People Changing Streets

We were contracted by Porirua City Council and Te Waka Kotahi to support their Innovating Streets programme in Fantame Street shops, Cannons Creek. The aim was to help slow down the traffic and make the street safer and more people friendly.

We were asked to help with the community consultation part of that mahi. Our Te Hiko Team Manager Makerita Makapelu developed a plan to do more than a consultation and the Porirua City Council and Te Waka Kotahi were really supportive of putting it into action. We saw this as an opportunity to build capability and capacity in the community do to its own consultations in the future. We bought together the “Engine Room” – a group of 15 Cannons Creek locals to work with the engineers and others in the community to develop a new street layout to make the neighborhood safer. They had to practice, facilitation, difficult conversations, information analysis, and decision making as they weighed up all of the competing interests and viewpoints to be expected in a project like this.  They went on to win the Kumara award from Placemaking Aotearoa.

Through this process we learned – once again – that when you give the community the opportunity to lead, and you give them the rightsupport, they can do it, and do it really well.

This is an example of where we look for multiple benefits in the mahi we do – a strong outcome for the traffic management, and a strong outcome from the Cannons Creek community who have 15 more people who can be relied onto run a community hui on a topic as controversial as car parking!

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Read more about the project: on the Porirua City Council Website, and Stuff.co.nz.

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