The purpose of this research was to examine the link between density and the costs of providing infrastructure in New Zealand. There is a need for research to provide planners and local authorities with an evidence base for shaping development to be economically efficient as well as socially and environmentally sustainable. Compact (dense) urban form...

The theme of this article is current developments in community governance (see, for example, Rolfe, 2016), but it comes with a warning: this is an area where definitions are extremely difficult and it is easy to become distracted by semantics, rather than focused on the substance. Discussion is further complicated by the variety of practice...

In my judgement, the overall conclusion to be reached is that New Zealand does regulatory statutes rather badly. They are insufficiently researched. They are not rigorously tested before being enacted. Nor are sufficient efforts made to find out how they worked in the real world. And large statutes are amended far too readily, leading to...

This article looks at constitutional and contractual resolutions to central-local relations, looking to see in what ways each approach could benefit the power and autonomy of local councils. Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Butler recently released their draft constitution for New Zealand, which joins a rich body of work on the subject of constitutional reform...

While the recent New Zealand local authority elections attracted their fair share of media headlines, the dominant narrative, as in previous elections, was one of declining turnout and whether or not local government has a future. Little was heard about the nature of the role councils play in their towns, cities and regions, or about...