Numerous political parties have campaigned on scrapping what they call the “Urban Growth Boundary”, usually referring to Auckland’s old Metropolitan Urban Limit or the Rural Urban Boundary it was replaced with.

The Metropolitan Urban Limit was pretty flawed. It ran hard up along the existing edge of urban areas in an effort to constrain sprawl, and was only ever expanded in small chunks through a difficult and arduous process. Because it was such a bad system, it was replaced with the more flexible Rural Urban Boundary.

The Rural Urban Boundary is very different to the Metropolitan Urban Limit. This boundary marks the outside edge of areas where urbanisation is expected over the next 30 years. That means that is distinguishes between the areas likely to shift from rural to urban over the next 30 years and areas that are expected to remain rural over the next 30 years. This has three main benefits.

The Rural Urban Boundary first provides certainty about which areas will remain rural. If all areas of the greater Auckland region having the theoretical possibility of becoming urban in the future, you’d greatly disincentivise investment in the rural sector.

The boundary also ensures certainty for infrastructure providers about where growth will be focused, ensuring that they’re able to develop. With urban development possible everywhere, NZTA, AT, Watercare, and others will have significant difficulty planning for network expansion. This would either cause infrastructure development to be constructed in the wrong areas, where the growth isn’t, or for infrastructure development in the right places to take significantly longer and less investment. By maintaining this already generous boundary, infrastructure can be put in the right place, where the growth is. The Future Urban Land Supply Strategy outlines how the development of future urban zoned area will be integrated with about $20 billion of infrastructure over the next 30 years.

The third benefit of the boundary is the reduction in environmental impacts. Highly dispersed sprawl is detrimental to the environment, with greater car dependency to make up for it- especially with the inevitable lack of adequate public transport.

Critics assume that the Rural Urban Boundary limits growth. There is still a lot of undeveloped land inside the Rural Urban Boundary. There is capacity for around 137,000 dwellings or greenfield land the size of two Hamiltons in these future urban zoned areas, which is more than enough capacity for 30 years of growth. If there is reason to change the Rural Urban Boundary, then it can be expanded through a private plan change process. When the Rural Urban Boundary was introduced, ensuring it could be modified through a private plan change rather than limited to the decisions of the Council was a core part of the hearings process.

The impacts of scrapping the Rural urban Boundary are notable. As explained in the previous paragraphs, we’d see greater uncertainty and less investment in rural areas, we’d ironically see slower infrastructure investment and development, and perhaps most importantly we’d see negative environmental impacts. Undermining the certainty provided by the Rural Urban Boundary for the mistaken reason of ‘unrestricting growth’ would be more likely to slow down growth and increase costs.

In short, removing the Rural Urban Boundary would simply be counterintuitive.