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TelstraClear Manukau City (2002)
Assessment of Landscape & Visual Effects
Location: Manukau City
Client: TelstraClear
TelstraClear proposes to construct a broadband telecommunications network in Manukau City , which will connect via a national fibre optic cable backbone, to other parts of where its network is already established. TelstraClear seek resource consent for this activity in a staged process, with the Otara - East Tamaki area being the second of the proposed stages in Manukau City .
As part of preparing the AEE to enable TelstraClear to lodge the relevant resource consent documentation, Hudson Associates Landscape Architects were engaged by TelstraClear to undertake a detailed Assessment of Visual Effects (AVE) of TelstraClear’s proposal to establish a mixed overhead and underground telecommunications network in the city. It is the purpose of this AVE to provide the details of the process undertaken in assessing the visual effects of TelstraClear’s proposed overhead network, and to recommend mitigation where necessary to reduce these effects to minor or less.
The approach undertaken to achieve this was to firstly recognise that each application area will contain sub-areas within it that have special characteristics and individual character. The same will occur for the streetscapes within these areas. By analysing these characteristics and the resulting character, the sensitivity of the receiving environment to the proposed TelstraClear network was assessed. Using this information as a basis, the visual effects of the proposed network within each receiving environment was then assessed at a wide range of representative sites throughout each application area. There were 37 assessment sites in the application area. Where effects were assessed as more than minor, mitigation was recommended to reduce the effect to minor or less.