HOMAGE TO HISTORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 14

HOMAGE TO HISTORY

An Interview With a Town-Planning Officer

to talk to a town planner; that very morning the newspaper had . carried the announcement that a civic centre was intended for Christchurch, consisting of an office block, a town hall, a banqueting hall, and a civic theatre-cost, about half a million. | was obviously a good day Miss Nancy Northcroft has only recently been appointed Town Planning Officer to the Christchurch City Council, and at the time of this interview had not started her job, so that the new civic centre is. one of the things she will inherit, not initiate. However, Miss Northcroft, who talks clearly, simply, and intelligently, seemed all through the interview to stress inheritance, rather than sweeping change, as the basis of good town planning. Patrick Geddes called this idea homage to history, Put practically, she said, it means making the best of a situation, "Don’t tear down a line of six-storey buildings to widen a road. Put your road somewhere else if you’re sure you need it. The plan must be made by and for the people, the people must not be battered into any shape the planner thinks is good for them." Planning, Miss Northcroft explained, is a team job. "The planner’s main job is co-ordina-tion. He (or she) must be a humble person who knows very well that all the answers are not in one head, the planner’s own. There are many answers to. be found, because town planning does not ‘Start and finish with a civic centre in the middle of a town, rather it concerns itself with the region of which the town is the centre. So, before the planner can start to put plan to paper answers must" be found

to questions of geography, geology, rainfall, drainage, soil chemistry, industry, retail trade, traffic, etc, etc, eté. Since all these etcs. involve people, the people who will be living within the plan, the obvious thing to do is to get them interested enough to do the research for their own section of the community. With a candour which would shock academi--cians, Miss Northcroft said she was sure shopkeepers knew more about the factors which made them fail or prosper than anybody did who was not a shopkeeper. "Shopkeepers have definite ideas about the width and design of streets, the length of blocks, and the flow of traffic. Many other people have an interest.in the flow of traf-

fic, particularly in the way it flows, or doesn’t flow, in rush hours, Theoretically there is a clear case for staggered working hours to avoid these short periods of congestion, but practically, at present, most people don’t want to work staggered hours, and until they want to it is not much use trying to make them." So the planner, she went on, consults, and listens, and injects enthusiasm, and points out the snags, and reconciles the differences, and smoothes over the ruffled feathers, and by taking all this trouble and concentrating on people rather than paper, has a very much better chance of finishing up with a good plan, and most important, of getting it accepted by the local authority and put into practice. Turning to the town planning situation as it now exists in New Zealand, Miss Northcroft explained that any borough with a population of over a thousand is required by the Town Planning Act of 1926 to prepare a plan for its development. The Act was amended in 1929, when 25 regions were defined, covering the whole country, within which tegions the local authorities could prepare, regional, plans, but were not re- quired to do so. Metropolitan areas were included in their particular region. At present Auckland, Hutt, and Christchurch Cities. have town planning officers, while the Wellington region, of eight local authorities, and the Auckland Metropolitan Area, of 14 local authorities, have their planning officers. Other areas have been somewhat handi‘capped by lack of trained staff in the preparation of their plans. Miss Northcroft thought the first settlers of Christchurch had built well, and their use of the River Avon, winding quietly through the town, was aesthetically sound. (continued on next page)

To her task of building on what they have built, she brings energy, welldirected enthusiasm, balance, patience, and a good deal of practical experience. She qualified as Bachelor of Architecture at Auckland University College in 1940, and went to England on a British Council Scholarship in 1942 to study housing. She soon realised that much of the good work going into housing was wasted because it was not done in relation to the bigger problem of town eeray, wee

planning-where to put houses. She stayed in England after her scholarship year, working with the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction, a private association running on ‘small resources and much enthusiasm. She added her enthusiasm to theirs until 1946, when she qualified as an Associate Member of the Town Planning Institute, of which there are 20 New Zealand members. Then she came home.

G. leF.

Y.