New rules governing Dunedin's rural land aims to protect the city's most productive land.
The rules covering how rural land is used and under what circumstances it can be developed were made public as part of the release of the Dunedin City Council's second generation plan today.
Council policy planner Michael Bathgate said Dunedin was unusual, as about 97% of its land area was non-residential and the changes made in the plan reflected the scale, use and size differences between different areas of rural land.
Land zoned rural will now be split into seven different zones to reflect those differences, Mr Bathgate said.
One of the major changes was the increase in the minimum site size for subdivision across five of the new zones, which was 15ha under the old plan.
''What we did end up with was the development of 15ha lifestyle blocks which isn't really a productive farm unit which didn't help with fragmentation of productive land.''
Rural residential zones had specifically been identified to allow for lifestyle block type development, he said.
Other changes included changes to the clearance of native vegetation and what activities were allowed on rural land without the need for consent.
The new rules now allowed for farming research facilities, rural industry, tourism and small scale retail like farm gate stalls.
As many of the city's wildlife and conservation attractions were located in rural zoned land, it made sense to allow that sort of activity, Mr Bathgate said.
