TOWN-PLANNING.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4700, 19 May 1924, Page 3

TOWN-PLANNING.

AN EXHIBITION' CONFERENCE. OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN. Pleasant things were said about Australia and New Zealand at a townplanning conference opened recently at the British Empire Exhibition. Mr W. R. Davidge, for instance, read a paper in the course of which he staled that "in no country hi the world had cities-started milder belter conditions, with more liberal ideas, and with more open spaces about the buildings than in Australia and New Zealand.” There is no doubt that we were fortunate, on the whole, in our town and city beginnings, and that little more than ordinary common sense is needed to enable us to avoid many of the most serious mistakes made in older countries. Fortunately as we are placed in this country, we have much to learn from conferences like that at the Empire Exhibition, and also from the town and regional planning enterprises that are being undertaken in Great Britain. A scheme prepared last year for the systematic development in nc-v conditions of an area of one -hundrel thousand acres around the town of Doncaster is a typical example, >:f present-day regional planning m Great Britain. * Doncaster has grown up as the.market town of an agricultural area, but coal measures, are now being opened up in the vicinity. An essential aim in the preparation of the Doncaster regional plan is to save the pleasant countryside from being converted into "black country,” As the plan was outlined in the London “Times," the land of the area is to be divided into three classes, “certain low-lying land being allocated to industry, other low-lying lanl to agriculture, and the higher to housing and clean commerce and industry, not, however promiscuously, but in well-balanced communities, dependent primarily on themselves, but still looking to Central Doncaster as the .social and civic, capital, as it were, of the group. Doncaster proper, therefore, it is not sought materially to enlarge ; the new communities are not to be suburbs, but members, rather, of a well-regulated family, and autonomous. The scheme provides for the maintenance, as far as possible, of agricultural lands for parks and open spaces, and for the preservation of places of historic interest and natural beauty, including whole villages within the ; area. British town-planners are giving their attention, amongst other things, to vai ious. aspects of the- housing problem, and also to the design and equipment of factories, the development of roads, and the preservation of • local amenities. A development which particularly deserves attention in this country is the transfer of factories and other industrial establishments from urban to tural areas.