Auckland parks receive international award
Tāwharanui Regional Park - Aoteaora’s first integrated park. Photo credit: Auckland City Council.
Auckland Council’s park management has been hailed as world-leading by an international panel of judges from the World Urban Parks (WUP) network.
The council recently received the prestigious Legacy Award for 2023 – one of WUP’s top honours in recognition of our “exceptional contribution to the urban parks, open space, and recreation sector”.
Auckland joins Melbourne and New York as only the third city in the world to win this special accolade.
The award acknowledges the council’s “remarkable achievements” to develop parks and open spaces everyone can enjoy and recognises initiatives that inspire other cities to shape urban landscapes around the world for the better. Our strong commitment to biodiversity has also been praised.
Taryn Crewe, the council’s General Manager of Parks and Community Facilities, is grateful the skill and expertise of her wider team has been acknowledged at helping to enhance Auckland’s green spaces.
“Tāmaki Makaurau is consistently recognised as one of the most ‘liveable’ cities in the world – thanks in part to the number, accessibility and quality of our parks. Now, it’s fantastic to see the innovative way we look after this significant treasure getting noticed on a global scale too.”
Auckland Domain. Photo Credit: Auckland City Council.
Head of Specialist Operations for Parks and Community Facilities Martin van Jaarsveld also credits the hard work and long-term approach to our park kaitiaki / guardians who have committed over decades to develop green spaces for generations to come.
“The Legacy Award is presented to an organisation only once every two years. It sets a global gold standard for all park managers and stewards for how we deliver effective kaitiaki of our parks. It is certainly an honour to be acknowledged internationally,” Martin says.
Principal Parks Advisor Thomas Dixon says Aucklanders should thank past city planners for their groundwork to establish an extensive park network that today gives us easy access to nature, in the council’s WUP award entry.
From the 1950s onwards, a transformative piece of work began to preserve and provide recreational access to kilometres of coastline and native forest in Tāmaki Makaurau. This paved the way for what is now recognised as a world-leading regional parks network in Auckland, with 28 regional parks covering more than 45,000 hectares, including 20,000 ha of native forest and 1,000 km of undeveloped coastline – attracting 7 million visitors now each year.
Maungawhau | Mount Eden. Photo Credit: Auckland City Council.
Auckland also has 4,000 local parks and reserves managed and cared for by the council, covering nearly 11% of our city’s total land area. This network of urban green space provides opportunities to recreate, connect with nature and with each other, as well as supporting our resilience to climate change initiatives.
In the last financial year alone, 34,000 volunteers planted 200,000 plants in parks, with the combined ability to remove nearly 350,000 metric tonnes of C02 by 2050. This helps to deliver some of the key aims of our Urban Ngahere (Forest) Strategy, another innovative approach to outline a vision for the city’s future ‘green network’.
Another iconic point in history has been the way Te Ao Māori is being celebrated in open spaces by Aucklanders. One key example is through the Tūpuna Maunga Authority, a co-governance partnership between Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau and Auckland Council. In 2014, fourteen Tūpuna Maunga /ancestral mountains, were returned to mana whenua in recognition of their historical, spiritual, ancestral and cultural significance. As a result of this partnership these taonga (the maunga) are flourishing.
This article was originally published by Auckland City Council.