Community Planning.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20730, 15 December 1932, Page 8

Community Planning.

It is to be hoped that the poor attendance at Tuesday's meeting of the Christchurch City Council to discuss the proposed zoning scheme for the City does not reflect a lack of interest in this important work. Town planning, or community/planning, as it is better called, has made deplorably slow progress in New Zealand; and for this the inertia of local bodies and the public is partly responsible. There is still an impression that Community planning is large scale decoration and that its main product is fussy regulations limiting the enterprise of builders. Actually, the function of planning is to promote economical and efficient development of land and other natural resources not less than to increase the healthiness and beauty of living conditions. In New Zealand, where few towns are cramped for space, the need for planned development is not as obvious as in older and more densely populated countries. Yet the haphazard growth of New Zealand towns has already had unsightly and expensive consequences. There are few suburbs without empty and untidy sections to testify to the evils of "ribbon" growth. Moreover, the tendency of settlement to straggle outwards along tram routes and main roads has immensely increased the cost of municipal services and created maiiy rating anomalies. The Urban Farm Lands Bating Act passed this session would not have been necessary had the growth of towns been controlled so as to prevent the intermingling of town and country. It must, however, be said in defence of Joeal bodies that the Government has not made it easy for them to devise and carry out planning schemes. There are half-a-dozen Acts dealing directly with community planning; and at Tuesday's meeting the Director of Town Planning confessed that he was quite unable to interpret some of the elauses. It is particularly unfortunate that most of the uncertainty is in connexion with compensation provisions and sanctions, for a local body will rightly hesitate to institute a scheme without knowing how much it will have to pay to property owners affected or whether it will be able to enforce the scheme in its entirety. Though it is still possible to (jteyjsc schemes which t will not involve

compensation, little real progress will be made until community planning legislation has been simplified, consolidated, and made more definite.