New Zealand surveyors have a long history in designing urban areas in New Zealand. From the earliest planned European settlements the surveyors have played crucial roles in selecting sites for and designing entire towns that have gradually grown into our major cities. Felton Mathew had a design once Auckland was selected as a city site, William Mein Smith made the first design for New Plymouth, Tuckett selected the site for Dunedin and planned the initial town. Original town layouts for many settlements were designed in England assuming the land was flat, clear of trees, with suitable soils and not subject to flooding. The early settlers to Wellington initially settled on the flat land around Petone but after after having their belongings washed into the harbour a second time by the Hutt River, they demanded the surveyors available on site relocate the settlement on drier land.

The best first efforts of the surveyors for the now homeless settlers were to drape the original flat-land-plan layout over the safer, drier hills of Thorndon.  It soon became apparent that good topographical plans were needed to ensure that all routes for roads were at gradients that wheeled vehicles could use and that rainwater was channelled from to minimise scouring the fragile roads and away from sites of house.  So New Zealand surveyors quickly developed skills in designing urban roads that could be built with pick and shovel on challenging, rocky contours and also to design stormwater drainage to keep urban developments accessible and habitable.
From these situations of necessity, New Zealand's early surveyors developed their own skills to create settlements in landscapes unheard of to the designers back in England. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries as settlements began to grow at a pace, many 'wannabe-land-developers' began designing their own towns or town extensions in rather haphazard fashions.  The result were often no better than the flat-plan-flat-land ideas first brought by the earliest settler.
A legal remedy was eventually created in the Municipal Corporations Act 1922 that required that every design for a new subdivision of more than two lots - the allotments, roads and reserve spaces had to be designed by a qualified surveyor.  So for about 70 years, from 1922 until the passing of the Resource Management Act in 1991, that was the law.  Much had changed in those decades as New Zealand society and our towns evolved to cities and simple roads that doubled as legal frontage to houses and travel-routes changed in types and functions.

Today many surveyors are still intimately involved with the process of designing the locations of new urban and suburban streets and the location of all the services and drainage provided there.  Because the Surveyors’ plans must determine the legal ownership of land for issue of titles, Surveyors are the professionals most commonly deciding the location, size, shape and orientation of the new allotments for house sites.

Some surveyors specialise in the modern detailed designs of urban residential areas, that is Urban Design.  This is an evolved skill to provide not just an adequate, well oriented house site, access to it and drainage from it but also creating more closely settled urban areas where families can happily live and recreate: liveable communities.

The accompanying slide show provide example images that can be considered for designing attractive liveable communities