Projects such as Jellicoe St, North Wharf, Westhaven Promenade, Karanga Plaza, and Daldy St Park are demonstrations of how we envisage the entire Wynyard Quarter and waterfront developing.
The financial leverage of these investments in infrastructure is tangible. We have carefully structured partnership arrangements with our lead investors and developers in a way that will ensure Auckland's ratepayers have a share of the value uplift as the surrounding sites are developed. Equally important are intangible benefits in how the public and private spaces will knit together.
That has not happened in isolation, as right from the start, it's been recognised that activity makes a community as much as the hard infrastructure. That is why we emphasise place-making -- ensuring that well-planned activities and events activate the wonderful public spaces that we are designing and developing.
This lays the groundwork for the community we are striving to attract and from that point it has been all about a preparedness to look at a new way of partnering with the private sector. This requires an allocation of risk and reward relative to the set of development tasks the partnership entails to ensure there is a fair and equitable return for the parties involved.
That approach enables us to look at areas of innovation in the progression of a more sustainable and liveable approach to the next phase of development which will include a new Park Hyatt Hotel, a range of residential living options and a commitment to a vibrant and growing hub of commercial space.
The new development partnership agreements include not only "essential outcomes" that developers must adhere to but also stretch targets. This results in developments that provide better liveability and sustainability than other comparable developments across the city. An independent design review process and new tools such as a custom Wynyard Quarter Green Star Rating tool have been developed to support this progressive approach.
A quality assurance mechanism is critical too and as developments get underway, we will work with our investor/development partners to monitor their performance in achieving both the essential outcomes and the stretch targets.
To achieve the above requires strong leadership with vision at a governance and management level playing a critical part in building community participation and partnerships with business and stakeholders.
A commitment to international relationship-making to foster and open and collaborative exchange have helped in this regard by providing access to the best international thinking. A string of awards both locally and internationally in recent years has been a testimony to this.
There is immense interest and the potential now to reframe the Auckland Council's role in urban regeneration for the region in the future, building what has been delivered on the waterfront in the last eight years.
John Dalzell is Chief Executive of Waterfront Auckland.