The Face of the City

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25249, 30 July 1947, Page 6

The Face of the City

Since the Christchurch City Council, in July last year, appointed a well-chosen committee of citizens to advise it in matters that concern the looks of the city, little or nothing has been heard of the committee’s work. As a report showed yesterday, the committee had been attracted by the suggestion of the council’s expansion and development committee that a leaflet should go out with all rate notices, asking citizens to cooperate in “ improving, Christ- “ church ”, and had drafted such an appeal; but the finance committee did not approve the draft—because it would have made the council ask everybody to take down his fences—and, besides, did not much like the proposal to circulate with the usual sharp demand for rates a soft petition for help. It is a nice question, this, whether an authority which has fixed occasions to bark and rarer ones to blandish can use both voices at once without a horrible and offensive discord, precluding, in the finance committee’s judicious phrase, “the best re“suits”; but the pleasure of intervening in this argument—on your right, Cr. Lyons; on your left, Cr. Hay—must be given up, or at least deferred, in order to make and

point one remark. This is that the alarmingly named advisory committee on civic beautification has by suddenly flourishing a paper reminded the people of Christchurch.

that the committee exists. Some of them will wondqr whether the rejected draft reminded the councillors of the committee they had appointed. Others will wonder whether this is the first they hear of the committee’s activity because this is the first time that, directly or indirectly, the council or a council committee has prompted it to be active. The occasion for such speculations is welcome, anyhow, for it is not too soon to say that Christchurch should hear what the advisory committee is doing—of its own initiative or of the council’s. It need not be thought, it never was to be thought, that the committee should work in a blaze of publicity, fizzling with little plans to decorate this or improve that. But one of its first tasks was to consider, and to discuss with the council, just what its function should be; and unless the council makes up its mind to use the committee, and how to use it, and turns to it accordingly, the committee will die, or had better be dead. It will hardly make a life and a purpose for itself otherwise, unless they are petty and, being>petty, quite false. The council will have to learn to consult the committee whenever it is working on plans which, for good or ill, will change the face of Christchurch. Otherwise it will reduce the committee to the contemptible search of little excuses for being alive—the removal or the masking of some small eyesore here or the contrivance of some bit of rock edging or a fanciful path or a rustic gate there. You don’t get a beautiful city by “beautifying” it. You get lost opportunities, with a few wry laughs, in compensation, at the exercises of the beautifiers, the unconscious apologists of failure.