Services

Masterplanning and Concept Design

Masterplans are developed in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary environment, working closely with our clients. Director-level expertise is deployed on all projects to ensure robust and commercially viable outcomes are achieved. Designs are developed to respond to best practice, site and contextual issues while ensuring the client’s brief is achieved creatively and sustainably. Methodologies used ensure that our processes build consensus across client and stakeholder groups.

— City and Town Centre Regeneration
— City Strategies
— Development Frameworks
— Campus Planning
— Site-Level Concept Design
— Public Realm Strategies

Design Guidance

McIndoe Urban is recognised for its contribution to research-based national level urban design publications and design guidance in both New Zealand and the UK. Director Graeme McIndoe was lead co-author of various NZ Urban Design Protocol documents and contributed to other national design guidance. Director Andrew Burns was a co-author of a wide range of UK best practice guidance publications and was a lead author for the residential chapters of the Auckland Design Manual (ADM), the CABE (UK) guide Creating Successful Masterplans, DTLR (UK) By Design and Delivering Design Quality (UK) series.

— Design Guides
— Best Practice Publications
— Design Manuals

Design Briefing 

Good design does not occur by accident and neither does it occur in a vacuum. The production of focused, specific and relevant design briefing is a critical part of the design process and often follows from broader masterplanning projects. We develop project briefs in close collaboration with our clients that has proven to achieve higher quality outcomes for projects. McIndoeUrban is recognised for developing briefs for many of Wellington’s significant sites, including waterfront locations and high value land around the Civic Square Heritage Precinct. 

— Strategic and Site Development Briefs

Design Review

McIndoe Urban undertakes design review and post occupancy evaluation for a number of Local Authorities across the country and sits on the Technical Advisory Groups for both Auckland and Wellington waterfronts. We work as trusted advisers to Council Officers providing design review of pre-application and resource consent submissions. Our role expands to include negotiation between design teams and the Authority where advocacy and interpretation of design policy is required.

— Local Authority Resource Consent Design Review
— Post Occupancy Evaluation

Policy, Guidance and Advocacy

McIndoe Urban has been involved with the development of urban design and planning policy at both national and local levels. This work has included projects for MfE (Options for including urban design provisions in the National Planning Template), the Auckland Design Manual and contributing to development of the Wellington, Palmerston North and Christchurch District Plans and the Auckland Unitary Plan.

— National Urban Design Policy
— District Plan and Design Guidance Policy

Participation and Engagement

The design of the built environment is essentially a political and social activity that determines the choices people can make and how those choices are experienced. Therefore, with multiple and wide ranging stakeholders and interest groups, and a responsibility to the public at large, McIndoe Urban has developed bespoke techniques to get people engaged. 
McIndoe Urban’s role on complex multi-disciplinary projects often includes developing strategies for participation and engagement that includes facilitating a range of participatory events and deploying our own unique ‘block modeling’ methodologies where representing and testing design ideas is required.

— Consultation Strategy and Planning
— Workshop Facilitation
— Physical Block Modelling
— Public and Stakeholder Consultation
— Technical and Officer Engagement

Expert Witness

McIndoe Urban is retained by a number of NZ’s leading resource management law firms to provide expert urban design advice and evidence.
McIndoe Urban Directors Graeme McIndoe and Andrew Burns are widely recognised across NZ as experts in this field and have acted as expert witnesses at Council, Environment Court Hearings and Boards of Inquiry for Plan Change processes or on specific sites and projects. We have over 50 years combined experience representing both councils and private clients. 

Leadership, Training and Advocacy

McIndoe Urban are leaders in driving collaborative behaviour across disciplines, recognising that better outcomes are achieved when built environment challenges are tackled ‘in the round’. The practice provides Officer training to Local Authorities across a range of topics including the integration and delivery of services, the embedding of urban design and collaboration within the culture of organisations and general urban design awareness and design application related to spatial contexts (city-quarter-neighbourhood-street-site) and specific places. We are frequently called on to act as advocates for good city design to stakeholders and the public at large, interpreting District Plan provisions and envisioning policy aspirations.