Thank you to all the people who stopped in at the People for Places, He Whenua He Tangata drop-in sessions held in the weekend.
We had approximately 100 people attend and a good cross section of people – residents both local and rural, visitors and retail who gave strong support for the purpose of the project- creating places downtown for people to gather and enjoy.
We received approximately 280 comments which validated the general concepts we presented. We are now working on incorporating these comments, ideas and suggestions into the next iteration of the designs. Bow St and the carpark outside Orca were confirmed as the places best suiting this project’s pop-up, experimental nature.
As expected, there were plenty of comments outside our immediate project scope but still of value for future projects of this nature (as well as other issues on the mind of the community). These will be collated and kept by the Community Board and Raglan Naturally for future use, including passing on to Council where needed and appropriate.
Clearly, the issue of parking downtown came through strongly, including support for reverse angle carparking, and we will be working closely with Council on this in parallel with this project.
Other prominent suggestions were to consider wind, shade and lighting in the plans, to design the spaces to meet a range of purposes, to draw on and reflect the character of Raglan, and to focus wherever possible on quality over quantity. This gives us some great momentum to take forward.
The next stages in the project will be a set of workshops next week at Raglan Area school to allow students to put forward their aspirations for this project. We will also continue to review in more detail the data from the weekend. From these sources we will prepare design concepts to be presented to the community for comment mid September.
Our objective is to get the project installed before the Christmas period so that everyone can enjoy the areas through summer and we can look at any adjustments or enhancements that may be required to make the installation permanent. There will also be opportunities for the public to assist in the installation phase of the project so if interested please let us know.
Raglan Community Board
