The Town-Planning Scheme

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23353, 12 June 1941, Page 4

The Town-Planning Scheme

The Christchurch City Council, this week, accepted the advice of the new town-planning committee and decided to ask the Town-Plan-ning Board to postpone further action while the council reconsiders the Christchurch scheme. The time for this request is very late. The board has already fixed the date (June 30) on which the public hearing of the objections lodged against the scheme will be begun. Only the discovery of a technical obstacle has prevented the previous advance of the statutory process to this stage, at which the board rules on the objections and on amendments proposed by the council, and accordingly puts the scheme into its final and operative form. Moreover, the scheme has now been in preparation for more than 13 years; successive councils and the board have wrestled with each other and with problems that begot new problems; the scheme now approximates a solution; and, with that welcome goal and first achievement in sight, to ask the board to suspend the last step and, in effect, set the council free to move towards another and wider scheme is to ask a great deal. But it is not asking too much, if the reason given by the Mayor and the DeputyMayor is given its due importance and if it becomes the motive of a vigorous policy. They said that it had been a plank in the Citizens’ Association policy to delay the adoption of the present scheme in order to provide an opportunity to turn it into a comprehensive one, covering the Christchurch and adjacent local body areas; that there were “encouraging” signs of the willingness of neighbouring bodies to co-operate; and, in fact, that “everyone “ concerned ” was eager to see the scheme so enlarged in scope, There is no doubt at all that a scheme embracing a wider area is desirable. It could be drawn, on a regional basis, to embody and carry out planning principles much more effectually than any plan for the Christchurch urban and suburban area alone. There is no doubt, also, that in preparing such a plan many other defects in the present scheme than those which arise from its too narrow limits could be got rid of. Expert assistance, architectural and engineering, has been insufficiently used up to now; it could, and should, be much more liberally used if a new opportunity is opened. These are arguments that the Town-Planning Board should seriously consider; and they are strong enough to justify it in granting the council’s application. But it is impossible not to see that the task ahead of the council, if it prevails with the board, is greater than was indicated in the cheerful references to the prospects of ready co-opera-tion among the adjacent local bodies. Most if not all of them have hitherto been indifferent to planning. The difficulty of reaching unanimity in principle and in action among local bodies is notorious. The chances of reaching it on the many issues of a regional planning scheme will not be considered good until concrete evidence is offered; and it seems probable that the only road to real unanimity and comprehensive action is the hard one to rationalised local government in the Christchurch area. If the City Council is not warrantably hopeful of such a result and not prepared to work for that, as the best approach to a better scheme, 4 the delay it is seeking promises gains too slight. If it is, the full and plain statement of its reasons should move the board to give it time at least to test the possibilities.