Please note that this information was provided for the 2022 Local Government Elections and may now be out of date.

Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. It is a people centred approach to the planning, design and management of our public spaces to turn them into places where we all want to be.

We know we need to do things differently to respond to the changing needs of our community and we are listening! To bring this concept to life, Council kicked off its Pride of Place project in early 2022.

The ‘Pride of Place’ project is about re-imagining our town centres and how to shape them for the needs of our communities now and into the future. Not only that, it is about co-designing with our community. This is about working in partnership with our communities and understanding what their aspirations are, looking at what we already have, and using inspiration and ideas to re-imagine the potential of these spaces.

Together with our communities, we have a shared aspiration to ‘placemake’ quality public spaces where we want to spend time, and town centre spaces that contribute to our health, happiness and well-being.

The project started in Matamata where we undertook a programme of engagement and co-design with the Matamata community. We wanted to reach a wide range of community members and talk to those who perhaps haven’t interacted with Council before.

The Matamata community enthusiastically got involved in this project and shared with us some fantastic ideas for fun, creative and meaningful initiatives to help make Matamata a place to be proud of. The engagement process culminated in working on a community action plan to drive these projects and we organised a film fest in June which went down a treat!

Council recently kicked off engagement in Morrinsville where we look forward to hearing some more brilliant ideas for their town centre and then later on with our Te Aroha community.

This project signals a different way of working for Council and we are thrilled with the positive response from our community as we work through this new approach to how we engage and partner with our communities.

Our towns are growing and becoming increasingly urbanised. Council’s ‘Pride of Place’ project is all about developing a new way to engage with communities to prepare for these changes and to tackle some of our challenges head on. We are asking our community about what they think should happen to make a positive and noticeable difference for our town centres.

We know that we need to change the way we engage with our communities so that it is meaningful and action focussed. That’s why each step of the development and implementation of this project shares the aim of building trust with our communities - providing a building block to organisationally implement this new way of working in everything that we do.

• How do you think we can best engage with our communities to ensure we are considering the needs and aspirations of all?
• Why do you come to your town centre?
• What do you love about your town centre/local community?
• What would make your town centre/local community more welcoming, vibrant and people-focussed?