PLANNING FOR TOWN AND COUNTRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 16

PLANNING FOR TOWN AND COUNTRY

Reconstruction in Post-war Britain SERIES of talks will presently be given from the YA stations by Charles Cameron, until recently an officer of the British Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Making contact with Mr. Cameron shortly after his afrival in New Zealand, The Listener asked how he thought British experience in physical reconstruction was likely to apply to New Zealand. "I can’t possibly say that after only a few days in the country," replied Mr. Cameron, a shorter edition of David Niven with a pleasant Scottish voice. "But it is quite obvious that both com‘munities are up agdinst a good many of the same problems-in essence if not in precise form. For example, you have to get more houses put up, and that pretty quickly. You have to decide what these houses shall be like-flats, or cottages, or bungalows; temporary or permanent; timber or brick or concrete; prefabricated or otherwise. You have to decide where these new dwellings are to be put-on the outskirts of your present cities, or replacing poorly built areas in those cities, or in smaller towns elsewhere. And if you decide to make the

smaller towns larger you have to take steps to get established in them the industries at which, people will be working in the immediate future. And, in any case, you have to take farming into consideration in all this. new building, neither using up good land unnecessarily nor pushing market-gardens and town milk supplies too far away from the people. Besides, your main highways have to-be planned from centre to centre so as to give freest and fastest communication from one to the other with-

out either making life too dangerous in the smaller settlements, in between, or leaving them high and dry. In short, New Zealand’s problems in this field are the same as Britain’s. The magnitude of Britain’s problem, however, has been aggravated by the war." » "Because-I take it--so many British towns have been blitzed." "Yes, but more than that. The British people have to convert the greater part of their industry back from war production to peace production; they have

also to convert some of it from war production into new industries altogether, and in certain cases, functioning with different processes on: different sites. Besides, as you know, we never really broke the back of clearing up our slums. They have still to be liquidated., German bombs did only some of the preparatory work towards that. For slum clearance really means slum replacement. And that involves not only putting up new and better buildings where the old substandard ones stood, but thinning out a good deal of their old populations and transplanting them into new districts altogether." Citizens Without Cities "You mean building new suburbs?" "Well, partly. But theré’s a limit to the distance you can keep pushing big cities out into the countryside round about. Take Manchester, for instance. Something like 150,000 people must be rehoused in new suburbs adjacent to the city or further afield in new localities. A White Paper published last April considered that a score or so of altogether new cities might have to be built in various parts of Britain, either in virgin country or around already existing small towns." "That woud promising." "It is. But don’t under-estimate the difficulties. For instance, if a big city loses population, particularly from its centre, it may lose status-and revenue. Both these things matter a lot to the ratepayers who remain. And then the small town that has been selected to become a minor city may not, for its part, like the prospect either." ' "Well, the problem that’s troubling us at this moment, Mr. Cameron, is what people transferred to new towns-or to new suburbs for that matter-are going to live on." : "Oh, there’s-no question of transferring people in the sense of ordering them out of one place into another. The idea is to provide new houses in new communities for those who at presert are without a house, or are living in poor conditions, and to do it inside such well-thought-out long-range plans that the whole British standard of living and way

of life will benefit to the maximum by the change." "So these Town and Country reconstruction plans are worked out in White. hall for the whole country?" "No, that is not the British way of doing things. The statutory Town Planning authorities are the local bodies. But these obviously cannot do «he job each on its own. Long before the war most of them linked up into , joint Planning Committees’ covering wide areas and delegated to these Committees the job of preparing statutory planaing schemes... These schemes are integrated with ‘the adjoining schemes of other Joint Com. mittees, and of course the Ministry of Town and Country Planning . itself, through its Regional Officers, co-ordin-ates the whole." ‘ Conserving Land and Forest "Why Town and Country Planning, Mr. Cameron? We usually hear only the phrase ‘Town Planning.’ " "Because it’s obvious that the country is a8’ important as the town, and agricultural interests are of vital importance and must be considered. Also, we must conserve our forests and good agricultural land, and keep plenty of playgrounds. We are not concerned just with making this town and that town a good place to live in, but with making Britain as a whole the best possible home for the British people. "But I haven’t yet answered your question on how industry is to be attracted into new areas, because of course once industries and houses are in a place the people will naturally flow there. Partly it is being done by making build. ing materials more available in districts where expansion is required and less available in districts that are already too full for social health and well-being. But I hope I am not giving the impression that shifting people about is the main part of British reconstruction. It is not so urgent a job, for example, as building up the Development Areas." "Never heard of them." "Probably you have — but as ‘Distressed Areas’ ‘or ‘Depressed Areas.’

Britain is not leaving these to rot. Where the difficulty in the past has been due to over-dependence on one industry-as for example, mining in South Walesconsiderable assistance has been given to bringing other industries to the area. In other words, ‘diversification’ is the keyword and other occupations are being attracted in by the means I have described." "Disinherited Youth" "Do you know these areas yourself?" "Fairly well. Just before the war I conducted an inquiry into the social and industrial conditions of youths and young men in Glasgow and combined it with reports from investigators in South Wales and Merseyside into a report that was published as ‘Disinherited Youth.’ Latex I did public relation work for the M.O.I. in Newcastle. Then I helped with Board of Trade surveys of the reconversion of industry and wifh programmes and statistics for tle Miniatry of Aircraft Production." "So you have seen ‘Planning’ both from the inside and the outside. Do you not think, Mr. Cameron, that it may be going too far? It must be pretty well impossible to do anything-in Britain today without fitting it into somebody’s plan." "There, of course, you have something! A high standard of life is possible only in a highly organised community, But in such a community you can do very little without affecting other people quite seriously. Therefore overall plans have to be made and followed out. But I am against making such plans more detailed than they have to be. Plans should provide a community with a framework of order in which to express itself-not with a substitute for individual self.expression. The Superman Planner idea is dangerous and absurd." "What can be done about that?" "Well, one defence against it will have to be a high degree of personal and professional humility among those who have to draft the community’s plans. Another will be the vigilance and vital interest of the citizens on whose behalf the plans are being drafted."