Waikeria Prison Landscape

The Waikeria Prison project began in July 2016 with a Prison Capacity Alternative Site Assessment to determine the most appropriate location for a proposed new prison facility in the upper north island. Three alternative sites were assessed against a number of criteria, including landscape and visual considerations. 

The focus of the project was to assist the Department of Corrections with obtaining an alteration to the designation for the Waikeria Prison site. The Department sought an amendment to allow up to 3,000 prisoners to be accommodated on the site. From a landscape architectural perspective, the concept throughout all stages of the project process, from initial scoping to detailed design, was to ensure that the facility (within a large 94ha area of the 1276 ha larger prison site) could be integrated in to the existing rural landscape to minimise adverse effects on rural character and the visual amenity of neighbours, while also managing the expectations of tangata whenua and other stakeholders. The collective experience of Boffa Miskell’s landscape planning, cultural advisory and landscape architecture team with other projects of a similar nature ensured the response to the brief was sufficiently robust and appropriate to undergo detailed scrutiny by the Department, Regional and District Councils, stakeholders and the Environment Court.