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Urban design and planning - city centre development

Urban magazine is distributed quarterly to 2000 well-qualified, high-earning professionals in urban design and planning throughout New Zealand and in Australia. It draws on international trends in the design and planning sectors.

In the space of just 20 months, TPL Media has established Urban magazine and UrbanNZ.co.nz as a significant resource for the New Zealand urban design and planning sector.

Now it’s time for the sector to make greater use of this resource.

The team at Urban want to talk to you about ways you can use Urban and its associated website to contribute to the future of urban design, planning, and architecture – and to the profile of your own consultancy or company.

Use your professional experience and skills to write or co-author articles of direct interest to designers, planners, developers, councils - or your own clients. Urban’s editorial team will provide whatever help you need.

General content – short articles, profiles, case studies, project outlines and other relevant topics
Focus articles – dealing with your specific area of expertise within the urban design and planning sector
Special feature articles – suggest ideas to the editor, or participate with other sector members on topics suggested by the Urban editorial team.
Book reviews
Letters to the editor

About Urban magazine

Urban magazine is unique in New Zealand as the only publication of its kind that is not published by an association, institute or other professional group. It was created to provide an independent forum for urban designers and planners, transport planners, architects and landscape architects, surveyors, engineers and many more.

We have an informal arrangement with Towns & Cities New Zealand Incorporated to publicise and promote its activities, but the group does not have any formal influence on magazine content.
TCNZ aims to improve local economies, in a sustainable way, through an emphasis on strengthening town and city centre organisations. Urban magazine unreservedly supports that aim as being critical to improving the quality of urban living throughout New Zealand.

Contributions to Urban magazine

All contributions should be discussed with the editor in advance, although we will definitely consider items that are submitted close to deadline on topics that are highly time-sensitive.

Contributions to the magazine should be sent electronically to grahamh@tplmedia.co.nz in a format that can be easily opened in Microsoft Word. Graphics or photographs should be in a widely accepted format like jpg or TIFF.
(Photographs copied from a website will not be suitable for publishing in a printed, 4-colour magazine). Even a relatively small photograph published on an inside page of our magazine should be at least 1 megabyte in size, although ‘head and shoulders’ pictures of individuals can be used if they are close to half a megabyte in file size.
Photographs can be sent on a CD, but the disk must be formatted so that it can be read by our production department. Sending files created with specialised software which is not available to us at TPL Media will cause delays.
Because our publishing dates are set in conjunction with our printing contractors, deadlines cannot be extended in any circumstances.

Ways to contribute
Urban magazine is intended to be an independent forum for the specialist knowledge of experts working in the areas specified above in the section called ‘About Urban’.
The magazine’s editorial policy is to provide highly readable but considered and professional coverage of the issues facing urban design and urban planning, and all the areas which are closely related to this important sector.

We want to publish success stories, but we won’t shy away from areas of failure either. In other words, we want to reflect the reality of working in urban design, urban planning, using the specialist knowledge of the professionals who drive this sector. You are the people who know what’s hot and what’s not in design and planning – we want to help you to put your views, your ideas, your expertise in front of your peers and people outside the sector who can benefit from your knowledge.

The easiest way to contribute is to discuss with the editor a subject for an article, either written entirely by you or in conjunction with our writers. It might be a case study of an acclaimed project recently completed; it might be a ‘preview’ article which details a project that has only just been approved by a council or by central government.

If you have a strong view on an issue currently facing the urban design and planning sector, you might want to give your opinion on it, or write an article that summarises both sides of a debate, and gives your view on a preferable outcome.
Articles can be humorous, cynical, irreverent - or judicious and impartial to a degree that any Supreme Court judge would be proud of.
Discussions of fact and opinion are the way human beings further their knowledge – Urban magazine is providing a forum (both in print and on the web) where its readers can examine issues of direct importance to their profession.

Urban magazine contacts

Managing Editor:
Graham Hawkes
grahamh@tplmedia.co.nz
DDI +64 9 529 3014

Sales Manager:
Charles Fairburn
charles@tplmedia.co.nz
DDI +64 9 529 3020