EREWHON TOWNSHIP-SLOW!

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 11, 2 July 1945, Page 12

EREWHON TOWNSHIP-SLOW!

A KORERO Report

On the opposite page is a sketch plan of a small New Zealand township. Let us call it Erewhon. You have all seen it; some of you have lived in it. Erewhon began about seventy years ago as a country store at a cross-roads. As the district developed and traffic increased (Erewhon is on the main road between two large towns), Erewhon acquired a public house, another store, a one-teacher school, and a handful of houses. Erewhon’s period of mushroom growth came with the motor-car, bitumen road surfacing, and petrol-pumps. The Erewhon you see in the sketch opposite has some six hundred inhabitants, a memorial hall, a newspaper (the bi-weekly Erewhon Advertiser'), two public houses, two churches, a district high school, two garages with petrol-pumps, a dairy factory, a post-office, a branch bank, and a library. Erewhon has grown fast in the last twenty years, and will probably grow even faster in the next twenty because there is talk of a meat-canning works being started there. But the Erewhonians, although proud of the way their township has grown (there is an Erewhon Progress League) are becoming aware that it leaves much to be desired as a place to live in. Instead of growing round a centre, it has grown lengthwise like a tapeworm. The shops and public houses and garages were built on the main road to catch the through traffic. Houses were built along the main road because to build them off the road would have meant incurring the cost of subdivision. This ribbon growth has many drawbacks. When the housewives of Erewhon go shopping, when their children go to school, and when they go visiting in the evening they use the main road. It is their shortest route, and it has a permanent surface. The few back roads are rough and usually muddy. But Erewhon’s daily traffic mingles with the through trafficfast-moving buses and motor-cars —between two large towns.

Sometimes motorists heed the notice “ Erewhon township—Slow." Sometimes they don’t ; and Erewhon already has an unenviable record of road accidents. Erewhon also suffers because its buildings are not arranged in any sort of plan. Somewhat decrepit houses occupy valuable sites in the middle of the shopping area. The garages are built up to the street fronts, so that the petrol-pumps have to be put on the pavement. Motorcars getting their tanks filled obstruct the roadway. Two public houses and a store, each built out to a right-angled corner, make visibility bad at the crossroads. The war memorial is certainly visible, but it interferes with traffic. The churches are badly placed, because church-goers must park their cars on the main road. The dairy factory is in a residential area, and surrounding householders are inconvenienced by the smoke and smell. Erewhon has reached the stage where it needs a sewage system and a better, water-supply ; but to do so it would have to pull up half a mile or so of the main road, which would be expensive and inconvenient. The Council has done nothing and isn’t likely to. The countryside in which Erewhon is set is a beautiful countryside — pastures backed by hills. But, as the Erewhonians have to admit, their township is an eyesore —a long straggle of wood and corrugated-iron buildings tailing off into hoarding advertisements for petrol and beer. Erewhon is a township built on the principle that every property-owner should do just what suits his purse and his convenience. For a few individuals the principle has worked well. Two storekeepers and a pubkeeper have made tidy little fortunes out of Erewhon. For the three hundred people who have their homes in Erewhon the principle has not worked well. ■ They had the chance to build a township that was safe, healthy, convenient, and beautiful. Erewhon is none of those things.

On page 14 is a picture of Erewhon as it might have been, as it probably would be if the township were destroyed by fire or earthquake and had to be rebuilt. Note these points about the Erewhon that might have been : —- (1) It is accessible and visible from the main road, but the main traffic stream passes it by. That will save lives, ease the worries of Erewhonian housewives with young children, and eliminate a delay to through traffic. (2) It is grouped about a centre instead of being stretched out like a piece of string. The school, the church, the memorial hall, and the shops are within a few hundred yards of any house. Services, like water, sewage, and lighting, are cheaper to install. (3) It is good to look at, if only because it is arranged in a pattern instead of being an untidy sprawl of buildings. If you had to choose between Erewhon that is and Erewhon that might have been as a place in which to live your life and bring up a family, you would choose Erewhon that might have been. You would probably agree that building towns like Erewhon of reality is as inefficient as it is unnecessary.

Ribbon development spread of housing along the main transport routes — not confined to small country townships. It occurs in almost all the cities and towns of New Zealand. The main roads radiating out from the town’s centre are built up ; and some distance from the centre you will often find open spaces in between the ribbons. The effects of ribbon development in towns are quite as bad as in country townships. Not only are traffic risks increased and traffic slowed down, but you get an inconvenient intermingling of urban and farm lands. Land used for farming cannot carry the rating charges carried by residential land. In most cases, therefore, the municipal council has to differentiate between urban farm lands and residential land in its rating system. To do so is expensive and complicated. Ribboning in urban areas also increases the cost of municipal services very greatly. Some New Zealand tramway systems have been losing money for years because tram routes serve only a small population in proportion to their length. The cost of sewage, gas, and electricity services is increased for the same reason. Let us take another example of what is liable to happen when the growth of towns conforms to no plan and is guided solely by the principle of individual

convenience. In one of the largest New Zealand cities there is a gasworks in the middle of a residential area. The neighbouring houses in the line of the prevailing wind are a grimy brownish colour ; grit and smoke filter through doors and windows ; gardens are blighted ; washing on the line is often dirty again long before it is dry. The householders of the neighbourhood have held many protest meetings and appealed to the local authority to do away with the nuisance. But shifting a gasworks is no simple matter, particularly just now. The prospect is that the householders will have to wait years before anything is done. Yet this situation could very simply have been avoided by the device known as “ zoning ’’—that is, by regulating the types of building that can be erected in any given area. To allow gasworks, chemical works, tanneries, and other enterprises to be set up in residential areas is wasteful and a source of endless inconvenience. The sensible thing to do is to set aside special areas for such enterprises.

We have dealt with two examples of the inconvenience and waste which arise when development is unplanned. Probably you could give many more examples —traffic bottlenecks created because those who laid out the roads failed to look ahead, dangerous railway crossings which could have been avoided if the railway had been more sensibly placed, industries set down without sufficient attention to their transport needs, crowded suburbs without parks or playingfields, shops erected far beyond the needs of a locality, and whole areas degenerating into unsightly and unhealthy slums because it would not pay the property owners to clear and rebuild. The way to avoid these expensive mistakes is to plan the development of our towns. Unfortunately, town planning has made little progress in New Zealand ; and the reason is that few NewZealanders have any clear idea what town planning is or what it seeks to bring about. Some people think of it as being primarily concerned with the ornamental, with laying out boulevards and roadside

garden flats. Others, again, are persuaded that it is concerned primarily with slum clearance ; and they think there is not much need for it in a country where there are no slum areas comparable with those in the old world. Town planning is concerned with the appearance of a town and it is concerned to prevent overcrowding, but these are only a small part of its purpose. Moreover, although it is not a problem in most New Zealand towns, under-popula-tion is a problem. Disperse a town too widely, and you make it difficult to provide, at reasonable cost, such services as transport, lighting, heating, and water. In addition, you add to the overhead costs of delivering commodities like meat, bread, and milk. Town planning is as much concerned to avoid this underpopulation as it is to prevent overcrowding. But to think of town planning in terms of garden plots or slum clearance is to think of it in terms of its incidentals. The central purpose of town planning is simple and practical; it is to ensure that towns are healthy and convenient places to live in. If you can get to work in a reasonably short time, if your children are near a school, if you have room for a garden, if your washing does not get fouled with factory smoke, if you are provided with gas, water, and electricity at a reasonable cost, if you are handy to a shopping centre, if your children do not risk being run over every time they stray out on to the road, and if your neighbours have also these conveniences, your town or at any rate your own neighbourhood — is reasonably well planned. We talk of " planning,” but we really mean “ replanning ” because the New

Zealand task will generally be the transformation of existing communities, rarely the building of completely new ones. Planning a new city is simple compared with the difficulties of replanning. The reason for this should be evident : a city, town, or village is not only buildings, streets, and sewers, but a tangle of ownerships, deeds, investments, mortgages, human hopes, and fears—in short, a bewildering complex of human relationships, mostly of a contractual kind. Community replanning is therefore the most profoundly social of all human activities. It involves every one from the mayor to the messenger boy. No replanning scheme, no matter how perfect, is likely to get very far without the active and enthusiastic participation of the whole community. This calls for simultaneous activity at both top and bottom of the civic pyramid. At the bottom, citizens’ planning councils, voluntarily organized in each neighbourhood, could survey their local needs, make rough plans, and thus start a flow of suggestions and demands towards the City Planning Commission at the top. The latter group would, of course, have the last say. It would be responsible for the city as a whole and would therefore be the appropriate body to deal, for instance, with traffic problems. It would also have the technical competence to execute the work in detail and the continuity of authority to guide reconstruction over the long years such a job would inevitably require. Organized public participation on these lines would be much more than a device for winning public support. It should be regarded as part of the actual process of planning, a process which may continue even in Erewhon for half a century.