allocation of future population growth into lifestyle residential land use so that by 2050 only the zoned areas were occupied. This “Reduced Lifestyle” scenario was then run for both the medium and high population growth projections. The results were used to assess the spatial patterns and rates of residential development.

Table 1: Lifestyle land use allocation under Reference and Reduced Lifestyle scenarios

Hectares of Lifestyle - allocated by scenarios in Waipa District
           

Year

2013

2020

2030

2040

2050

Reference

5027

5405

6003

6343

6431

Reduced Lifestyle  - medium

5027

5352

5653

5774

5810

 

This “Reduced Lifestyle” scenario was then run for both the medium and high population growth projections. The results were used to assess the spatial patterns and rates of residential infill. The infill rates for medium population projection for the Te Awamutu and Cambridge areas are shown in Figures 1 and 2 respectively.

 

 

Figure 2:  Rates of residential infill for growth cells around Te Awamutu

Associated Models

Waikato Integrated Scenario Explorer (WISE)

The Waikato Integrated Scenario Explorer (WISE) is an Integrated Spatial Decision Support System (ISDSS) designed specifically for New Zealand which focuses on the Waikato region.

Links

WISE website: http://www.creatingfutures.org.nz