Current Answers Urban Sprawl

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28529, 7 March 1958, Page 16

Current Answers Urban Sprawl

By 1975, New Zealand is expected to have added another 1,000,000 to its population and it will need another 300,000 dwellings by then to house the increase and replace worn out buildings. At that rate, the Architectural Centre, Wellington, has estimated that with current subdivision practices our land will be consumed for housing at the rate of 60 acres a week.

As the map prepared by the Architectural Centre shows, our urban development is spreading over the country’s best ploughable land. And an authority has said that our next million of population, if housed at present standards, would occupy a strip of land half a mile -wide stretching from North Cape to Bluff.

Land around houses is desirable in many ways, but much is wasted and the quarter-acre plot to which most New Zealand families aspire is in many cases no longer fulfilling their hopes and needs. In recent years. Governments have seen the need for higher population density and, like the former National Government, the Labour Government is setting an example through the State Housing Division of the Ministry of Works of ways to reduce the ccstly and inconvenient spread of cities. The garden suburb has from our earliest days been a characteristic of New Zealand cities. Our pioneer ancestors revolted against the overcrowded, ugly, industrial cities they left behind in Britain and they made no attempt to reproduce them here.

The idealism of the pioneer town planners has become the convention of today for individual home-builders, the subdividers, and the law-makers.

Thanks to the early settlers’ work, the conditions against which they had revolted hardly exist now but the tradition that they established has produced some very real problems of its own. It is these problems, most of which can be summed up in the term “urban sprawl,” that have been exercising the minds of town

planners and architects and, in recent years. Cabinet Ministers and their departments.

Several answers have been produced and none of them suggest, an attempt to thrust the new ideas upon those seeking new houses. They rather suggest experiment with a variety of ideas and the presentation of opportunities for people to see that there are other and possibly better designs for city living than the one we are at present pleased to accept Each group of four houses in our cities on 32-perch sections on either side of a 50ft road, occupy, together with the road, almost an acre of ground. One thousand houses will need about 250 acres. Then they must be serviced by schools, churches, shops, playgrounds, 'and parks. The cost of sections under these circumstances only reflects the huge cost of development and the way we use our land.

In Christchurch’s built-up area the streets cover nearly 4000 acres, or 17 per cent, of the area. The roading past every new section costs about £2OO. It is no wonder that after this outlay of work and money other services can be a long time coming. For the installation of sewerage, already severely handicapped and lagging behind requirements for half a century, it is an unequal race. In spite of Christchurch’s excellent water-supply .the most economic u3e cannot always be made of it. Buses have to travel

for building purposes tends to reduce productivity because maintenariceand other work is kept to a minimum. The rural zone section of the