KEY POINTS:
Nearly eight years after the country's top environmental watchdog warned that the Waitakere Ranges were doomed to become suburbia, Parliament has passed a special law to protect the ranges' rural character.
During that time, many more lights of houses have appeared on the city-facing flanks of the ranges.
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Morgan Williams released in 2000 a study which found that unrestrained development in the ranges would lead to "death by a thousand cuts".
He pointed out that although iconic landscape it was hardly pristine; 18,000 people lived there and almost a quarter of the land was privately owned.
The response to his warning, the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Act, will not stop development.
Waitakere City Council will prepare local area management plans where communities get to decide the long-term development goals.
Applications for consents that are seen as good for the economic and social base of communities will get more weight from the people who decide planning. Attempts to clear bush for sites will get much harder.
Residential development will have to be of an appropriate scale and intensity to fit the rural character of an area and not contribute to urban sprawl.
Dr Williams' worry that those deciding consent applications are not thinking about the big picture view, or the cumulative effects, of granting each consent, will be met by matching the application against set goals to suit the particular needs of an area.
The net effect is that in the future, the ranges are more certainly to be of a rural character than urban.
