Land Use in New Zealand
One of the misconceptions we face in New Zealand, and for a majority of countries worldwide, is the concept of the available capacity for urban development. Pejoratively called urban sprawl, it conjures up an imaginary visual image of massive development that threatens to overwhelm the countryside.
Currently urbanisation in New Zealand's landmass is around 0.7%. Stated another way, it is important to state that 99.3% of New Zealand's landmass is not developed at the moment. We can visualise this by taking the shape of New Zealand and placing the 0.7% on it, which equates to 1,881 square kilometres, a blue square that is 43.4 kilometres long on each edge.
What is visually apparent immediately is the concept of urban sprawl is simply a fiction. What is commonly called urban sprawl is from the perspective of people. As we all know, people represent a very small area of 'space' when seen from the scale of our country. For example, if we were to assume the average height of all people were living in New Zealand was 1.8 meters, then lying us all head to foot around our coastline means we would reach 57% of the total length (I used 15,000 kilometres, although some estimates are more). This is always important to keep in mind when a combination of emotive language alongside a human perspective is used. I believe it is important to use a geographic perspective when talking about geographic concepts, like how much urban development has taken place.
Having said that, not all land in New Zealand is suitable for urban development, and not all land should be used for urban development; farms, national parks, and natural waterways are all example where we can't. Informing this, we can think of land use in New Zealand can be based around the categories of land type. Some land types are not conducive to any development, while others are good for farms. Landcare Research New Zealand have surveyed New Zealand's landmass and defined eight Land Use Classes (LUC). Figure 2 of the Land Use Capability Survey Handbook describes each of the Land Use Classes; they are summarized in the table below.
With this description in mind, LUCs 1, 2 , 3 and 4 can all be used for development be it residential, commercial or industrial types of urban development. With that in mind, the table below shows the proportion of LUCs in New Zealand, and as a special addition, for Auckland as well.
To understand this table, the penultimate column means the quantity of land classified with that LUC as a proportion of all land in New Zealand. For example 9.2% of all land in New Zealand is classified as LUC 3, which has rolling slopes (8 to 15 degrees), low moisture holding capacity and low natural fertility. The last column is the proportion land in Auckland classified with that LUC as a percentage of all Land with that LUC class in New Zealand. For example, Auckland has 0.2% of the 58,077 square kilometres of LUC 8 land in New Zealand.
It is important that our land is classified and put to the best use. To know the best use, we need to balance food (for national consumption and export markets), animals ( in farm and natural habitats) and economic requirements for our residential sector as well as employment in the amenity, commercial and industrial sectors.
There is enough land for all our needs, but at present it is skewed to unproductive means when looking at our economy: both housing affordability and our lack of savings as a nation are evidence that the balance of our resources is incorrect at present. I believe our land zoning by councils needs to be more informed by the facts and less by 'popular observations' and pressure groups that do not have a balanced approach to land use in New Zealand.
