Understanding Town Centres through a Wellbeing Survey

Across Aotearoa New Zealand, towns and centres are under increasing pressure from growth, affordability constraints, infrastructure limits, and shifting patterns of everyday life. Large‐scale developments are frequently positioned as solutions to these challenges. This Insights Report brings together findings from the University of Auckland Town Centre & Wellbeing Survey undertaken in 2023, alongside key insights from The New Zealand Housing Survey®, behavioural clustering, and applied scenario‐testing practice to demonstrate a simple but critical proposition: town centres succeed or struggle based on how housing, mobility, amenities, and social infrastructure function together as a system.

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