Study Land Planning and Development at Otago

Devon Allen:

Kia ora, my name is Devon and I’m a third-year student at the School of Surveying, the University of Otago.

As part of my degree, I’ve taken a range of Land Planning and Development papers, and this has led to me falling in love with urban design. I love that with urban design you can be creative, and we use the latest CAD techniques in order to implement our designs. Urban design has a real field finish process, so it feels like a real job. We go all the way from the initial site analysis to the final design of our subdivision.

Planning is also one of my favourite papers. I love exploring the different ways that people use land, and I also really like considering the effects that people’s actions have on the environment. The papers in the land planning and development degree really complement each other, and I feel really ready for industry and I’m really confident about my future employment.

So if you want a career that takes you places, check out Land Planning and Development at the University of Otago School of Surveying.

James Berghan:

Kia ora, I’m James. I’m one of the lecturers in the School of Surveying, and in the next three minutes myself and one of our students, Devon, are going to sell you on the three-year Bachelor of Surveying in Land Planning and Development.

So the Bachelor of Surveying in Land Planning and Development is all about the relationships between people and places. So we work with how humans impact and effect on the environment, but also how the environment impacts on us as well.

Some of the specifics in the course we focus on are the design and layout of roads, streets, pipes, reserves, and transport networks. But we also ask some of the bigger questions like: How might we solve the housing crisis? How do our towns and cities foster resilience or combat climate change? And how do we create diverse spaces for all sorts of different people within our societies?

The first year of the degree is pretty broad. It sets a really good foundation for the rest of the course, and then you start to specialise in the second and third years. We start to look at topics such as urban planning, engineering, urban design, project management, and land law.

For me, I really love the creative element of the degree. So I teach the urban design papers where we use a lot of freehand and computer-based drawing tools to design streets and new neighbourhoods. I also really love the real-life aspect of it. So we work with real sites, we work with real people and real clients. We’re working with real council documents and regulations, and we work a lot with local professionals in the industry.

The job opportunities are great for a graduate from the BSc. Graduates from the Survey School are world-renowned, and there are lots of opportunities in private practice, in development companies, for iwi, councils, or government centrally.