Planner notes N.Z.’s potential

Press, 26 January 1979, Page 3

Planner notes N.Z.’s potential

PA Auckland The Auckland city area is a British working man’s dream of paradise, according to an American landscape planner, Professor lan McHarg. The Auckland region’s long coastlines and unpolluted ocean had lots of potential for planners. New Zealand was well suited to new ecological planning techniques, he told a group of architects, engineers and planners.

Professor McHarg who is in Auckland for the annual congress of the AustraliaNew Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, said that New Zealand was not menaced by any polluting neighbours. Its national boundaries were the same as its ecological ones, so New Zealanders were responsible for their own environmental future.

Highway engineers and Government bureaucrats were the biggest menace to the environment in the United States, he said. Developers had learnt that building in sympathy with the natural environment instead of mutilating it was good business — it meant more and better sales and lower development costs.

Professor McHarg said that the environment had a

way of penalising those who made ecological mistakes. Developers reclaiming San Francisco Bay had found that the fill would be so unstable an earthquake would cause buildings to sink into the bay. Satire, ridicule, and responsive planning were the best weapons against bureaucracy, which he described as the biggest problem facing governments.