State's Role In Town Planning Criticised

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28257, 20 April 1957, Page 15

State's Role In Town Planning Criticised

'■The Press" Special Service

AUCKLAND, April 19. .A strong attack on the Town t and Country Planning Act, 1953, ; as “an experiment which hag al- ? most completely falsified the theory” is contained in an address by Dr. K. B. Cumberland, chairman of the Auckland Regional planning Authority, to the New Zealand Institute of Professional Town and Country Planners. Speaking at the institute’s annual conference at the Chateau Tongariro, Dr. Cumberland said that the act and its appended regulations ran the risk of doing the cause of planning in New Zealand a grave and lasting disservice.

Dr. Cumberland referred to the preparation of a district scheme for Auckland as rather like playing a game of snakes and ladders. “The game is being played on a board with far too many snakes,” he said, “and the ladders are short and stumpy—some would say riddled with borer and dry rot.” . Although the Auckland City Council has begun the project eagerly, he said, work had been Inordinately slow. Eight months had passed without any advance; enthusiasm had waned and the committee had become lost in “a morass of detail.”

Responsibility for Planning Dr. Cumberland said that the Government had designed the act to shift the blame and responsibility for planning on to local authorities. The possibility of a new university, the realignment of motorways, and major railways proposals could cause important amendments to Auckland’s plan, with the result that much “reptileridden ground” might have to be trodden again. “The Government made a fundamental mistake in divorcing itself from responsibility,” said Dr. Cumberland. “Planning requires more money than local bodies, and certainly the larger urban local bodies, can find. Any local authority with ideas requiring Government co-operation will meet with a frustratingly cold reception or even abrupt rebuff.” A list of the steps to be taken in preparing a district scheme was “an informed and revealing guide to the game of snakes and ladders,” said Dr. Cumberland. If the administration of the act, and not planning practice, had been the job of the department the list should have been prepared by departmental officers three years •go. "Arid, Bare Schemes”

Some town planning schemes by "consultants” were, at the recommended stage, “and arid, bare, cyclostyled scheme statements, an almost illegible map. and a code of ordinances utterly beyond the understanding of. the council.” They could have been prepared by a schoolboy capable of reading.

?he X" soS P"®. an a , ttracti ve, illustrated, long-term plan with a forwardlooking statement of policy on civic design and reconstruction, it should be designed to be presented, he said, not only to the Minister concerned but also to the public.

a y by day local bodies grow more and more frustrated,” said Dr. Cumberland. The antiplanners among them have ground in which to sow more viable seedit is only recently that they came face to face with the regulations or the deficiencies of the act. Although New Zealand towns were young by European standards, they were physically old and dilapidated—because of the way they were built and the materials used, he said. “We have slums in the parts of our cities which are 100 years old.

While cities grow at the periphery and decay or become outmoded at the heart,” said Dr. Cumberland, “our planning stagnates or is bogged down. It is time we got together to crack the whip so that some progress can be made along a different track.”