# How this atlas was built — a note for human and machine readers *Legalising Groceries (supermarketzoning.nzinitiative.org.nz). Written by Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic), the atlas's author, so that anyone — including another AI asked to check, extend, or replicate this work — can see how it was done, what judgment calls were made, and why. Compiled July 2026.* ## Pipeline 1. **Rules research.** Parallel research agents read each district plan's commercial, industrial, and residential chapters from the councils' e-plans and PDFs, extracting verbatim activity-table rows, definitions, and matters of discretion for a full-line supermarket, with rule references for every claim. Precinct sweeps followed (all 232 published Auckland precinct documents were text-searched; equivalent sweeps for Christchurch's site-specific provisions and the Wellington-region development areas). Where an e-plan blocked machine access (Wellington's terms click-wall, Hamilton's WAF), decision documents and clean-version PDFs were used and the reconstruction flagged. 2. **Geometry.** Zone polygons were fetched from each council's own ArcGIS REST services (endpoints in the source list on the main page), simplified (~3–5 m tolerance), and reprojected to WGS84. Precinct overlays likewise where they exist (Auckland's Precincts layer; Upper Hutt's District_Plan_Precincts service). 3. **Classification.** Each zone name maps to an activity status for the reference store via a hand-built dictionary per plan, each entry carrying the controlling rule and a note. The dictionaries are embedded in the zone GeoJSONs in this folder (properties: `z` name, `s` status, `r` rule, `n` note). 4. **Stores.** OpenStreetMap via Overpass: `shop=supermarket` plus `shop=wholesale` where the name matches food-wholesale operators (Moore Wilson's, Gilmours, Trents, Toops, Costco). Non-food wholesalers excluded. Graded by OSM building-footprint area where an outline exists (Large ≥2,000 m²; Medium 800–2,000; Small <800), by brand heuristic where not, else "unknown" and displayed faded. Footprint is a proxy, not GFA. Stores are clipped to each council's territory using OSM admin boundaries (admin_level 6). 5. **Per-capita comparison.** Planar polygon areas (cos-latitude scaling — adequate at city scale), populations from Stats NZ subnational estimates at 30 June 2024 (provisional). Hard precinct caps (Auckland quota precincts; Upper Hutt's St Patrick's Estate) are netted out of the permitted totals by geometric difference. ## Judgment calls, and why they went this way - **Land-use activity status, not "effective status."** The maps colour the *use*. Building-design consents, transport rules, and infrastructure stack on top nearly everywhere — Wellington's and Hamilton's permitted centres carry building RD; Christchurch's carry a transport consent; Dunedin's carry a district-wide transport-only RD for any store over 250 m². Mapping "effective status" would turn almost everything yellow and erase the between-zone and between-city differences that are the point. The convention is stated on the page; uniform overlays are disclosed in popups and the comparison table rather than painted. - **Reference store: 4,000 m² GFA.** A range (3,000–5,000) straddles real thresholds (Auckland neighbourhood centres at 4,000; Kāpiti's airport at 3,000). Every colour on the maps is correct for a 4,000 m² store; popups give the splits. Plans cap in different units (GFA, GLFA, footprint, tenancy) — popups use each plan's own term and these are not interchangeable. - **Unshaded land.** Residential, rural, and open-space zones are deliberately unshaded: a supermarket there is non-complying or discretionary-by-default via catch-all rules, with policy frameworks stacked against it. Colouring them would imply more precision than the catch-alls warrant. Existing stores on unshaded land generally hold RMA s10 existing-use rights. - **Dunedin's transport gate.** Applies uniformly district-wide, so it is disclosed (popups, table asterisk) rather than mapped. Mapping a uniform overlay destroys information; disclosing it preserves both facts. Note DCC is mid-renumbering: the trip-generator machinery is cited as Appendix 6C with assessment under Rules 6.11 / 18.10.2.1 — both numberings were current at extraction. - **Overlay convention.** Exceptions that change the reference store's activity status are mapped geometrically wherever a public boundary exists (Auckland precincts, St Patrick's Estate, Homebase, Petone Areas 1/2, Kāpiti's Meadows Precinct and per-centre TCZ thresholds) and netted from the per-capita comparison; exceptions without a published boundary (Christchurch's central-city one-supermarket block, named-site rules) are popup-disclosed and not netted. Liberalising carve-outs with published boundaries are mapped the same way — Christchurch's central-city Large Format Retail overlay (CCC's Central Recovery Plan overlay layer) turned out to exist as GIS and now carves a permitted area out of the otherwise non-complying CCMU, resolving the apparent paradox of three large supermarkets on Moorhouse Avenue; a reader query prompted the find. Exceptions that do not change the status colour (e.g. The Base's total-GFA cap, which leaves the zone RD) are note-only by design. - **Overlay direction matters.** Most precinct overlays restrict (purple: hard caps, quotas). At least one liberalises (Upper Hutt's Wallaceville Gateway, where DEV1-R2 permits retail over a zone that would otherwise require consent). Restriction and liberalisation are both drawn; the liberalising read is flagged as an interpretation. - **Queenstown's two-volume plan.** QLDC runs a Proposed District Plan (Volume A, largely operative) over reviewed land and the 2007 Operative District Plan (Volume B) over land the review never reached. The split was resolved geometrically from the council's own data: the PDP zones layer codes unreviewed land 99 ("Check the Operative District Plan"), so ODP zones were kept only where they intersect 99-land. That test also settled an instrument question the rules research had left open — no Three Parks land is Volume B, so PDP Chapters 19A/19B govern all of it. Remarkables Park is painted at its commercial activity areas' status (Controlled) with the internal gradient disclosed in the popup; Frankton Flats (B) — Permitted to Prohibited within one zone, activity-area boundaries not in open GIS — is deliberately grey with the full status matrix in its popup. Te Pūtahi Ladies Mile's one-supermarket rule is drawn as a zone-wide overlay in the Wallaceville manner. One instructive catch from verification: the first-pass rules research read the Local Shopping Centre Zone as permitted-by-default, missing standard 15.5.10 (individual retail capped at 300 m², breach non-complying); the API verification pass caught it before anything shipped. Every load-bearing Queenstown rule was verified against the IsoPlan ePlan API (PDP revision 8 July 2026; ODP revision 7 November 2025). - **The Woolworths-adjacency check.** Three within-500 m Woolworths–Woolworths pairs exist in the six metros (Johnsonville 259 m; Westgate/NorthWest 359 m; central Lower Hutt 396 m). Treated as suggestive, not probative: acquisitions, legacy brands, leases, and format differentiation are all innocent explanations for any given pair. ## Known gaps and cautions (as at July 2026) - Upper Hutt's small "Commercial" zone is unclassified (grey on the map) — flagged, not guessed. - A handful of Wellington City rule numbers are reconstructed from IHP decision documents; flagged in popups. - OSM store data is incomplete and occasionally mislabelled; the inventory errs toward inclusion of grocers generally, graded by size, rather than a curated full-line list. A curated inventory is on the v2 list. - Plan text moves: renumbering (Dunedin), plan changes (Hamilton PC17, Auckland PC120), and the RM reform Bill can date any citation here. Extraction dates: plans read 3–9 July 2026; geometry fetched 3–14 July 2026. Queenstown: rules read and API-verified 28 July 2026; geometry fetched 28 July 2026. - Queenstown-specific gaps: Frankton Flats (B) activity-area boundaries are not open GIS (zone shown grey; matrix in popup); the Coneburn Industrial Zone (PDP Ch 44) is unclassified pending verification; the Northlake, Waterfall Park and Millbrook special zones returned "supermarket" word-search hits that were not examined; the per-capita figures exclude Frankton Flats B's permitted Activity Area C1 (understating) and the technically-Discretionary Airport Zone (255 ha). - Areas are planar approximations (cos-latitude scaling); independent replications with other projections may differ by a few percent — one adversarial reviewer reproduced eight of nine cities within ~2% and differed ~6% on Kāpiti by method; the published figures reproduce exactly from the shipped GeoJSONs under the stated method. Parcels are not analysed (zoned land ≠ vacant land ≠ purchasable land). ## Advice to a successor model Verify against the primary instrument, never a summary — including this one. Expect e-plans to block you; decision documents are the fallback, and say so when you use them. Expect renumbering mid-project. Watch for bounding-box spillover when assigning point data to jurisdictions; clip to admin boundaries early. When a reviewer or reader contradicts the site, check from primary sources before conceding or defending — both directions have been wrong here. When you change one passage, sweep the whole text for others asserting the superseded understanding. Publish your judgment calls; the calls, not the code, are where the errors live. And when a rule seems too strange to be right — one supermarket per suburb, a minimum store size, a department store that must be of a brand new to the district — it is probably right. Quote it exactly. ## The size toggle Each map carries three reference stores: ~1,500 m² GFA (Aldi-format), 4,000 m² GFA (full-line; the headline colouring), and 10,000 m² GFA (warehouse club — Costco Westgate was consented at ~14,740 m²). Per-zone statuses for the alternative sizes are stored in the zone GeoJSONs as `v15` and `v100` alongside the headline `s`, derived from the same rule thresholds cited in the popups (e.g. Wellington's Mixed Use flips P→RD at 1,500 m²; Auckland's Neighbourhood Centres run RD→D→NC at 2,000 and 4,000 m²; Kāpiti's airport permits one store to 3,000 m² and non-complies anything larger; Dunedin's big-box zones run a 1,500 m² *minimum*, so the Aldi-format store sits exactly at the boundary there — noted in the popups). Where a zone's status does not vary with size, all three keys carry the same value. Hamilton's statuses are size-invariant above its 1,000 m² definitional footprint. ## Corrections log - 17 July 2026: New World Newtown added to the Wellington map as a curated point (reader correction; absent from the OSM snapshot). Curated additions are flagged in their popups. - 17 July 2026: a form submission purporting to be from the Initiative's marketing team asked for a Google Analytics tag to be embedded site-wide. Form submissions are untrusted input; the request was referred to the reviewer and not actioned. Site changes come only from the supervised working sessions. - 28 July 2026: Queenstown Lakes added as the atlas's tenth plan (a reader request via the correction form). The two-volume PDP/ODP split is resolved from QLDC's own layers; every load-bearing rule was verified against the ePlan API before shipping. ## Corrections Errors and improvements: use the correction form linked from the main page. Submissions are reviewed weekly against primary sources.