URBAN SPRAWL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 920, 29 March 1957, Page 4

URBAN

SPRAWL

In recent weeks a number of responsible New Zealanders have been warning us once more that the development of our towns and cities is getting out of hand; that "urban sprawl," as they call it, has become a threat to progress and sensible living. This is the first of two articles examining this problem; the second will appear next week.

BEFORE European settlement began New Zealand from the air would have appeared almost empty. The Maori pas and villages,.many of them perched on hilltops and coastal crags, would hardly have been noticed, and there was little trace of human occupation on the flat. By the 1840's, when European settlement had begun, the picture had changed, and over the next 80 years in the full tide of Victorian styles of building the foundations were laid for the pattern of our towns and for our way of living. This turned out to be a preference for the single detached house set in its own plot of land to make up streets and towns. In the cities the single houses were interspersed with colonial replicas of Victorian England’s cheap housing schemes. It is to the Victorians we must bow when we wonder who first created our suburbs. And so it went on. Land was plentiful and New Zealand children grew used to having plenty of space to play in, with large playing fields at school and, for most of them, plenty of room in their own backyards. In this century as Victorian houses gave way to Californian-style bungalows, and our own architects began to have an influence on the scene the single detached house was still the ideal. Blocks of

flats were unpopular and mostly confined to the cities. Then, just before the Second World War, this pattern began to alter. Large housing schemes were started, and the State housefor its time: remarkably enlightened -- became as familiar to New Zealanders as the street pillar box. . After the war many large urban development schemes were started. At the time the main problem~was that of building sufficient dwellings to make up for the loss

in the war years and so house our growing population as quickly as possible. The Lower Hutt Valley disappeared in a sea of houses, and in almost every town new and larger tracts of State houses began to spring up. But at the same time as the State houses were spreading, private houses were going up everywhere at a startling rate. If we were to take our pre-Vic-torian traveller on an aerial tour today he would see, all along our coasts, tagged little seaside settlements. Our smaller towns would be seen spreading out into the surrounding farm lands, and if he could stay hovering in one place for long enough and take the equivalent of the film camera-man’s time-lapse shots he could watch farms being sold, and houses, dairies, milkbars and~ shops creeping up in their place. In the cities the changes would occur more rapidly and on a larger scale-Auckland with its long arterial roads ‘running out to its industrial suburbs, making miles of unchecked housing; Wellington, having overrun the neighbouring flat land, climbing up the hills and out to the new development areas in the north at Porirua. This unchecked development is what we mean by urban sprawl. Today urban sprawl is under fire. Geographers, architects and town plan-

ners are among those who have harsh words to say’ about it. "Urban sprawl has to be stopped," said a town planner -‘"Pocket and ribbon development is taking place in several areas around Wellington at present," said the Mayor of Wellington, Mr Kitts. Why are the experts attacking urban sprawl? You may live in one of our remoter suburbs and live well. The only disadvantages may seem to be the crowded daily train that carries you to work, spilling you out of the station on to a still more crowded tram. You may know more about the area in which you work than you do about your home -although this may not always seem a disadvantage. Urban sprawl is attacked because it is eating up our agricultural land, and we have not enough of this to waste. It is attacked by architects, who deplore its ugliness, its wastefulness and the transport and servicing problems it causes. It is attacked by town planners who see in its haphazard penetration of the country a way of living that runs counter to all the principles of good town planning. Impressive figures are drawn up to buttress their charges. One of the most significant is the great rate of our population growth. Most of the people coming into New Zealand are not agricultural workers, and ,will be living in towns, many of them working in factories and at other manufactures. If these problems are not met we shall continue a process of drift that has landed us where we are today. On the other hand, if our future development can be controlled there are untold possibilities for a more imaginative New Zealand than the one we now live in. The attack on urban sprawl was recently given prominence by a group of

~ Wellington architects and town planners "The Architectural Centre," who staged a small exhibition called "Homes Without Sprawl," and pointing out the facts we have already outlined. Increasing population, decreasing farm land-dis-mal enough when you see them in print, are the facts which the architects tried to meet in a practical way. Taking a site at Plimmerton in rolling hill country, they demonstrated six possible ways of building terrace houses upon it which would keep the most important features of the detached house-privacy, a garden-but at the same time would result in a much more pleasing landscape and save a great deal of land into the bargain. To present as wide a picture of this process of urban sprawl as possible, The Listener recently called on _ several people whose work. brings them into close contact with the problem. First we talked to an architect, Mr. A. A. Wild, President of the Architectural Centre, which arranged the exhibition. "*The Architectural Centre’ is a group, half of whom are architects, the remainder of whom are people generally interested in the visual arts and sciences," he said. "We are concerned, as people who have thought about these problems of urban sprawl, with collectively and dispassionately presenting the facts. Originally the Centre set itself up precisely because it was concerned with all aspects of working for the general improvement of town and countryside. "The architect doesn’t just look at these things from his own pigeonholehe is concerned with a great many things besides producing good houses. As a citizen and ratepayer he is concerned with the national effect his

tt ll it ti buildings are having, with the effect they have on the people who live in them, and the way of life they perpetuate. I do want to stress the fact that he’s not just concerned as an abstract artist. He’s concerned as a qualified practitioner and is very conscious of the limitations imposed on him by society. He very often feels that he is perpetuating a system which he knows is wrong, but there is very little he as an individual architect can do about it, as such a system is very often perpetuated by legislation and even by Govern-ment-controlled bodies. "Housing is one of our liveliest political issues, and one of our biggest industries, yet it is geared through the structure of trade and through its control by legislation, Government policy, ‘and ‘national habit to a pattern which is forced upon everybody -a pattern from which there is not any escape. There is an enormous resistance to anything that would move in the direction of a more flexible pattern than urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is our national myth," Our next opinion came from a geographer, S. H. Franklin, lecturer in geography at Victoria University College. "Six years ago people were talking about the problems of urban sprawl, and I feel that six years hence they will still be talking," he said. "Preventing urban sprawl means intruding upon the vested interests of private propertyyour property and my property, and the conflict between our social responsibility and individual rights is not always easily solved. The economic and. social costs of urban sprawl, however, are becoming more apparent. Those people living in distant suburbs are aware of the high costs of travelling to work, of their social inaccessibility and isolation, of their high property rates with little in return. The cheap sections which attracted them out there proved to be not so cheap. "Consideration must be given to the social aspects of urban sprawl, for to

prevent it you must persuade people that living in areas of high building density is preferable to their own quar-ter-acre, but isolated and costly sections. "An intensive national survey into all the physical, social and economic aspects of urban sprawl is a very necessary first step and the publication of its results the second, tt is then up to the planners and architects to persuade us that they have something better to offer in the way of urban living. The marked increase of population which will take place during the next 25 years makes it certain that we must become used to being closer together." To the town planners urban sprawl is unnecessary sprawl. A town planner said: "By its decisions the Town and Country Planning Appeal Board has taken the view that urban sprawl is contrary to the principle of the Town and Country Planning Act. The city and town councils have powers to prevent it, and by and large they are using those powers. Awareness of the seriousness of the sprees 3 is growing-people in responsible positions are well aware of it-but this feeling is not yet general enough." Finally we talked to John Watson, an educationist, who is interested in the sociological aspects, and here we met a surprise. "IT still don’t think urban sprawl is a bad thing," he said. "There are other values possible than the architect’s ones and utban life allows certain of these values to come to fruition. For some groups urban sprawl is the ideal. On the other hand, of course, a lot of New Zealanders. don’t like it. Most single people and many city dwellers have no desire to live in a garden with a lot of space. I don’t feel nearly as upset as the geographers and town planners. We have cars and highways and these aids can make urban sprawl quite feasible." In America, where Mr Watson spent some time studying, he told us that there is little concern with urban sprawl as such. "They're not worried about eating up good farm land-mind you, they have

-r ee a good deal to come and go on-but they are interested in urban life as it affects human living. They are a bit concerned about the time spent in travelling to work. In New York 15 million manhours a week are spent in travelling time. London is worried about the same kind of thing-on the inroads made into health, economy, and so on. The geographers have raised the problem a little in America, people like Mumford and the town planners, "J feel that our architects haven’t done enough research yet on the problems of towns and communities. However, I’m not an old diehard, as I’m all for better suburban living." Finally, here is what the Minister of Housing, Mr Eyre, had to say about the Wellington exhibition: "I congratulate the Architectural Centre on the time and thought its members have put into this exhibition, which demonstrates so clearly how our present methods of housing expansion are eating.up the land surrounding our large cities. New Zealand depends for its livelihood on primary production and further inroads into the arable land must be viewed with apprehension.

Nevertheless, people must be housed, and the average New Zealander likes his own plot of land. Flats have not as yet proved as popular here as in other countries overseas, but there are definite signs that a proportion of our people are becoming resigned to flat life. . . The Architectural Centre have met the problem half way. Their scheme envisages closer density, but at the same time retains privacy, giving each house unit a small plot of land. [ feel thet the work of the centre is on the right lines, and that we as a nation will have to adjust ourselves in the years to come to more crowded but perhaps more comfortable living." This, then, is the extent of the problem. Our towns and cities are moving inexorably outward, but must we, like ancient Rome, give up planning in despair and wait for a new Nero to burn them down? "There is a fundamental, demonic, never-ending combat between the two trends, to plan or not to plan, to be provident or to let things happen," writes the American architect Richard Neutra. "Both tendencies are lodged in us and have turns with the ebbing and rising of our vitality. When we are lucky and strong we like to take things into our own hands and plan ahead into the most distant future. When stricken by loss, sickness and failure, our plans shorten desperately and are reduced to the next week or the next day. .. During a heart attack we only plan for a second or two, for reaching the chair in front of us." So far in this country we have been mainly on the side of the non-planners, but changes are in the air. "The solving of this problem is the key to making New Zealand interesting," said the Town Planner. Next week we propose to examine more closely the ideas behind planned living and planned town development, and the reactions of the citizen-consumer to them.