HEALTH NOTES.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 November 1926, Page 14

HEALTH NOTES.

HOUSING THE VALUE OF AIR SPACE. CONDITION'S TO BE AVOIDED. (Contributed by Department of Health.) That crowding is the greatest of all sanitary.sine will be admitted by everyone who has had to deal with problems in sanitation. It applies equally to crowding of houses on land or the crowding of persons in a building. In this article wo will consider only the first of these two evils. A person living alone in a tent in the midet of a desert .may neglect all the laws of hygiene, or personal cleanliness and still he will not be a danger to his fellow men. It is only when he lives in proximity to Others that his method of life becomes of public interest, and the greater the proximity the more likely is it that his lapses from the rules of hygiene may become a public danger. NECESSITY OF FORESIGHT. In a rapidly growing country such as we live in. how frequently do the sanitary authorities find that*, owing to the absence of control when a township began to develop, they have inherited a number of sanitary problems, the solution of which is beyond their limited financial powers. Had the buildings been properly spaced the difficulties would never have arisen. Often a township begins as a cluster of shanties round a mine, a sawmill, or some other industrial centre. As time goes on the owners of these shanties acquire the email plot of ground on which they stand, they put up larger premises, and with the growth of the township we find at its centre crowded buildings and all the elements necessary for the development of a slum. BUILDING AREA STANDARDS. It becomes advisable therefore to lay down some sort of standard —a limit of building area—the observance of which may be enforced reasonably even when the conditions are wholly rural and the township has not yet come into existence. In this we must look ahead and base our standard on the position which would obtain with an aggregation of population warranting the description of ‘‘village.” By this we must understand a collection of dwellings situated so nearly together that they may influence mutually their sanitary welfare, yet, owing to sparcity of population, the provision of the usual amenities of town life would prove too expensive for the dwellers. The first and most pressing trouble which this community will experience is the disposal of household waste matter. Refuse may be buried or burned, nightsoil can be buried —but waste waters from kitchen baths and laundry are more difficult to deal with in a crammed space. This then otters a convenient standard for ‘our building unit as applied to all rural conditions. MINIMUM AREA OF SECTIONS. Each dwelling should have attached to it exclusively sufficient land for the safe disposal of the waste waters discharged from such dwelling. The area naturally varies somewhat with the composition of the subsoil and the natural gradient of its surface, but experience teaches that a safe average • area is one quarter of an acre. In the model by-laws relating to buildings issued by the Department of Health this area is recommended as the minimum on which in an unsewered area a person should be permitted to erect a dwelling. It would be of advantage to the welfare of the Dominion if such a minimum were made compulsory. DANGERS FROM OVERCROWDING. Let us suppose now that a progressive, growing town has obtained a water supply and provided sewerage ■* and refuse removal in ite most populous areas, and the disposal of waste matters being no longer our necessary basis fojr limitation, to what sanitary needs shall we look for guidance in fixing our next standard? Undoubtedly the danger to be avoided at this stage is that of so crowding our dwellings together that tiie free circulation of air round them and the access of sunlight to them and to their immediate surroundings may be obstructed. It is impossible to over-emphasise the value to the community of fresh air and sunlight round our dwellings more particularly to the growing child. Recent scientific investigation lias shown the curative value of certain rays of sunlight, and has further shown that some of the most useful of these do not penetrate glass. Science also has proved that ricketts in children is not a question of diet alone, for insufiiciency of light aggravates greatly the tendency to this disease. We have in this Dominion a well-earned reputation for our low infrant mortality. To those who have had the opportunity to compare the physical development of the New Zealand bred children and youths with those of more crowded communities tiie superior nourishment of the majority of our young people is most striking. We have" certain advantages which affect this superiority. Our organisation for child welfare is copied by other countries, our food supply is plentiful and pure, and is produced under natural conditions. But the great!est factor of all is the absence of overcrowding. One-half of our population is ■still—let us remember with gratifica-tion-living under rural conditions, and even in our largest towns there are few places in which there is crowding in the least comparable with that to be found in older communities. Our towns —thank goodness—are still extendin'' laterally and not vertically. WHAT < lIILDREN NEED. By far the majority of our houses are small cottages each situated in its .own plot of ground. Let us think what this means to the children. If the writer were asked to single out the greatest factor of all in our national health he would select the space in the garden, or even backyard, where the baby can lie in its perambulator and breathe fn.sh air and absorb the sun's life-giving rays and where the young children ran spend the best part* of earliest years. Even the veranTlah. ugly as it so often is, lias its value as an open-air- nursery. Conpare tl.uss- conditions with thoss in

crowded manufacturing towns where the infant lives in a stuffy room and the only playground the children have is the gloomy smoke-canopied street, and let us resolve to avoid those excrescences on civilisation, the tenement house and the “sky-scraper.” Let us also be thankful that ours is a climate which lends itself to the open air life. Even in winter the children can be out-of-doors to a great extent, and we are not induced to keep them when indoors- in a steam-heated hothouse atmosphere such as we find in American dwellings. The nearer to Nature the better for the organism whether it be food, temperature, air, or habits of life. LIGHT AND AIR. We must consider then the practical methods for securing in aggregations of population a sufficiency of light and air round our dwellings. There is ,of course, a great step 'from the quarter-acre sections of unsewered areas to the minimum building site -which will secure to each householder a reasonable share of these necessities. In this we have to be guided to a large extent by economic considerations. It is little use providing sanitary surroundings for our population if tile cost thereof is such that the people cannot afford to live in them. We should, however, decide on the absolute minimum of area on which a dwelling may be erected without dangerously reducing the light and ventilation. In England the Ministry of Health in their manual for the guidance of local authorities in formulating State-aided housing‘schemes suggested that for the type of two-storied dwelling they were advocating the minimum should be one-twelfth of an acre. Given a forty-foot frontage such a section would be about 90J feet in depth. This would certainly leave little open space after the erection of usual type in use in this country, but where building space is limited and cost of land ie high it might be advisable to accept so meagre a standard, and this the Department of Health does in their pamphlet on Model Building By-lawJ. Each community must decide for itself, after due consideration of the economic position, how closely it will approach this absolute minimum, but those engaged in the planning of a town will be wise to adopt this only under pressure of circumstance, and will appoint zones wherein better standards are fixed. Another factor in securing due air space is the proximity of one house to the next, and here we have also to take cognisance of the danger of fire.

STREET FRONTAGE. The minimum frontage to the street has therefore to be considered, but limitation by this standard alone is not satisfactory since on the one hand it docs not prevent buildings covering the whole width of the section, while on the other hand it may prevent building on a spacious back area which has but enough frontpge to admit of a cart entrance. Exceptions therefore have to be provided for, and when that is done the minimum frontage must vary with ’the size of the section. The model by-laws suggest 40ft as the, absolute minimum apart from exceptional cases, since such a width,' while permitting semi-detached cottages of average structure, will permit of airspace on three sides of each house and a space of five feet clear of buildings on at least one side boundary. To prevent dwellings occupying too much of the space on its own section the Municipal Corporations Act of 1920 very wisely requires an open space to be provided at the rear or side of each building and such space must vary in width according to the height of* the house. The minimum size of this area is perhaps smaller than the enthusiastic sanatarian would select, but it is one which might well be made to apply to populous areas outside boroughs. ECONOMIC ASPECT. A marked feature in the suggestions for housing schemes issued by tire English Ministry of Health is tire recognition of the economic side. Thus, although 70ft is regarded as the correct minimum of distance between houses fronting each other across a roadway it is not suggested that the whole of this sapce should be devoted to roadway. The space is secured often by setting back the frontage line of the houses, while the roads are divided into many types ranging from twenty-five feet upwards, according to the amount of traffic to be expected on the road. This is a point which has been lost sight of by many of our local authorities. One sees sometimes short blind roads formed and footpathed. for the whole 06ft in newly cut up blocks of land. Such unnecessary work adds to the cost of the land, and so hinders the s;<ead outwards of our population. 1 inally let us not overlook the sanitary value of good transport. Anything which encourages the population to live outside the crowded centres must .bo regarded as having great hygienic significance.

N-H--A further article on this problem will deal with the construction of the house.