Kopupaka Reserve: Project Statement

Kopupaka Reserve is a locally responsive environmental design that integrates engineering, ecological, cultural and community outcomes. From an infrastructural need to attenuate and detain stormwater run-off from the streets and buildings of the town centre, Kopupaka challenges expectations around the design and use of stormwater reserves to intertwine culture and infrastructure with the creation and ecological restoration of a new public space distinctly bespoke to Aotearoa.

The humble strawberry is an unlikely victim of the changing face of Auckland city yet, in west Auckland, the acres of strawberry fields that once defined the landscape are being replaced with the infrastructure of a new town centre at Westgate, part of an Auckland Council strategy to cope with a predicted population boom. The notion of weaving histories and overlapping functions together is the dominant design narrative of the park articulated in physical form through the merging tributary and constructed wetlands of the park.

This is a hybrid park, an integration of infrastructure with the natural. A stormwater reserve is combined with an urban park, playground and skate park, all made possible by dovetailing the masterplanning of the streets with the green infrastructure of the 22-hectare stormwater reserve.This is a new type of civic infrastructure, where traditional boundaries and functions overlap it, has a tight overlay of cultural, ecological, community and (mostly unseen) engineering objectives.