Explore some quarter-hour paradises

You’re invited to dive into some future visions of four places in Te Upoko o te Ika, the Wellington region.

The visions you’ll find here are purely made to inspire discussion.

Our artists and experts have used a well-informed crystal ball to look into a future where these places have developed with good basic 15-minute neighbourhood principles, with warm dry affordable homes, and people able to flourish. This is wholly consistent with the longterm and medium-term goals of all the cities. The team found the best information that was publicly available, and used that to apply the quarter-hour paradise recipe so it would fit each site's street network, topography, hydrology, and surrounding neighbourhood.

We've had to make some assumptions, which is inherent to looking into the future. Check out the "technical details" page under each location's vision, and drop us a line if you're interested in more details of our approach.

Importantly, nothing of what you'll see is in any specific development plans or investment proposals, and none of the specific changes you see are currently being pursued. But there's no good reason why not!

Remember: while the visuals and the narratives with them appear pretty comprehensive, they’re simply what you get when you apply the most basic quarter-hour paradise recipe to each location.

Even this is pretty transformational – the place becomes much better for people and the taiao.

But the big missing element is: how local people would like to see quarter-hour paradise growing in their neighbourhood.

These images are designed to be a conversational floor, not a ceiling: they present the most ‘beige’, the most basic and generic of the possible futures.

A much richer and more locally-powerful vision for each place, its true quarter-hour paradise, is growing in the local conversation that’s coalescing around each image.