Improving the Evening Economy

Night time in the City Centre

Heart of Gisborne has just launched what it hopes will be one of the most comprehensive studies of Gisborne’s city centre night life. The aim? The development of the cities first Evening Economy Strategy.

It is now well accepted that a truly vibrant and economically viable city centre should be functioning well 24 hours a day. At Heart of Gisborne we have developed a strong retail or daytime strategy, our vision now is to develop a similar hospitality or after 5pm strategy with a focus on the well supported, mixed use of our city centre after dark.

The first step on that road has just begun - a major research project ascertaining the communities perceptions of the city centre, what it offers and what it should offer. The community survey will be supplemented with walking audits focusing on the presentation of the city centre after dark – lighting, parking, deserted streets etc – as well as some desk top mapping overlaying placement of bars, cafes, restaurants, taxi stands, residential developments etc to see if this throws up any issues.

Heart of Gisborne hopes to gather the city centre hospitality industry together to talk through the results and come up with a strategic plan of attack for improving business conditions for our city centre bars, cafes and restaurants. Weare very aware that the only way this will work is if we have community and industry support from the ground up, so their thoughts, ideas and expertise are vital all the way along the process.

HofG will be setting up a survey kiosk in the CBD very shortly to collect research data and the survey is also available for download here, we encourage as many people as possible to take time to complete and return it to PO Box 202, Gisborne.

Hospitality Survey