Re-awakening Cannons Creek: Revitalising the commercial centre

As of last year, the Prime Minister and Minister of Housing and urban development has announced a 25-year project to regenerate Eastern Porirua. $1.5 billion will be contributed towards delivering better public housing as well as a safer and better neighbourhood. (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, 2020) “This is a large, long investment to deliver a step-change for this strong vibrant community, who are amongst the most disadvantaged in New Zealand”(Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, 2020).

As of right now, Cannons Creek has a dying commercial centre that has been struggling for many years. Research has shown that many locals living in the area are familiar with their ‘negative reputation’ of an unsafe neighbourhood with high crime rates (James, n.d). Therefore, this has affected the community’s growing progress (James, n.d). Based through site observation, the centre has poor infrastructure, unused carpark spaces, and abandoned buildings. Therefore, the current state may encourage crime to occur around the area.

Moreover, there is no place for social support, public information and other facilities a community would need.

Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to investigate ways of creating a liveable community by integrating an urban intervention into the area. In this context, intervention is defined as combining architecture and urban interventions to create a place of activity and social engagement. Cannons Creek will be revitalised into a vibrant community to live in.

Eastern Porirua overall is slowly growing and changing, there is now more diversity within the population. The Transmission Gully that is set to finish within 2020 which will also add more value towards the land and people living in Porirua. There is now an opportunity to foster intensification within the suburbs town centres.