Our Vision

Auckland is a great city – with immense potential to become so much more.

A sustainable and equitable city, one that’s easy, safe and affordable to get around, with an abundance of great housing options.

A prosperous and accessible metropolis in which to live, work, learn and play, made up of well-resourced and well-connected communities.

A healthy and resilient city, where we all feel at home in our stunning natural environment.

A creative and caring city that’s inviting and exciting for residents and visitors alike, where we can all enjoy a fulfilling life and contribute to a better legacy for the future.

Getting there requires visionary leadership, clever planning and smart design.

It also requires informed, evidence-led and inclusive conversations. Which is where we come in. We’re dedicated to raising the quality of analysis, insight and public discussion about how best to get there. We aim to empower the people who care about our city – residents, communities, professionals, decision-makers – to help realise its full potential.

Auckland is special. We’re the gateway city to Aotearoa, with New Zealand’s largest urban area. We’re younger, more diverse, more educated, more productive – and still growing.

Our location itself is a creative challenge. The isthmus we live on gives us abundant access to maunga, moana, awa, ngahere – hills, harbours, waterways and greenery. It also poses challenges for what and where we build, and how we get around.

We want to accelerate action as well as understanding. Historic choices made for a smaller city in simpler times haven’t always served Auckland well. Our city is getting better at housing people, and is slowly catching up on decades of underinvestment in public transport. We’re seeing more people-friendly public spaces, and healthier streets that make it easier to walk or bike.

But it’s an uneven process, and often opaque to the public – while the case for progress grows more urgent by the day.

We’re here to help, and we bring two decades of advocacy and analysis to the table.

For almost 20 years, we’ve been keeping our eyes on plans and promises, tracking and visualising the data, checking receipts and telling compelling stories.

Greater Auckland is a trusted and tenacious voice of reason, advising policymakers, planners and the general public on how we can best equip our city for this century.

Our vision for a greater Auckland rests on three pillars:

LIVE

Aucklanders need more and better housing that suits our highly diverse population, maximises existing infrastructure, and brings us closer to everything our city has to offer.

This means making it easier to build homes near transport, jobs, shops and schools, and more options and stronger protections for people who rent, and less costly sprawl.

And it means creating a healthier urban environment for all of us – more trees, cleaner air, less traffic noise, more green spaces and flourishing waterways.

MOVE

Aucklanders deserve a full range of everyday travel choices that are affordable, accessible and congestion-free, so we can free ourselves and our city from traffic.

This means expanding access to regular and reliable public transport, and making our streets and neighbourhoods safe enough for people of all ages to walk and bike.

And, with a third of our urban emissions coming from transport, the more low-carbon journeys, the healthier our environment, and the faster we’ll tackle climate change.

CONNECT

Aucklanders should all be able to enjoy access to the good things that springs from the diverse people and fantastic energy a great city attracts and enhances.

This means embracing our streets, neighbourhoods and town centres as a collective resource we all share, and can all access.

By transforming public spaces into attractive places to gather, chat and play, we can make our city more accessible and welcoming for all.

We all have the power to make our city a greater place – join us and we’ll get there together!

Keen to help? There are lots of ways to boost the cause and be a part of it: write an article, join the conversation, make a donation, or get in touch with other ideas.

Te Komititanga aerial view. Photo: Patrick Reynolds