BETTER PLACES TO LIVE IN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 365, 21 June 1946, Page 22

BETTER PLACES TO LIVE IN

| Written for "The Listener" |

by

A.M.

R.

Planning the Towns of To-Morrow # Beicc % EAR plans for new roads, railways, bridges, pipe-lines, aerodromes, reservoirs, and entire extra suburbs (not to mention tunnels) have been announced for Auckland and Wellington. Boroughs in various parts of New Zealand have sought blueprints of their futures from professional Town Planners, The National Council of Churches has called for "dispersion and decentralisation of population and industry." Even Britain’s White Paper, which in April discussed building in all a score or so new towns may not look fantastic in New Zealand if this procession of proposals continues. But are they really planning-or just patching? What is town planning anyhow? And how do town ax Sige set to work?

VERY overseas visitor arriving at Wellington expresses two amazements-the first that the city can exist at all where it does; the second, how anyone could have thought of putting a city there. But then nobody did. It just growed. In the same way practically every town in New Zealand has been snowballed from small beginnings, unexpected and unplanned. The results are sometimes so unpleasant, and the prospects of further unplanned growth so frightening, that municipal authorities are taking their charges in hand to correct bad deportment and ensure healthier and ‘more balanced growth. Actually every settlement of over a thousand people has been required since 1926 (by the Town Planning Act) to work out proposals for its own reconstruction and development. Civic pride and sound business have urged most to do so. But few have had the necessary staff. When recently, therefore, the Planning Division of the Ministry of Works found itself able to lend qualified men from its Town Planning Design Staff to local bodies there quickly accumulated a queue of towns waiting to be served. But who are these Town Planners? And how do they set about their work? The men are a very small company of architects, civil engineers, lawyers or economists who have taken a university course in Town Planning (by correspondence ot abroad-we have as yet no such course in New Zealand), and have passed the British Institute of Town Planners theoretical and practical

exams. They are experts, not dictators (as all "planners" are assumed by some people to be), merely advising the people’s representatives, with whom, locally and nationally, the responsibility for directing each town’s planning lies. However, they are the rule-testing exception to the definition of experts as people who know more and more about

less and less, for their object when beginning a plan is to know just everything about the region they are to prescribe for." Citizens in Imagination This means becoming, in concrete imagination, a daily citizen of the town: knowing "in one’s bones" from what way comes the rain and how often that wind blows; how the soils of each suburb and street hold water; what happens when the rivers rise a foot, or two feet; how much shade trees will throw in each month of the year; what folk favour for their front lawns, and like what are their backyards and back gardens; how far women can push prams with pleasure in the climate; where their eggs and vegetables come from; how often fires are needed; how fast traffic speeds through what streets; where farmers park cars on sale day; how many children are likely to be in kindergarten, primary and _ secondary schools, respectively, two, fifteen and forty years hence; and what hopes for expansion, what new processes, are being hatched by factories or firms already in the town or intending some day to come eo epee All This and Much More It sounds a lot to know, and it is. But obviously no one could plan intelligently a town layout that would make life simple, fuller, happier, for the citizens unless he knew all these and two hundred more. Fortunately, modern techniques come to the town planner’s aid in helping him to build -quickly a more d¢etailed and balanced picture of a place than probably even its oldest inhabitant possesses. He has not only plans and maps, for example (including soil maps and contour maps-to show rises and hollows), but aerial photos which, pieced together, reveal much that even actual street-walking and housecalling never can. He can study wind charts, sun-incidence diagrams, traffic tallies, income information and population curves. By this means, in fact, he can sit in a balloon over his town and

see in a few days or weeks all that occurs in an entire twelve months in streets, sections, factories, theatres, churches, schools, playing fields and houses. Thus he sees children run across throughtraffic streets, even when they have not yet been born in houses not yet erected along streets that so far exist only on maps. He sees future tired housewives leaving, for future tired husbands later to push uphill, unprotected prams and groceries at the foot of "surveyors’ streets," (Too often in New Zealand surveyors have applied to maps of country they have never seen the axiom that a straight line is the shortest distanceand semi-perpentiiculars like Hay Street and Grass Street in Oriental Bay, Wellington, have resulted.) He sees women (again actual or likely) struggling to dry clothes on the lee side of smokestacks, he sees wardrobes and pianos being craned into hillside houses. He sees schoolchildren whooping in exswamp backyards. For weeks, perhaps months, a town planner broods over the documents that call up these pictures before ever he sets pencil to paper. That is his job-to lengthen ‘scores of lives and to save scores of thousands of man-hours in the future by imaginatively seeing to-day what this road or that building will lead to, ; But meanwhile he is gathering also other sorts of facts to complete his. picture of Town X. Painstakingly he is classifying, from the civic files or from personal visits, the use to which every section and building in the town and its outskirts is put. He is discovering who owns each, and by what tenure. He is noting what features of his landscape are "given’-unchangeable and irremovable, that is to say, for all practical purposes, such as through railways, rivers, harbours or volcanic "lines." He is forecasting, too, the settlement’s probable line of development by seeking out advance knowledge of the possibilities‘ of the district that it serveswhether for farming, or manufacturing; whether it will become a crossroads of communication or pass off the. beaten track as rail gives way to road and road to air; whether it is attractive to industrialists, or to holidayers, or to retired people... What Do People Want? Then, when the Planner has his full local knowledge, what. will he do with it? He cannot turn it straightway into a plan for X, because to do that another kind of knowledge is needed, a knowledge of what people want. No: one knows that, of course, not even the town’s inhabitants. So again the town planner has to set a trained imagi-

nation to work upon another set of facts. He must begin with that very elusive thing, the national character. All human beifigs, of course, want shelter and convenience from their towns, But thereafter an Englishman’s wants differ considerably from a Frenchman’s or an American’s, and a New Zealander’s are different again. We do not desire, for example, American skyscrapers along our waterfronts, or huge ornate Latin boulevards, monuments and city centres, or English promenades with piers and pierrots and penny-in-the-slot machines beside our beaches. What we do want, however, we do not know because we have not had it yet. The town planner must do his best at this point to interpret ourselves to ourselves. Then there is’ national policy to consider, sometimes almost as elusive a thing as national character. Is industry to be dispersed or concentrated? Is it wanted at all? Will farmers of the future have big cars and cheap petrol with, accordingly, a wide shopping range, or will the smaller country centres revive instead of being swallowed by the larger? Will big public works be required to maintain full employment (and therefore grandiose city improvements really be possible) or will full employment elsewhere leavé only a small manual labour fofce available? Your guess is as good as mine. But the town planner must not guess, He must have interviewed departmental heads and others who know possibilities and work on likelihoods, not assumptions. Not Too Large, Not Too Small After that his whole local situation must be set in the wide perspective of general principles.. For example, under a certain population a town can be too small for industrial efficiency (i.e. its local market and its "pool" of labour, skill and servicing facilities will be too small), or for municipal efficiency (amenities become too few and _ too costly), or for cultural efficiency (libraries are too small, choice of films too limited, production of local papers and plays, and visits of touring teams and companies impossible), But over a cer tain sizé also towns lose their advantages. Suburbs sprawl out into country, wasting workers’ time, money and energy

in daily travel, and becoming’ mere dormitories without life or character of their own. Crowded traffic routes neutralise the advantages of contiguity. Sheer human mass destroys local democracy, and cultural individuality and initiative. Fresh food comes in too little quality, and too late, from too far. And the cost of living risés with the tenements... It is also possible for a town to be too approachable as well as‘ not approachable enough. If it lies far off the highways of commerce its people will suffer economically and socially. But if traffic to elsewhere flows continuously through it they will suffer in life and in limb, Similarly a town can be so unified in architecture or so completely zoned in activities as to be mechanical; or, on the other hand, so sprawling and diverse as to be simply a mess. The pleasantest places to live in turn out to be those where city streets follow one style of building (with individual variations), and where trees, patks and tall blocks of flats diversify the suburban sea of houses. Having considered his settlement against this whole background of national atmosphere, political intentions, natural limits and experience elsewhere, the town planner at last produces his report. After All This Or perhaps we should say that the Town Plan now makes itself, for, whe» all factors have been considered, one line of development-a compromise between all considerations-usually appears inevitable. It must be worked out in detailed particularity, neverthelessa road to be diverted at this point, a windbreak plantation to be planted here, a new school to go there, with such and such an access to this housing block, and such and such an angle to the winter sun, these sections only in this suburb to be set aside for shops ... After that we must leave our town planner, turned salesman, to convince the town council, And leave them, working over decades and as opportunity occurs, gradually to mould their settlement towards the practicable ideal of "a good place to live" which they have accepted.