TOWN PLANNING

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 143, 2 June 1936, Page 8

TOWN PLANNING

Vigorous Policy Persued in Italy NATIONAL COMPETITIONS Mr E. R. Yerbury, who recently toured Europe for the study of various schemes, gave a summary of his observations to the British Architectural Association. “One striking fact about working-class housing in various parts of Europe,” he said, “is the tremendous amount of experimental work which has been done in regard to the actual buildings erected, both by way of using new materials, and by novel methods of construction, sometimes with satisfactory results and sometimes with very disastrous results. I would suggest to anyone who desires to undertake research in matters relating to housing that one branch of such research might very well be an examination of the materials and methods which have been in use in working-class housing for the last ten years, and the effects of time and use upon them. It would be most interesting to see the results of such research. It is so easy to go on in ignorance of the actual and potential value of materials and to produce some smartlooking but cheap scheme, leaving the people who have to live there afterwards to suffer from it. It may be the fault of local and national government authorities that such things happen; it may be that they should provide—as in Germany, for instance, they have provided—for the erection' of experimental houses in which all sorts of new materials and types of material are introduced, and that only when these have stood the test of time should permission be granted to utilise them in working-class housing.” In New Zealand town-planning continues to be rather an ideal than a definite recognisable movement. Some encouragement for the idealists in the Dominion is given by the far-reach-ing progress made in Italy. In a paper on “Recent Town Planning and Architecture in Italy,” read at a meeting of the Liverpool Architectural Society, Mr Wesley Dougill said that from the town-planning point of view the objective had been to clear away the rubbish of centuries, to eliminate slums and raise the standard of housing of the poorer classes, to renovate and systematise the towns in order to fit them for the new traffic conditions, and to cater, by means of new towns and extensions to existing ones, for the people displaced by clearance schemes and for the rapidly growing population. Italy, at an early stage, determined not to allow around her existing towns those unplanned, haphazard extensions which had become a universal thing in practically every other country. At the beginning of last year 30 per cent, of her towns had completed their comprehensive plans of systematisation and extension, and a further 50 per cent, were well on the way towards completing theirs. Almost without exception the plans were the result of national planning competitions, and in most cases were prepared by groups of planners. The earlier town-planning was designed by accretions, but latterly the satellite town system had been adopted. Every town had its stadium, new holiday resorts had been built, and marine and mountain colonies had been established for children.