NOT A CRANK'S HOBBY

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 107, 1 November 1940, Page 6

NOT A CRANK'S HOBBY

PLANNING BETTER

TOWNS

ENFORCEMENT OF ACT

LOCAL BODY SCHEMES

Town planning was no longer looked upon as the hobby of the crank, but as a sensible means of ensuring social and industrial welfare in the future, declared Mr. M. G- C McCaul, the president, in the course of a discussion at yesterday's annual meeting of the Town-Planning Institute. The question at issue was whether any tangle progress in town planning had been made in recent years. On this there was a difference of opinion. Mr. E. H, Andrews (Christehurch) contended that the provisions of the Act, which had required local authorities to prepare and submit their plans within five years of the passing of the legislation in 1926, should be enforced. Not many of the local bodies had done that. The only effective means ofi educating the public as to the advan-1 tages of town planning was to enforce the Act and call upon the local bodies |to submit their schemes. EXAMPLE OF AMERICA. Mr. J. W. Mawson, Government Town Planning Officer, said that the outstanding fact of town-planning progress in America, and also in Canada, was that the initiative was invariably taken by the chambers of commerce, who regarded themselves, and were so regarded, as leaders in matters of community interest. The success of any endeavour to prepare a town-plan-ning scheme lay in the degree of cooperation which was sought by the local body preparing a scheme. All sections of the community should be invited to confer with the authority or the individual preparing the scheme, so that interest and understanding might be built, rather than that a scheme should be sprung upon them, to be met, almost inevitably, with criticism and obstruction from certain quarters. That policy had been followed throughout in the preparation of the Hutt Valley town-planning scheme, shortly to be published, with the consequence that the scheme was virtually one of unanimous agreement.