AUCKLAND CITY COUNCIL MEDIA RELEASE

19 January 2006

Growth goes online and interactive

Auckland City has launched a new easy to use online tool that illustrates where growth and change is occurring and how the city is managing its effects.

The city's population is expected to increase by 141,000 between 2001 and 2021, largely due to births over deaths, and Auckland City is working to develop sustainable communities.

The tool, entitled 'Auckland's future', uses flash technology to provide a single point of access to information about where and how the city will grow.

"The biggest technical hurdle that we had to overcome was providing a highly graphical multimedia tool to home internet users who generally rely on dial-up connections," says Councillor Dr Bruce Hucker, deputy mayor and chairperson of the Urban Strategy and Governance Committee.

"A special feature of the site is that the movie presentation and other photographic images are designed to start playing almost instantly while the remainder of the movie and images continue to download in the background.

"We have achieved this by using Macromedia Flash web technology, which is used to deliver multimedia content to millions of potential web users."

The site introduces the viewer to information about growth in Auckland city through a 'movie' of a growing city, but without the long download times that might be expected with this kind of technology.

The animated tool allows Auckland City's web savvy customers to choose the area of the council in which they are interested - transport, community, city development, environment and economy. They can then select projects, illustrated as red dots or "jaffas", which are located geographically on a rotatable map. Links from the "jaffas" take the user through to specific pages of the existing Auckland City and project partner websites.

Different viewing orientations of the map of the Auckland isthmus help provide a sense of location for those unfamiliar with specific areas.

The tool is a means of staying on top of the variety of projects in which Auckland City and partner organisations, such as Transit New Zealand and Watercare, are currently involved and which contribute to harnessing the benefits of the growth expected across the isthmus over the next 25 years.

For example, visitors to the site can find out more about Auckland City's liveable community plans or how Auckland City is working with the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) and Transit New Zealand to connect people and places throughout the Auckland region.

To access the tool, go to www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/aul.

Note:
The tool is available in flash and static versions to ensure equal access to the information regardless of modem speed.

ENDS

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