CITY DEVELOPMENT Public’s Duty To Tell Experts What It Wants

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30541, 9 September 1964, Page 8

CITY DEVELOPMENT Public’s Duty To Tell Experts What It Wants

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, September 8.

It was up to the public to tell the experts how it wanted to live and then for the experts to tell how this desired mode and manner of living could be achieved, said the Governor-General (Sir Bernard Fergusson) today,

Opening the city development and symposium in Wellington, Sir Bernard Fergusson said it was not for the experts “to tell us how we must live.”

He could not remember, said Sir Bernard Fergusson, who made the remark “war is much too serious a matter to be left to the generals,” but as a former regular soldier he had always thought it unkind.

“Let me riposte by asserting that town planning is far too serious a matter to be left to the experts. Now, mark you, I only partly mean that because town planning is a highly technical business,” he said.

Unfortunately it was hopeless to expect the public to be unanimous about what it wanted: “So all too often the experts, forcing their ways as an organised body through the milling crowds at the foot of the tower of Babel, get what they want and present us non-experts with what we deserve, in the form of a fait accompli. “There are two ways in which we can go wrong. One is by letting the experts ride rough-shod over us. The other is by ignoring what the experts, with all their advice and experience have to tell us..

Damage Done “Much damage has already been done in the short history of New Zealand since the Europeans came and some of it is irretrievable. “On the land, to take one instance alone, through sheer ignorance our forebears—and indeed even some of our own generation—by wantonly and unthinkingly destroying the forests on the hillsides have exposed us to all the evils of erosion. “In the same way the urban sprawl, due largely to the inbred desire of every New Zealander to have that quarter-acre section (referred to at the symposium by the Minister of internal Affairs, Mr Seath) is just as shortsighted. “We can’t go on like this,” said Sir Bernard Fergusson. “Yet, on the other hand, we don’t want to be regimented.” “Ground” He maintained the pleasantest part of Washington' was Georgetown, that part of the city which was never planned but “just growed.” Yet, paradoxically, the pleasantest part of Edinburgh was, to him, the new town, the very part that was planned. Sir Bernard Fergusson said he thought he deduced from this that the ideal pity was usually one which resulted fom a mixture of: spontaneous growth and judicious planning.

Several limited town planning schemes in New Zealand had given him pleasure. Two schemes he had particularly in mind were the little group in Lower Hutt which included St. James’s Church, the town hall, library, theatre and some very fine greensward and, still in the project stage, the

plan for part of the Auckland Harbour Board property. “There ate many more projects that I have seen and doubtless many more 'that I haven’t but I am sure that there is abroad a-new awareness of the importance of planning,” he said. “A Bit Late” “The fact that this awareness has come a bit late need not plunge us into grief. The fact remains that it has come.” New Zealand was spared the great fire of London, and the blitz. Her urban problems stemmed not from disaster but purely from a lack of planning. “Nobody in New Zealand is to blame for the past, when the problems were not to be foreseen; but somebody will be to blame for the future, and that somebody will be you and me, unless we put our house, or. our houses, in order,” said Sir Bernard Fergusson.