Pedestrians’ Place In Planning Modern Cities

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29855, 22 June 1962, Page 12

Pedestrians’ Place In Planning Modern Cities

[The Press Special Service)

AUCKLAND, June 21,

A plea for the recognition of the rights of pedestrians in the planning of modern cities was made by Dr. R. H. Toy, professor of architectural design at Auckland University. “For every pound spent on motorways there should be a pound spent on pedestrian ways,” said Professor Toy, speaking at an Auckland Rotary Club luncheon. ’ He was not advocating escapism, he said. But he was suggesting a balance between the pedestrian’s place in planning and the place of motorways and cars, so that cars became an added dimension and not a destructive monopoly.

The “metropolis” was a strange, utterly new place which had completely shattered the living patterns of centuries, he said. 4 Once boulevards, -lanes, squares and greens were places where people walked and met. The buildings in cities were designed in these settings in size, space, decoration and detail to suit the eye of a man standing or walking. Now these buildings had been invaded by the car, a steel-shell machine which had changed all man’s conceptions of space and made him a

slave in his city instead of a master.

Through the invasion of the car in the city, man had lost his public space and his normal relationship with architecture. Buildings, monuments and statues were no longer seen in proper perspective but from a crawling or racing car. The car had enabled people to live at greater distances from the city and had broken the architectural unity of the city. Detached buildings were scattered across the landscape.

“For balance in our cities we must make provision for man as well as cars in our planning.” said Professor Toy. “We must have sectors in which man imposes his own scale. These sectors or pedestrian areas must be the matrix of our building and planning. “Their existence is imperative. Only in these areas can we create a proper framework for our architecture which otherwise may be lost in a sea of cars.”