4.3 - Challenges

Key challenges for the city include:

• achieving the balance between providing for compact growth, appropriate densification and placemaking in accordance with national and regional policy, yet ensuring innovative and sensitive development that respects the city’s unique character and enhances its natural and heritage assets;
• promoting sustainable building heights in the right locations to ensure efficient use of resources, services and public transport infrastructure;
• ensuring the long-term resilience of the city centre to climate change and ensuring that it is as a place where people want to live, work, invest and visit;
• ongoing issues of dereliction, urban decay, underutilised and vacant sites particularly in the inner city and the need to implement effective active land management to promote balanced and sustainable economic and residential development;
• ensuring the sustainable development and consolidation of Key Urban Villages to provide a focal point to the communities and neighbourhoods that they serve and that such centres are successfully promoted for further investment, regeneration and environmental improvement; and

cultivating the inner and outer suburbs and providing neighbourhoods with a choice of homes for a diverse mix of households and communities and aligning and prioritising the provision of appropriate physical and social infrastructure, including Green Infrastructure, services and retail, with future development and areas of consolidation and intensification.