Te Rimutahi Ponsonby’s new civic space opened last month. It is a wonderful thing to witness the successful completion of a project that has been over 25 years in the making especially as there were many moments when it didn’t look like it would get there.
The project goes back to a Boffa Miskell Ponsonby Open Space Study in 2000 that led to the purchase of 254 Ponsonby Road in 2006 with funding from the Western Bays Community Board. There are many parents who nurtured Te Rimutahi along the way.
My part was initiating the community-led development process a decade ago. This came about after the Waitematā Local Board consulted on the Ponsonby Road Plan including three options for the site. When the feedback was reported to the local board council staff refused to provide an recommendation on the way forward because it wasn’t a funded project. This left us a bit stuck especially as a petition was presented to the local board with over 1200 signatures calling for a ‘whole of site option’ rather than the sale of the rear portion to fund the project as envisaged when the site was purposed.
I pitched to Chair Shale Chambers the idea to using a community- led development process to achieve community support for the best outcome for the site. Fortunately Shale took a leap of faith and in May 2015 the City Vision-led Local Board committed funding to a community partnership approach.
At Auckland Council we have been talking a lot about community-led development and empowered communities over the last 4 years . We’ve been introduced to the concepts through excellent visiting speakers such as Milenko Matanovic and Jim Diers. We have a community-led development champions group convened by Roger Blakely, Chief Planner of which I am a member. We have many community groups participating in shaping local services and placemaking but we don’t have many positive examples of Council putting community-led development into practice.
I am therefore really thrilled about the approach the Board has decided to take in response to the feedback on the development of 254 Ponsonby Road.
What followed once a community-led design group was established is covered here in the history of Te Rimutahi. I was really relieved when the group’s design brief led to the LandLAB Park+ concept for the civic open space being chosen by the community and endorsed by the Local Board in 2017. It then took sustained advocacy to secure the funding and see the project through to completion 8 years later.
The opening of Te Rimutahi, a name gifted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, on 18 May 2025 was a fantastic community celebration of probably Aotearoa’s biggest project delivered through a community-led design process.
